Superficial Hygiene aimed to introduce to the Netherlands a set of practices of a younger generation of artists who employ, adapt, and corrupt the grammar of our accelerated environment to propose a new understanding of the relation between the mediated image and text, and objects and the physical body. The most recent developments in image production allow for a new kind of realism, one, which has caused a further rift between objects and their representation. As a result, our physical relationship with images and things in our daily environment is changing. Superficial Hygiene brought together diverse artistic practices in which this new relationship between the artificial and the real is scrutinized.

Accessibility to hyper-sharp HD video, lifelike 3D-animation and powerful image editing software has created aesthetic possibilities that give new impetus to our relationship with reality. The shiny seamlessness of the digital surface has brought about a new kind of realism, as seductive as it can be confusing and disturbing – the ‘seamless uncanny’ is steadily developing as a category of the contemporary sublime. The interfaces and navigation principles of the operating systems and software that we surround ourselves with provide for a new approach to the production of images and the arrangement of information, introducing a visual idiom of new frequencies, speeds, and rhythms.