Abstract

"Online symbols in the offline world"

Aram Bartholl

The data-based world of digital networks has become an increasingly important part of everyday life. A diverse array of platforms, devices and services vie for our attention. The acceleration of communication and networking in recent years has been considerable. This expanding world is visible only on our screens, our windows on the digital world. Monitors of all sizes—from gigantic urban screens to tiny cellphone displays—accompany us through everyday life. The digital world can be extremely usefull, or even indispensable if you will, but it remains arrested on a rectangle full of pixels. With each new communications service, people’s online habits change. Whereas big-city anonymity still prevails in everyday life in the public sphere, the most minute details of private life are being exhibitionistically put on display in the Internet. Who are you? What do you do? Where are you? Who are your friends? The Internet services of so-called Web 2.0 trigger undreamt-of synergy effects for their users in the form of social networks; the price, however, is anonymity. But whoever doesn't get into the swim doesn’t make a
ripple in the networked world; they go unnoticed and go without access to the big data flow. Human beings themselves comprise the interface between the abstract, digital world and the material, analogue one. We lead a sort of schizophrenic life between the rapidly moving, difficultto-grasp world of communication and real life in space and time. It seems to be something regarded as completely normal to be chatting with someone in a cafe while simultaneously writing an SMS, but these are two fundamentally different worlds of communication.

In which form does this network-data-world really manifest itself in our physical everyday-life space?
What is being fed back into physical space from the “cyberspace” into which data has been fed for so long now? How do these digital innovations influence our actions in everyday life? What status does privacy have in that world and in this one?

For several years now, I’ve been working in the field of inquiry delineated by these topics and questions, and investigating the feedback effects of general digitization as an approach to gaining an understanding of the technological transformation of society. Result is a series of projects in form of objects, installations and performances transferring online symbols into the offline world, taking digital artefacts to everyday life public space.

All projects with descriptions on my website:
www.datenform.de/indexeng.html