Lost (Straßbourg, 2016)

LOST - Exhibition in Apollonia in Strasbourg 3rd March - 10th April 2016 by Kamila B. Richter & Michael Bielicky

Social media is fully established as a tool of political power: with the appointment of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States, liberal selfishness has regained strength worldwide. During his tenure, Barack Obama not only speaks for the global intelligence movement, he remains the darling of the digital avant-garde even after moving out of the Oval Office. The digital avant-garde still is very present and eloquent, but obviously outnumbered. Donald Trump, the financially affluent flamer or troll who has become president, the sort of digital identity under which good citizens log in at night on forums and on YouTube to insult and hurt others from an anonymous perspective, as a new strange form of catharsis, is now sitting on the red telephone.

Data Dybbuk, the meandering, harmless, noiseless vortex made of alphanumeric characters, greets visitors in it’s ever friendly rotating manner at the entrance door to Apollonia gallery in Strasbourg and is then superimposed over the entrance hall of the gallery, thus creating an atmospheric pull: the visitor is sucked into the exhibition via a data tunnel. Inevitably, visitors become part of the data and information flow, the blank spaces in the projection cover their eyes and make them appear as impersonal human envelopes on some photographs. Man and technology complement each other splendidly in all the algorithmically generated projections in the exhibition Lost: but the visitors are not irritated or even overwhelmed by so much data-driven fake news, but rather pull out their pocket computers and start to retain themselves in the sea of ​​data and start to share their photos with the digital world. The Niagara Falls as a background has been seen a thousand times - the potential for likes lies in hybrid realities.

Computer, projector, software: a specially programmed custom made Java-based text editor of just over 0.4 MB generates language waves in an infinite loop, whereby the angles of the movements, the vectors of the movements, their speeds and many other settings can be programmed steplessly in the decimal range. The text that appears is also entered in the editor.