Hurt me plenty review – Motherboard
Review of Hurt me plenty on Motherboard Vice http://motherboard.vice.com/read/hurt-me-plenty
by Doug Berend
thx!!
Unfinished Reality
10. April – 5. June 2026
Group Show, United Art Museum, Wuhan
Current Events
Well informed. Badly disposed.
15. March – 24. May 2026
Group Show, Galerie Eigenheim, Weimar
Well informed. Badly disposed.
Doomscrolling, Negativbias und die sozialen Herausforderungen
Ort EIGENHEIM Weimar, Asbachstraße 1, 99423 Weimar / Eröffnung 14.03.2026 um 19 Uhr mit dem DJ Set Druck – Resonanz – Kontrollverlust von Christoph Höfferl / Dauer 15.03.2025 – 25.04.2026
beteiligte Künstler*innen: Anna Bittersohl, Aram Bartholl, Simon Baumgart, Jonas Blume, Benedikt Braun, Elisa Jule Braun, Paolo Cirio, Ben Grosser, Esra Gülmen, Susanne Junker, Philipp Kummer, Marc Lee, Kayla Mattes, Signe Pierce, Theresa Rothe, Michal Schmidt, Stefan Schiek
Der Auftakt des Jahresprogramms, das sich Zuversicht, Positivität und kollektiver Lebensfreude widmet, wird durch die Ausstellung “Well informed. Badly disposed.” markiert. Zugleich versteht sich diese erste Ausstellung als bewusste Problemanalyse: Sie benennt die Bedingungen, unter denen ein positives Jahresthema heute nicht naiv, sondern notwendig erscheint – als Haltung, um zunehmender Polarisierung, Emotionalisierung und politischer Vereinnahmung von Information etwas entgegenzusetzen.
Im Zentrum stehen die Mechanismen von Doomscrolling und Negativbias – Phänomene, die unsere Wahrnehmung, unsere Stimmung und zunehmend auch den gesellschaftlichen Diskurs prägen. Eine immersive, düster-dystopische Ausstellungskulisse definiert einen bewusst abstoßenden Raum und schafft einen von Reizüberflutung geprägten Erfahrungsrahmen, der Angst, Erschöpfung, Ekel und Abgründigkeit vermittelt. Die Ausstellung macht jene emotionale Überforderung erfahrbar, die aus der permanenten Konfrontation mit negativen Nachrichten entsteht.
Künstlerische Positionen untersuchen, wie digitale Informationsflüsse, soziale Medien und algorithmische Logiken unser Denken und Fühlen beeinflussen. Dabei wird deutlich: Plattformen sind nicht neutral. Sie spiegeln ökonomische und politische Machtverhältnisse wider, verstärken Polarisierungen und prägen demokratische Öffentlichkeiten weltweit. Zugleich zeigt sich, dass individuelle Mediennutzung eng mit Fragen von Verantwortung, Vertrauen und Bildung verknüpft ist. Die Ausstellung macht sichtbar, wie stark wir dazu neigen, das Negative stärker zu gewichten als das Positive – und wie soziale Medien und Informationsplattformen diesen Bias gezielt nutzen, um Aufmerksamkeit zu maximieren.
„Well informed. Badly disposed.“ beleuchtet bewusst die negativen Einflüsse unserer medialen Umwelt und macht zugleich neugierig auf die weiteren Ausstellungen des Jahresthemas. Sie eröffnet den notwendigen Kontrast, um die Kraft der Zuversicht in den folgenden Projekten umso stärker erfahrbar werden zu lassen. So bildet diese erste Ausstellung den kritischen Auftakt für ein Programm, das Schritt für Schritt Perspektiven auf Optimismus, Empathie und kollektive Freude entfaltet.
Moi et les autres
12. March – 13. September 2026
Group Show, Fondation EDF, Paris
By occupying nearly a third of our waking hours, screens are profoundly reshaping the contours of our relationships with others. In response, numerous journalistic and academic discourses echo concerns about the digital migration of our social lives: the idea frequently arises that the socio-technical systems at work in this migration are making us more resistant to diversity.
Our intention is to nuance this concern by acknowledging a foundational aspect of the internet—its original design to facilitate the virtuous and unprecedented emergence of communities of specific interests, often far more specialized than what our traditional offline social circles can accommodate. This utopia inevitably carries a tension between, on the one hand, the benefits of more efficient and far-reaching sociability, and on the other, the widely discussed risks of a social life limited to alters who are most similar to ourselves.
Curated by Aurélie Clémente-Ruiz, director of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, and Camille Roth, a researcher at CNRS in social sciences.
With: Nicolas Bailleul, Aram Bartholl, Léa Belloousovitch, Neïl Beloufa, Sophie Calle, Paola Ciarska, Laurent Grasso, Juliette Green, Ben Grosser, Özgür Kar, Béatrice Lartigue, Lauren Lee MacCarthy, Katherine Longly, Randa Maroufi, Magalie Mobetie, Martine Neddam, Philippe Parreno, Françoise Pétrovitch, Valentina Peri, Marilou Poncin, Jeanne Suspuglas
Today Is a Good Day to Discuss Digital Rights
20. November 2025 – 3. May 2026
Group Show, Fundacion Telefonica, Madrid
A look at how our online practices leave a trace and shape our rights. Drawing on the Charter of Digital Rights (2021), the exhibition explores seven key areas with humour and everyday examples. Framed within the Observatory of Digital Rights and curated by Fundación Telefónica and Domestic Data Streamers, the show encourages reflection and debate around the safe, responsible, critical, and creative use of technology.
We accept cookies as if they were freshly baked biscuits, without having the slightest idea of what ingredients they contain. We share photos of our children’s birthdays or family trips as if they were WhatsApp stickers, without knowing where they might end up. We use the same password for our bank account and our grocery app (spoiler: not a good idea). We check a website to see if it’s going to rain, only to give away our data like candy on Halloween.
The exhibition Today Is a Good Day to Discuss Digital Rights seeks to raise awareness about the rights and duties that citizens exercise and develop in the digital sphere. Moreover, the show invites us to keep debating and building a system of guarantees around the digital ecosystem — a kind of ethical guide that helps us understand what digital rights and duties are, what they imply, and the opportunities the technological environment offers citizens.
Framed within the initiative of the Observatory of Digital Rights and curated by Fundación Telefónicatogether with the artistic collective Domestic Data Streamers — which presents six installations —, the exhibition features works by contemporary artists such as United Visual Artists, Eva & Franco Mattes, Paolo Cirio, Noemí Iglesias Barrios, Theresa Reiwer, Hasan Elahi, and Aram Bartholl, among others. Their works challenge visitors, help them understand, and encourage reflection on our actions as digital beings. A much-needed exhibition, it fuels the debate around digital rights and duties, and calls for a safe, responsible, critical, and creative use of technology. Because today is a good day to discuss Digital Rights.
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Upcoming Events
Grand Snail Tour
10. – 11. September 2026
Group Show, Urbane Künste Ruhr, Hattingen
The Grand Snail Tour activates public spaces in the region through artistic formats of exchange, participation, and co-production – often in collaboration with local actors. Over the course of three years, it will travel through all 53 cities in the Ruhr region. The project addresses important questions of social coexistence in an experimental and innovative way: Who owns public space and how can we create places for communal activities or activate existing spaces? What role does art play in this? The Grand Snail Tour aims to leave a variety of impressions, offer shared experiences and invite people to join the journey.
Self Storage
6. – 10. May 2026
Group Show, Galerie Ellia, Paris
We are made of memory, but memory itself is a fiction
The exhibition Self Storage investigates how individuals construct identity through personal and intimate recollections, as well as through the technical and social systems that shape their traces. Memory is not an objective recording: it is an assemblage, a selective construction built from both forgetting and persistence. A memory emerges within a space shaped by desire, loss, and reconstruction. Self Storage foregrounds this subjective and unstable dimension of remembering. Diaries, family archives, obsolete technologies, and bodily reminiscences become raw materials to examine the materiality of memory and its capacity for reinvention.
Hard drives, clouds, online profi les, and social networks are gradually replacing notebooks and photo albums. This massive externalization questions the boundary between private memory and public exposure, between lived traces and standardized data. Self Storage extends this inquiry into a contemporary era where identity is stored, outsourced, and endlessly duplicated. Through the works assembled, the exhibition off ers a poetic and critical drift between real and invented memory, intimate and externalized. It prompts us to consider: What do we need to retain? What do we choose to forget? And what becomes of the “self” when it is reduced to archives, content, and imprints?
curation : Nicolas de Chérisey & Philippine de Salaberry in collaboration with Ellia gallery
participating artists:
Joël Andrianomearisoa, Maxime Antony, Marcella Barceló, Aram Bartholl, Federica Belli, Matthias Bitzer, Borgial, Victor Boyer, Amélie Caussade, Salomé Chatriot, Coucou Bébé, Nick Coutsier, Fleur Cozic, Paul Créange, Corentin Darré, Oli Epp, Léonor Fini, Nan Goldin, Gregor Hildebrandt, Ryoji Ikeda, Victoire Inchauspé, Éloïse Labarbe-Lafon, Octave Lauret, Louis Lekien, Inès Longevial, Keegan Luttrell, Shiva Lynn Burgos, Matisse Mesnil, Sabine Mirlesse, Polina Osipova, Louise des Places, Joséphine de Rohan-Chabot, Philippine de Salaberry, Tehotu, Egon Thuile, Thu-Van Tran, Louis Verret, Francesco Vezzoli, Rose Vidal, Xolo Cuintle, Kai Yoda, Yugnat999.
Recent Events
readOn Konferenz
31. March 2026
Talk, LUX Pavillon, Hochschule Mainz, Mainz
Am 31. März findet im LUX Pavillon der Hochschule Mainz die ganztägige, vierte Ausgabe der readOn Konferenz unter dem Titel AT THE EDGE OF KNOWING statt.
Die Konferenz richtet den Blick auf jene Momente, in denen Wissen brüchig wird – wenn sich zwischen Gewissheit und Vermutung, Erkenntnis und Ahnung ein offener Raum auftut. Ein Raum, der sich eindeutigen Definitionen entzieht: Fragen werden wichtiger als Antworten, Prozesse bedeutsamer als Ergebnisse – und Unsicherheit erscheint nicht als Mangel, sondern als produktive Kraft.
AT THE EDGE OF KNOWING lädt dazu ein, diese Schwelle des Verstehens bewusst zu betreten. Gemeinsam suchen wir nach neuen Perspektiven auf Gestaltung, Begegnung und das Denken möglicher Zukünfte. Nicht-Wissen wird dabei nicht umgangen, sondern als Ausgangspunkt ernst genommen.
In Vorträgen und Diskussionen untersuchen geladene Gäste, welche Rolle Unsicherheit in gestalterischen Prozessen, in der Forschung und in unserer Haltung zur Zukunft spielen kann. Die Konferenz versteht sich nicht als abgeschlossener Zustand, sondern als Reflexion eines Prozesses, der sich in die Ungewissheit hinein entfaltet – und lädt dazu ein, gemeinsam an den Rand des Wissens zu treten und die Weite des Unscharfen zu erkunden. In ungewissen Zeiten möchten wir Raum schaffen, um zusammenzukommen – und statt am scheinbar Sicheren festzuhalten, bewusst loszulassen und neu zu denken. Die Teilnahme ist gegen eine freiwillige Spende möglich.
Organisiert von den Studierenden des Masterstudiengangs Kommunikationsdesign der Hochschule Mainz.
Bring Your Phone!: TOUCH FARM
16. January 2026
Curatorial, panke.gallery, Berlin
🤳🏾Bring Your Phone! : TOUCH FARM 🌾👩🌾 reclaims the idea of the farm for the screen age. If farming once organized land, labor, and life, today it organizes attention and clout. TOUCH FARM takes the architecture of click farms and flips it from extraction to participation.
Bring your phone. Exhibit your work. Everyone participates.
🐷🐐🐰🐖🐴🐑🐓🐖🐔🐮🐇🌾🚜👩🌾
Curated by @arambartholl & @socratesstamatatos.
🎉 #Vorspiel 2026 Opening Party at @panke.gallery
📍panke.gallery, Friday, 16 January 2026 at 7 PM (Gerichtstr. 23, Hof 5, 13347 Berlin)
Blog Archive for Tag: hurtmeplenty
Computer art of today
‘Hurt me plenty’ opening speech by Olia Lialina
Opening speech by Olia Lialin on Sept 12th 2014, DAM gallery Berlin.
Aram Bartholl – Hurt me plenty (pictures )
13th September – 1st November 2014
DAM Gallery, Berlin
Good evening,
I’m happy to have a chance to talk at the opening of Aram Bartholl’s, “Hurt me plenty” exhibition. Please allow me to start by mentioning another artist, Herbert Franke. His work was exhibited at the DAM Gallery many times I believe. Some year ago I invited him as a computer art pioneer to tell young designers about the origins of Algorithmic Art and Generative Graphics.
It was a very inspiring and energetic talk. One of the most thought provoking parts though was Franke explaining that there were times such as in the late 50’s/early 60’s when you had to fight for the idea that you can make Art with computers. Computer Artists were outcasts of the Fine Art scene. They couldn’t claim to be called Artists. It was just not accepted, because computers are algorithmic and Art is spiritual. Art was not allowed to come from computers or algorithms. These times are long gone. Digital computers became medium, then meta-medium, and turned in to new media. There is hardly any art today made without computers in Fine Arts and in Contemporary Art. Moreover, there is a whole universe of Media Arts with at least a 30 years old tradition of creating art with digital technology as being medium specific, not just by producing the work with some application, but with being critical or at least attentive to the software itself.
Today we find ourselves surrounded by post-digital and post-internet art, whereas renouncing of digital technology is so important and paying attention to the computer is supposed to be of ‘yesterday’. In post-digital art, hybrid forms are preferred and ambiguous, veiled messages are sent around. Like, common, digital is everywhere. Don’t even mention it. Be an Artist. Don’t be Computer Artist. Full circle.
In particular, this state of the arts makes me think about the possible revival of Computer Art as a notion and term that nowadays could belong to artists who make an effort to show the computer itself. It is neither algorithmic, nor nostalgic. Not 8 bit.
Art of direct messages and gestures. Clear and totally explicit.
Here are 10.000 passwords from Yahoo messenger. Find yours.
This is the graphic card. A computer inside your computer. It is expensive and powerful.
This is your phone. You have no idea when it is off or on. Come to a workshop and make a copper bag to put it inside and find out for sure.
This is the Hard Disk Crusher. This is your hard disk.
Computer art of today is hardware art. Art of hard messages. It hurts.
These brutally scratched hard disk plates are there. They refer to a significant case that happened a year ago when the Guardian received an order to destroy the computer where Snowden’s files were stored. In the mass media we saw explicit pictures of damaged computer parts and images of journalists executing drives and chips. It hurts to see it, hurts to listen to the Guardian’s Editor in Chief, who says, “Its harder to smash up a computer than you think”. Yeah, it’s even harder to accept it as a reality, journalists drilling though hard drives.
They were forced to do so. It was an act of intimidation. But, I think soon we’ll do it voluntarily and on a regular basis. There is less and less certainty of what you are doing with your computer on the level of software. There is hardly a proper way to save, and almost no way to delete by giving commands to the software. When you really would want to delete information, you’ll have to put your hard drive into the hole of this machine.
You are probably familiar with classic images of the first ever computer called ENIAC from 1945. It’s a computer the size of this space, and it is operated by many people who rewire or rebuild it for every new tasks. ENIAC was operated on the level of hardware, because there was no software. These images are from the remote past, but maybe, they are also of the nearest future.
Software is developed in a way that makes us helpless and desperate and there are less and less commands available. I don’t have an ‘undo’ available on my phone any more. So if something crucial, if I really need to ‘undo’, the only way is to throw my phone into this hole. I’m exaggerating. Whats this phone after all? This dumb terminal through which I connect to the Cloud? But the Cloud is in the same routine.
Earlier this year at the Transmediale Festival, Sebastian Schmieg and Johannes Osterhoff showed their project “10 kilograms from the Google factory”. It’s a box of shredded hard disks from the Google Data Center in Belgium with hundreds of useless, formless objects looking like fragments of a meteorite. It’s of no importance for Science, but could be well suited for the gift shop of a science museum. Artists were actually selling them as a souvenir – 85 Euros per piece. Buy part of the Cloud, say hello to your files.
But there is also good news. There is a computer artist who brings a hard disk ‘crasher’ in to the gallery. It looks small here. It is three times smaller than the graphic card on the wall. These cards will not fit inside there. The ‘crasher’ looks rather harmless here. Looks like there maybe alternatives. There is a future for software. That there is a chance for software transparency, a chance to delete by giving a command to the computers not the computer terminators. You should see clearly to think about it.
Dimensions and scale matter.
Last semester we had the honor of hosting Aram at the Merz Akademie. He made a project with my students titled, “For your eyes only”. It was about wearable smart objects: smart watches, smart glasses. These are technologies that promise to be very helpful and almost invisible. Week after week this group was doing the opposite, working on projects and objects that would bring awareness about the presence of the devices. Works that would made them visible and that would make us notice them. Two students decided to build a big model of Google Glass. Like really big. Three to two meters or something like this. Yeah, surprise, of course, invite the author of the monumental ‘Marker’ and ‘Dust’ to teach, and wonder that his students will search for some vivid element of the digital realm to erect a statue of in public space. I know that Aram was not really comfortable with this and tried to guide students into more subtle solutions, but they were steadfast in their decision. And in the end of the semester, they carried in a huge clumsy model of this trendy high-tech accessory. I don’t know what grade they got, but it still stays there, an unusable and sad object like Google Glass itself. But now you can clearly see it.
The thing is, we are not blind, but invisible computing made us longsighted, we don’t see what is right in front of our eyes because we are not supposed to see it. Computer Art can help. It has an optic.
Enjoy magnification, zoom in, clear images and binary statements.
Olia Lialina 2014
Olia Lialina
Net Artist, one of the net.art pioneers.
Co-founder of Geocities Research Institute
New Media Professor at Merz Akademie, Stuttgart
Hurt me plenty – Pictures & Press
All pictures: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bartholl/sets/72157647904042972/
Hurt me plenty
Exhibition: 13th September – 1st November 2014
DAM Gallery, Berlin
7:30: Introduction by Olia Lialina, Professorin New Media at the Merz Akademie Stuttgart.
In his solo show Aram Bartholl exhibits a new series of works inspired by the questions and developments engaging humankind’s ‘entry’ into the digital realm and the role of the first person as ‘shooter’. Bartholl deconstructs stereotypes about pixel imaging with unique large-scale works that are subtly combined with a series of pieces about issues of privacy, surveillance and net neutrality. With this exhibition, Bartholl proposes a new discourse that challenges the current debates about surveillance versus the seemingly antiquated ideas and images of ‘cyberspace’.
Press:
- Hurt me plenty – opening speech by Olia Lialina
- press release DAM gallery, by Tina Sauerländer PDF (PDF deutsch)
- http://motherboard.vice.com/read/hurt-me-plenty
- aqnb.com “Aram Bartholl, Hurt me plenty (2014)” by Jean Kay
- makezine.com ‘A First-Person Tour of Aram Bartholl’s First-Person Shooter Art Exhibition’ by Andrew Salomone
- Breitband Deutschlandradio, ‘Vorsicht Ironie’ by Moritz Metz (mp3, at 20:13 min)
- kotaku.com ‘Yes, Even Duke Nukem Is Art‘ by Luke Plunkett
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Individual Invitations
Hurt me plenty
Preview: September 12, 2014, 19 – 21 Uhr
September 13 – November 1st, 2014
DAM Gallery
Hurt me plenty
I’m pleased to announce my upcoming solo show at DAM gallery. New works!! CU there!!
Aram Bartholl – Hurt me plenty
Exhibition: 13th September – 1st November 2014
DAM Gallery, Berlin
Preview: 12th September 2014, 7 – 9 PM
7:30: Introduction by Olia Lialina, Professorin New Media at the Merz Akademie Stuttgart.
In his solo show Aram Bartholl exhibits a new series of works inspired by the questions and developments engaging humankind’s ‘entry’ into the digital realm and the role of the first person as ‘shooter’. Bartholl deconstructs stereotypes about pixel imaging with unique large-scale works that are subtly combined with a series of pieces about issues of privacy, surveillance and net neutrality. With this exhibition, Bartholl proposes a new discourse that challenges the current debates about surveillance versus the seemingly antiquated ideas and images of ‘cyberspace’.
Performance during the Preview:
BYOD – Bring Your Own Drive, and crush it.
Disused hard drives of PCs, laptops and servers imply a high security risk. DATALOVE prevents that discarded hard drives with sensible data fall into wrong hands. During the Preview of the exhibition the visitors are invited to bring their old data storage media and get them destroyed with a hardware crusher as part of Bartholl´s performance DATALOVE.
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Aram Bartholl – Hurt me plenty
Ausstellung: 13. September – 1. November 2014
DAM Gallery, Berlin
Preview: 12. September 2014, 19 – 21 Uhr
19:30: Einführung von Olia Lialina, Professorin New Media an der Merz Akademie Stuttgart.
In der Einzelausstellung zeigt Aram Bartholl eine Reihe neuer Arbeiten inspiriert von den Fragen rund um die Entstehung von First Person Skootern und dem ‘Eintritt’ des Menschen in das Digitale. Bartholl dekonstruiert mit großformatigen Arbeiten Pixelstereotypen und kombiniert diese auf subtile Weise mit den aktuell dringenden Themenkomplex rund um Privatsphäre, Überwachung und Neutralität im Netz. Die scheinbar antiquierten Ideen und Bilder von ‘Cyberspace’ versus der aktuellen Überwachungsdebatte werden in einer Ära der digitalen Omnipräsenz neu zur Diskussion gestellt.
Performance zur Eröffnung der Ausstellung:
BYOD – Bring Your Own Drive, and crush it.
Ausgediente Festplatten von PCs, Laptops und Servern bergen ein hohes Sicherheitsrisiko. DATALOVE verhindert, dass ausrangierte Festplatten-Laufwerke mit sensiblen Daten in falsche Hände geraten. Zur Ausstellungseröffnung sind die Besucher herzlich eingeladen im Rahmen von Bartholls Arbeit DATALOVE ihre alten Datenträger mitzubringen und vor Ort mit einem Hardware-Crusher zu zerstören.