Current Events

Home Smart Home

8. March – 21. April 2024
Solo Show, Kunstverein Rotenburg, Rotenburg

For the exhibition “Home Smart Home,” Aram Bartholl equips the tower of the Kunstverein Rotenburg with a variety of home surveillance cameras. In addition to hidden cameras, known as “Nanny Cams,” Bartholl also experiments with 360° “Lightbulb” cameras equipped with lights and speakers. The market for surveillance cameras in the private sphere has grown tremendously in recent years. The desire for control over one’s own private space is reflected in this development and is part of the digitally driven society marked by a loss of trust.

The Art Tower, 4 Floors – 122 Steps – 24 m.
Originally slated for demolition in the mid-90s to make way for parking space for the “Ronolulu” leisure pool, the disused fire brigade water tower was on the chopping block. However, Peter Möhl, the former managing director of the municipal utilities and thus the owner of the tower, envisioned a meaningful repurposing. Together with the vice chairman of the Art Association, architect Jürgen Lohmann, the idea was born to convert the tower into a gallery.

pictures

Decoding the Black Box

27. January – 2. June 2024
Group Show, Galerie Stadt Sindelfingen, Sindelfingen

Die Ausstellung Decoding the Black Box bringt Künstlerinnen und Künstler zusammen, die Licht in diesen dunklen Raum und die Prozesse werfen, die sich in ihm ereignen. Sie legen dabei nicht nur die Funktionsweisen digitaler Technologien wie beispielsweise von künstlicher Intelligenz offen, sondern visualisieren zugleich die Auswirkungen, die sie auf unsere Wahrnehmung von Realität und unser In-der-Welt-Sein haben. Während sie die ökonomischen und machtpolitischen Strukturen der digitalen Technologien und insbesondere des Internets transparent machen, zeigen sie Gegenentwürfe für eine dezentralisierte, humanere und demokratischere Nutzung ebendieser auf.

pictures

?>

Upcoming Events

Urban Art Biennale

26. April – 10. November 2024
Biennial, Völklinger Hüttte, Saarbrücken

Recent Events

Killyourphone workshop

13. April 2024
Workshop, Transmediale exhibition hosted by Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Berlin

14:00 – 16:00

Killyourphone is an open workshop format. Participants are invited to make their own signal blocking phone pouch. In the pouch the phone can’t send or receive any signals. It is dead! This workshop was run for the first time at the Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg end of 2013.

Stitch Incoming!!

25. March 2024
Curatorial, Speed Show at Web Cafe, Athens

Monday 25th of March, 7:00 PM at Web Cafe, Eptanisou 40, 113 61 , Kypseli – Athens

with:
!Mediengruppe Bitnik with Selena Savić & Gordan Savičić , Ingrid Hideki, Joanna Bacas, Kyriaki Goni, Maria Mavropoulou, Marina Gioti, Marsunev, Nadja Buttendorf, Theo Triantafyllidis

Curated by Aram Bartholl & Socrates Stamatatos

Speed Show lands in Greece, the country of souvlaki, the sun (yes we can claim that they originated a celestial body), ouzo, feta, an enormous financial debt. Currently, Greece is also trending for all the wrong reasons namely, gentrification, queerphobia, state crimes and more dystopic incidents.
As 2024 unfolds, we find ourselves amidst a whirlwind of confusion, bombarded with a cacophony of online horrors to consume, an attention span further abbreviated by TikTok’s algorithm and the barrage of incoming stitches.

Stitches Incoming serve as a conduit for creators to engage and converse, traversing from one topic to the next. They have evolved into a new social fabric, weaving connections within an ever-shifting digital and physical landscape while also serving as a testament to personal and collective traumas, both past and present.

What unites the participating digital artists? Perhaps everything and nothing simultaneously… Departing from the traditional Speed Show setup, where artworks are carefully stacked inside internet cafe computers, and drawing inspiration from the structure of TikTok stitches, each piece seems to propel the conversation forward, or perhaps uses the next as a springboard for its own narrative.

Stitch this and stitch that, we have everything you ever wanted (maybe) ! Are we stuck in an infinite loop of sh*tposting, valuable content, the highlight of social issues, personal and interpersonal experiences?
Maybe! Come and find out…

More info on Speed Shows at https://speedshow.net/stitch-incoming/

Killyourphone workshop

23. March 2024
Workshop, Transmediale exhibition hosted by Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Berlin

14:00 – 16:00

Killyourphone is an open workshop format. Participants are invited to make their own signal blocking phone pouch. In the pouch the phone can’t send or receive any signals. It is dead! This workshop was run for the first time at the Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg end of 2013.

Killyourphone workshop

9. March 2024
Workshop, Transmediale exhibition hosted by Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Berlin

14:00 – 16:00

Killyourphone is an open workshop format. Participants are invited to make their own signal blocking phone pouch. In the pouch the phone can’t send or receive any signals. It is dead! This workshop was run for the first time at the Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg end of 2013.

Blog Archive for Tag: podcast

Crossing Property Lines

July 18, 2020

Prof. Agnes Förster and Martin Bangratz from Urban planing RWTH Aachen invited me to their podcast series “Whats Next“. Below their article accompanying the conversation in German. Thx!!

 https://www.planung-neu-denken.de/podcasts/crossing-property-lines/

Crossing Property Lines

The relatively soft lockdown in Germany has forced innovation on many firms and schools, revealing the country’s shortcomings in the area of digital transformation, such as broadband access. While some of Aram Bartholl’s friends in the arts and programming scene notice hardly any difference in their routines, other, less digitalized professions have been hit hard. For Mr. Bartholl himself, teaching online has turned out to be a challenge. But what struck him most was the temporary absence of urban public space as a platform for expression. It feels liberating to see large demonstrations back in the city, both for noble and questionable causes.

Aram Bartholl’s work has dealt with digital space since his thesis in architectural studies in 2001. Back then he started with simple interventions – taking boxes from computer games and placing them in the city. He was looking at games such as first-person shooters, where the knowledge of a virtual space is crucial to the gameplay. And he found himself wondering: what does it mean to place objects from a digital realm into physical space? Do the spaces merge, or do they still belong to separate worlds?

This dualism of what is analogue and what is digital is so intertwined these days, that we are unable to distinguish one from the other. […] Of course, everything that happens there is real, it has an effect on our lives. Aram Bartholl 06/2020

A number of techno-social upheavals of our lifetime have influenced Bartholl’s work, as he observes the permeation of digital technology. The first disillusionment around 2000, when the dotcom bubble burst, the introduction of smartphones in 2007, the rise of global Internet corporations. Aram Bartholl has followed these trends closely and is still astonished by the dynamics of these tools which are so inscribed in our society; a tweet by the American president may cause immediate reactions in the stock market or foreign relations. The effects of technological developments are also becoming increasingly manifest in our cities. An early example were delivery services that visibly affect urban logistics and business closures. More recently, electric scooters and bicycles have turned up in cities worldwide – demanding our attention with a colorful design reminiscent of animated icons back in a web 2.0 era. They are objects that seem to bring the promise of a trendy internet startup into urban space, Silicon Valley Solutionism arriving in cities around the globe. Unsurprisingly, their promise of a shift towards sustainable mobility has yet to occur, as that would require political guidance and many other factors to align.

Urban space has always been a native ground for Bartholl’s work. To him, it is more exciting than the white cube with its preconceived notions and expectations about art. Outside, the audience is random and may start a discourse that would never happen in a controlled artistic environment. To encourage people to think critically about the relationship of private property and public space, Aram Bartholl recently took rental bikes from the street to exhibit them as sculptures in a gallery. Visitors were still free to rent the bikes and take them back outside, but the project challenged people’s notions of ownership, of public and private space. In a follow-up project, Bartholl is fishing algae-covered electric scooters out of Berlin’s channels to display at Kunstraum Kreuzberg, showing once again that their promise of sustainability doesn’t hold water.

We are currently experiencing social media and the internet profoundly as a public space for discussion – in contrast to urban space – even though these platforms are run by private firms, with all the problems this entails. Aram Bartholl 06/2020

Just as private objects start to clog up public space, the digital space we perceive as public space is in fact in the hands of private corporations. Inoffensive mottos and ludic logotypes suggest harmlessness, but these firms are ultimately listed and profit-oriented. This seems problematic considering the history of privatization of other public infrastructures. Europe is hard-pressed to develop independent digital infrastructures.

In 2010, Aram Bartholl began a project that has since turned into a global movement: Dead Drops are flash drives embedded in a wall so that only the USB connector sticks out. Not connected to the internet, they constitute a statement against censorship and about the relationship between our new, digital reality, and the brick and mortar of cities. New Dead Drops still pop up, over 2.500 are currently listed globally [link: deaddrops.com]. Sharing things digitally through concepts such as open source and creative commons has led to unprecedented levels of collective production and consumption of content. Movements such as Fridays For Future or Black Lives Matter would not have been possible without the viral effects of social networks. In another recent example, the German hacker and programming community has pushed the government to adopt an open-source approach to their COVID19 tracking app.

Data should be free, Bartholl agrees, yet he urges us to consider what could happen with our data in the future. If research institutions are using photos found online to train artificial intelligence models that may ultimately be used for military purposes, it raises questions about the merit of uploading billions of images each day. And movements such as the alt-right have been quick to adopt internet and meme culture and learned to improve their own false-flag tactics.

Aram Bartholl continues his investigation of technology and space. Given the current discussion around the removal of outmoded monuments, he tinkers with augmented reality to attach digital artefacts to sculptures. And, referencing the hashtag #natureishealing, he announces that he will be fishing for more discarded bicycles in the river Spree.

Aram Bartholl is a Berlin based concept artist who investigates the relationship between digital and physical space. Since 2019, Bartholl teaches art with a focus on digital media as a professor at Hamburg University of Applied Sciences.

Tagged with:

Radio Spätkauf: Interview

June 29, 2020

This mini episode features Daniel Stern interviewing artist Aram Barthall about his recent installation “Unlock Life” which utilizes remnants of the recent bike share boom.

Find out more about at Aram Bartholl at https://arambartholl.com and see the exhibit until the 16th of August at https://www.kunstraumkreuzberg.de.

http://www.radiospaetkauf.com/2020/06/rs-mini-unlock-life/

Tagged with: +

Post-Digital Self. Die Kunst der modernen Maskerade

April 27, 2020


MdbK Podcast #019: LINK IN BIO, 27.4.2020

Wie werden heute im digitalen Alltag die Frage & Veränderung des Gesichtes, Gesichtserkennung und Facefilter diskutiert?
In der letzten MdbK [talk]-Folge zur Ausstellung LINK IN BIO, sprechen wir mit Aram Bartholl, Hanneke Klaver und Jeremy Bailey über „Post-Digital Self. Die Kunst der modernen Maskerade“. War die Maske seit der Ur- und Frühgeschichte ein fassbares Objekt, verschwimmen mittels digitaler Technologien die Grenzen zwischen Maske und Gesicht. Der deutsche Medienkünstler Bartholl kuratierte gemeinsam mit Anika Meier die „Speed Show“ zum Thema Post-Digital Self, in der die Geschichte der Netzkunst erzählt wird. In einem Internetcafe klickte man sich so durch Arbeiten von NetzkünstlerInnen, wie Jeremy Bailey und Hanneke Klaver, die Identitätsbildung reflektieren und auf den Gesichtsfiltertrend reagieren.

SHOWNOTES
Einleitung 0:00 (Deutsch)
Aram Bartholl 2:43 (Deutsch)
Hanneke Klaver 13:00 (English)
Jeremy Bailey 20:00 (English)
Schluss 26:21 (Deutsch)

Der Kanadier Jeremy Bailey hat in seinem Video „The Future of Television“ (2012) den digitalen Gesichtsfiltertrend gewissermaßen vorhergesehen. Er arbeitet mit einer Gesichtserkennungssoftware. Die Zukunft des Fernsehens ist für Bailey im Jahr 2012, was heute die sozialen Medien sind: Orte der Identitätsbildung.

Die Serie #freetheexpression der niederländischen Künstlerin Hanneke Klaver ist eine Reaktion auf den Gesichtsfiltertrend. Mit Strohalmen, Metalldraht, Holz, Papier und Kleber stellt Klaver analog Filter her, die sie wie Bastelbögen verteilt. Mit ihren nicht standardisierten Gesichtsfiltern befürwortet sie die freie Meinungsäußerung.

Der deutsche Medienkünstler Aram Bartholl entwickelte im Jahr 2010 ein Ausstellungsformat, das aus einem Internet Café für einen Abend einen Ausstellungsraum macht. Im Rahmen der „Speed Show“ ist auf diesen Computern Netzkunst zu sehen. Kunst, die das Internet als Medium nutzt, sich mit den genuinen Eigenschaften des Internets auseinandersetzt und die Technik thematisiert, mit der sie arbeitet. Netzkunst existiert nicht erst, seit das Internet für ein Massenpublikum zugänglich geworden ist, aber die sozialen Medien machen es einem breiteren Publikum möglich, im Alltag bewusst oder unbewusst Netzkunst zu sehen.

LINK IN BIO. Kunst nach den sozialen Medien zeigte mit über 50 Arbeiten, wie sich Produktion und Rezeption von Kunst im Zeitalter sozialer Medien verändern. Die Gruppenausstellung endete mit der temporären Schließung des MdbK. Wir konnten uns glücklicherweise noch vorher mit einigen KünstlerInnen für diese und weitere MdbK [talk]-Folgen zusammensetzen.