Archive for the ‘deaddrops’ tag
Dead Drops appear on Elementary
@arambartholl dead drop on Elementary :) pic.twitter.com/BslUrpBKrv
— Theodore Watson (@theowatson) https://twitter.com/theowatson/status/793612879928885248 November 2, 2016
Thanks to Jonah Brucker-Cohen & Theo Watson for pointing out the appearance of a Dead Drop in the TV show ‘Elementary‘. Cool! :)
Interview – Dead Drops on Huffpo
The internet revolutionized information sharing, allowing people all over the world to post content and distribute it among networks. But as the internet has grown, surveillance on the web has exploded as well. So one artist is encouraging people to forget the cloud and share information in a totally anonymous way.
In 2010, Berlin-based media artist Aram Bartholl started “Dead Drops,” his participatory file-sharing art project, by cementing a USB drive into a brick wall in New York City.
Save The Data
Save the data!
27.09. – 22.11.15
Von Kunst und datenträgern
Kunstpalais Erlangen · www.kunstpalais.de
In Erlangen, der Stadt, in der mit Entwicklung des mp3-Formats die Digitalisierung einen ganz bedeutenden Entwicklungsschritt getan hat, fokussiert mit der Gruppenschau „Save the Data!“ erstmals eine Ausstellung das Zusammenspiel von bildender Kunst und verschiedenen Speichermedien.
Auf welche Weise werden die technischen Speichermedien – aktuelle und überholte – für den künstlerischen Ausdruck genutzt, und wie werden deren unterschiedliche Bedeutungsebenen miteinander verwoben? Welchen Einfluss hat die Digitalisierung auf die Bildgenerierung in den Medien Fotografie, Film und Skulptur? Inwieweit wird der Bedeutungswandel, den die Speichermedien von analog bis digital in den letzten Jahren und Jahrzehnten erfahren haben, durch den künstlerischen Umgang mit ihnen hinterfragt?
Schallplatten, Compact Discs und CD-ROMs, vor allem aber Musikkassetten, Disketten und VHS-Tapes verschwinden einerseits zunehmend aus dem täglichen Gebrauch –andererseits taucht solcherlei Hardware in den letzten Jahren vermehrt in Museen und Galerien auf. Als künstlerischer Werkstoff sind sie für viele Künstler zunehmend von Interesse, und auch der Betrachter freut sich über die Wiederbegegnung mit solchem zum Teil allzu vertrauten Material. Der einst gefürchtete Bandsalat, das Rattern des Filmprojektors, die Mixkassette für die Liebste oder das Bild von Regalen voller Videokassetten gehören im täglichen Leben zwar meist der Vergangenheit an, doch die damit verbundenen Gefühle zwischen Nostalgie und Zukunftseuphorie kommen umso stärker zum Tragen und werden von den Künstlern ganz gezielt eingesetzt. Der Aspekt des verborgenen Gehalts, den die gespeicherten, aber dennoch unsichtbaren Daten den Werken hinzufügen, spielt hierbei für viele eine weitere große Rolle.
Zum anderen entstehen mit Elementen des ganz zeitgenössischen Umgangs mit Dateien und Speicherstrukturen auch neue ästhetische Prototypen: so beispielsweise das Fenster im Internetbrowser oder das Raster des Bildbearbeitungsprogramms. Auch diese haben seit einiger Zeit in der künstlerischen Produktion ihren festen Platz. Vergangenheit und Zukunft werden auf diese Weise in der Schau „Save the Data!“ dicht verwoben – spannend, sinnlich wie intellektuell ansprechend und nicht zuletzt durchaus humorvoll.
with: Timo Arnall (GB), Aram Bartholl (DE), Viktoria Binschtok (RU), Gregor Hildebrandt (DE), Ronnie Yarisal und Katja Kublitz (CH und DK), Via Lewandowsky (DE), Joep van Liefland (NL), Florian Meisenberg (DE), Yuri Pattison (IE), Gebhard Sengmüller (AT)
Dead Drops at Palais de Tokyo
Dead Drops
at Palais de Tokyo, Paris
24/06/2015 – 13/09/2015
Intervention on the building.
Four Dead Drops are installed in different places of the museum. Visitors are invited to bring a laptop to connect to them.
“From the very beginning, I always encouraged people to leave their art on there. Especially for the MoMA dead drops, I made this blog post like, ‘If you want to be able to claim you had art in the MoMA, you can just go now and put something on there’.” Aram Bartholl
Dead Drops is a participative project started in 2010 by German multi-media artist Aram Bartholl. A dead drop or dead letter box is a term from the field of espionage and designates a method used to transmit information or items at a secret location. This anonymous peer to peer file-sharing network is based on USB keys cemented into a wall or other support in public space. The GPS coordinates of the site are then posted on the Dead Drops website. Each dead drop is installed empty except for a simple text file explaining the project. Users are invited to share documents, pics, digital works, films or whatever suits their fancy. A computer with a USB port is the only thing needed to connect to the not interconnected network. After having installed and referenced the first five dead drops in New York and on the web, Bartholl’s project unexpectedly took off, spreading internationally. As of May 2015, over 1520 Dead Drops had been submitted to deaddrops.com. Aside from its crazy concept, the project tries to rematerialise the dematerialised world of computers. Following the revelations by Edward Snowden, at a time when clouds and the debate on internet censorship and privacy have become hot topics, this project is now more then ever front and center on the political stage.
Born in Germany in 1972, Bartholl focuses on interrelations between the digital world and our physical surroundings. He obtained his degree in architecture from the University of arts in Berlin, where he lives and works. His artistic work has been shown in numerous festivals and exhibitions in museums and galleries. In 2011, five Dead Drops were part of the “Talk to me” exhibition at the MoMA in New York and a new facet of the project saw the day in 2013 with the installation of a DVD Dead Drop at Museum of the Moving Image in New York as well. Palais de Tokyo is the first French institution to welcome Dead Drops.
Cited from “Somewhere between Cyber and Real: An interview with Aram Bartholl”, by Jillian Steinhauer, 2012, http://hyperallergic.com
Links for all four Dead Drops:
Comment exposer au Palais de Tokyo ?
Dead Drops au Palais de Tokyo, à Paris
Vernissage public le lundi 22 juin à 21h
Comment exposer au Palais de Tokyo ?
- Apporter vos oeuvres sur votre ordinateur portable lors du vernissage
- Téléchargez-les sur l’une des 5 dead drops placées au Palais de Tokyo
- Dites à tout le monde que vous exposez au Palais de Tokyo
HOW TO GET YOUR ART IN THE PALAIS DE TOKYO
DEAD DROPS at Palais de Tokyo, Paris
Public OPENING, Monday 9:00pm 2015 June 22nd
How to get your art in the Palais de Tokyo
- BRING YOUR ART ON A LAPTOP TO THE GRAND OPENING.
- UPLOAD IT TO ONE OF THE 5 DEAD DROPS IN PALAIS DE TOKYO.
- TELL EVERYONE YOU HAVE ART IN THE PALAIS DE TOKYO.
Dead Drops on Heute news
Dead Drops revistited!
In the past two months there has been again a lot of international press about DeadDrops. The DeadDrops project is running since November 2010, for four and a half years now. After the initial press buzz in 2010/11 the project kept spreading online with occasional press like after the Snowden releases etc. But just since the beginning of 2015 there was a lot of press all over again. It is really hard to tell how such a press wave is starting on a project which is already running for such a while but I assume after almost 5 years there is a new generation of Internet users and press people who haven’t heard about DeadDrops yet. Through some big blogs in the US it reached the south american news, spreaded there and also made it back to Europe. I ve listed a selection of press links at the end of this post. Please also see the nice DeadDrops youtube playlist somebody made.
In Germany the recent reports about DeadDrops had a special twist. End of February the yellow press style news paper Kölner Express had a piece about a bomb making plan PDF which was supposedly found on a DeadDrop in Cologne. The local and national press picked up quickly the story and my phone kept ringing for two weeks. It is astonishing how in 2015 you still have to explain to people that it is of course not a problem to find such a PDF with illegal tutorials on the Internet. Or yes! there could be a virus on the USB drive, like there could be a virus in this blog post. But in an era of constant fear about terror the suspicious USB drive in wall was a perfect story for them. I was only waiting for the ISIS connection. But again this was a good opportunity to explain that there is no use in censoring or prohibiting encryption or anonymous communication technologies because there is illegal activities. Like back in the days the ruling class tried to banish the brand new dangerous technology ‘book printing’ which radicalized all the young people. Especially journalists should be aware how important independent, encrypted, private communication is. In fact DeadDrops is not a very efficient communication technology but a good symbol on independent, open digital communication. So while the NSA has trojans installed on all our hard drives or access to millions of sim card keys we worry about a 20 year old anarchist cook book PDF on a flash drive in a wall in cologne. What a crazy world! :))
The actual great story about the Cologne DeadDrop is that this specific DeadDrop, which I made myself as part of a duo show with JODI at DAM Cologne in 2011, was still existing and working in 2015!! Until the police ripped it out and broke it to then hand it in at the at the LKA cyber security department to get it fixed. Of course the highlight is how the two police men are kneeling in front of the yellow banana (the gallery “certificate”) trying to understand what’s going on. In fact later the Kriminalpolizei called DAM gallery to have them explain what exactly this USB stick is about and what the DeadDrops project is etc. On the same day I made this popular tweet about the whole story.
Of course I am very happy about all the attention for DeadDrops. It is very interesting to witness how the perspective on such a project has changed over the past five years, especially since 2013. I am glad to see how this project is still going on and how it has inspired so many people over the years. Thanks to all the deaddroppers out there!! You are awesome!!
Aram Bartholl, March 2015
LINKS:
- http://www.express.de/koeln/eingemauert-in-einer-fassade-bomben-bauplan-auf-oeffentlichem-usb-stick-in-der-koelner-suedstadt,2856,29952848.html
- http://www.express.de/koeln/geheime-bomben-bauanleitung-stick-aus-der-suedstadt–ein-fall-fuer-die-cyber-profis-vom-lka-,2856,29972140.html
- http://www.express.de/koeln/in-wand-zementiert-lka-spezialisten-analysieren-bomben-stick-aus-der-suedstadt,2856,29962112.html?regio=2858
Full Interview at Sueddeutsche.de:
Guardian:
More press links:
German:
- http://www.general-anzeiger-bonn.de/region/koeln/Daten-fuer-immer-verloren-article1575822.html
- http://www.ksta.de/koeln/polizeieinsatz-an-der-koelner-volksgartenstrasse-eingemauerter-usb-stick-ist-eine-kunstaktion,15187530,29962316.html
- http://www.rp-online.de/nrw/staedte/koeln/offenbar-bombenbau-anleitung-auf-usb-stick-entdeckt-aid-1.4900331
- http://www.swr3.de/info/nachrichten/Polizei-prueft-Bomben-USB-Stick/-/id=47428/did=3120472/vx8ipn/
- http://www.taz.de/!155350/
- http://motherboard.vice.com/de/read/wie-aus-einer-kunstaktion-ein-toter-briefkasten-fuer-bombenbauer-und-drogenkoeche-wurde-444
- http://www.welt.de/regionales/nrw/article137783878/USB-Stick-mit-Bombenbauplan-in-Wand-ein
POPULAR TWEET
the moment when the #KRIMINALPOLIZEI calls your gallery to get explained your ART! #DEADDROPS http://t.co/eUEHxlCXP2 pic.twitter.com/2FmryheOtw
— Aram Bartholl (@arambartholl) 24. Februar 2015
https://twitter.com/arambartholl/status/570195342253277185
Dead Drops YouTube playlist
The Youtube user #USBdeaddrop made an effort to collect all videos dealing with DeadDrops in one or the other way. The result is this beautiful playlist of news reports, tutorials, documentations and more. There are whole lot of clips I haven t even seen before. So cool!! Thx!!
In the meanwhile on Instagram …
Maddecent.com fans on Instagram like very much the DVD Deaddrop install it seems. :)) and Dismagazine.com too :))))