Installation, 2006
20 12″ Black and White monitors, wall shelf, variable dimensions
“Bookshelf places computer monitors on shelves as their screens flash text that visualizes network traffic. Shown adjacent to shelves containing real books, the installation questions the status of reading, the narrativity of protocol and data streams, the relative invisibility of data, the permanence of print versus the impermanence of digital archives, and the role of the human memory in retaining this information.” Marisa Olson
“Computer monitors are set up on a bookshelf where each screen visualizes network traffic in the space. Placed strategically next to real books, the installation contrasts printed matter and virtual matter occupying the same space and fighting for dominance in an increasingly technological world.” Jonah Brucker-Cohen
Artistic Concept
Rapid flow of letters and numbers on the monitors has nothing to do with chaos theory which can cause big disruptions in our world. It has also nothing to do with hacker’s world as one would like to say. Monitors placed on a wall shelf become a contemporary bookshelf containing in itself endless digitized textual and visual material. The Bookshelf represents a network traffic translated into descriptive form, so the unseen side of “networking” would be understandable or at least readable. In technical terms the flow of letters and numbers on the monitors would sound like ‘tcpdump’, a common computer network debugging tool.
The Bookshelf was exhibited in various shapes and contexts. A Memex Wall installation, conceptualized in cooperation with superfactory.biz, was shown within a context of a “memory extender” game, the term of which was used to call a proto hypertext computer system influencing the development of subsequential hypertext and intellectual augmenting computer systems.
Exhibitions
2006 [][][]Raum, Berlin
2007 lauf.werk . tmp . data.rescue, Berlin
2008 Migrating-Reality, GdK, Berlin
2008 Strictly Berlin, GdK, Berlin
2008 Rencontres Internationales, Madrid
2008 Rencontres Internationales, Paris
Related Media
