FDIC Insured by Michael Mandiberg Now Available!

The Link Art Center is proud to announce that the book FDIC Insured, by Brooklyn based artist Michael Mandiberg, is now available on Link Editions’ bookshelves. The issue #12 of the In My Computer series, the book was selected last February out of a call of proposals issued in 2015 by the Link Art Center and Abandon Normal Devices (AND) in the framework of Masters & Servers, and will be followed soon by the publication of the online archive of the 500+ failed banks logos collected and restored by the artist since 2008. FDIC Insured is available now as a 500 pages color paperback and a free download pdf. 

 

 

Michael Mandiberg, FDIC Insured, Link Editions, May 2016. Paperback, Color, Perfect Bound, English, 500 pages, ISBN 978-1-326-65189-3

 

Starting in 2008, Mandiberg methodically downloaded the logos of the many banks that failed during the Great Recession, and were taken over by the United States Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). During this process, these corporate visual identities were erased from the web. Except that every Saturday morning the artist downloaded the logos, preserving an otherwise lost history. Since then, more than 500 bank logos were saved on his computer as low resolution images, which he carefully recreated as vector files.

 

As Domenico Quaranta notes in his intro text: “In the free market ideology, the state should leave the market free to regulate itself, such that any state intervention is perceived as an attempt to control and set a limit to freedom. In this perspective, an institution that was founded to save the financial system when it is collapsing onto itself is seen as a necessary evil, that should be preserved by kept unseen. By putting it under a spotlight, and saving and restoring these icons of failure, FDIC Insured questions late capitalism and offers a small act of resistance against its ability to resurrect from its own ashes.”

 

 

This September, Mandiberg will exhibit this project in Manhattan’s Financial District at an Art-in-Buildings Project Space; for the installation Mandiberg will use a laser-cutter to inscribe each of the logos into the cover of a cast off investment guidebook. Visitors will enter through the building’s quintessentially corporate lobby, take an elevator to the 15th floor, and enter a recently vacated office suite, where they will encounter Mandiberg’s installation and the ghosts of hundreds of failed banks.
Michael Mandiberg is an interdisciplinary artist, scholar, and educator. His work traces the lines of political and symbolic power online, working on the Internet in order to comment on and or intercede in the real and poetic flows of information. He lives in, and rides his bicycle around, Brooklyn. His work lives at Mandiberg.com.

 

“In My Computer” is a series of books collecting unpublished material available in your computer, produced by LINK Editions and circulated both in digital and printed form through the print-on-demand (POD) service Lulu.com. The book can take any shape compatible with POD’s production and distribution standards.

 

FDIC Insured is realized in the framework of Masters & Servers. Networked Cultures in the Post Digital Age, a joint project by Aksioma (SI), Drugo more (HR), Abandon Normal Devices (UK), Link Art Center (IT) and d-i-n-a / The Influencers (ES) that was awarded with a Creative Europe 2014 – 2020grant. For 24 months from September 2014, Masters & Servers will explore networked culture in the post-digital age.

 

 

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This communication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.