Addie Wagenknecht: This Connection is Untrusted at Link Cabinet

Link Art Center and Abandon Normal Devices are proud to present This Connection Is Untrusted by artist Addie Wagenknecht. The exhibition will be on show at Link Cabinet from October 25 to November 22, 2014.

 

 

The exhibition is a co-commission with Abandon Normal Devices as part of their programme, The Lost Hour. The programme will launch on the October 25, marking the occasion when once a year clocks across the world are brought back one hour, signifying the switch from summer time to winter time. The hour lost will be taken as inspiration to ask, if you could get away with it, what would you do with the hour that gets lost? Rejecting the panopticon of pervasive surveillance the projects featured celebrate the move in social networks towards the ephemerality of the lived experience.

 

This Connection Is Untrusted by Addie Wagenknecht is a visual investigation on the notion of surveillance and the role of group thinking around public decisions to reveal or conceal private information. The artist has collected several banned or censored images from the Internet and concealed them with a layer of opaque color. Exploring the notion of private vs public spaces, the artist plays with procedures like hiding sensible data from classified documents (sanitization) and online distribution of pseudo-porn images (bubble porn). The audience can interact with the work choosing whether and to what extent they reveal the underlying images. The visual results generated will be saved together with the users location data, thus creating a new archive of sensible information.

 

Addie Wagenknecht is an American artist based in Austria, whose work explores the tension between intimacy and technology. She seeks to blend conceptual work with traditional forms of hacking and sculpture. Wagenknecht’s work employs a peculiar mix of hacking and visual aesthetics drenched by conceptualism. She is a member of the Free Art & Technology (F.A.T.) Lab and chairs the Open Hardware Summit at MIT. Past exhibitions include MuseumsQuartier Wien, Vienna, Austria; La Gaîté Lyrique, Paris, France; The Istanbul Modern; and MU, Eindhoven, Netherlands as well as Phillips Auction House, New York City. With Link Art Center, she just published the book Technological Selection of Fate.

 

Abandon Normal Devices (AND) is a catalyst for new approaches to art-making and digital invention, commissioning ground breaking projects which challenge the definitions of art, digital culture and the moving image. Inviting artists to hijack the imagination, by developing projects which abandon traditional settings and partnerships, with a distinct emphasis on creative enquiry and provocations. AND brings together an eclectic mix of academics, filmmakers, scientists and anarchists to actively push the boundaries of audience experience.
The AND portfolio consists of film happenings, exhibitions, performances, online projects, residencies, public realm interventions and a roaming biennial festival. To date AND has commissioned 60 new works and has worked with pioneering and award winning artists, which now amounts to over 300 contemporary artists including Aram Bartholl, Eva and Franco Mattes, the award winning Julian Oliver, Brody Condon, Molleindustria, Ubermorgen, HeHe, Andrew Kötting, Matthew Plummer Fernandez, Heath Bunting, Oreet Ashery, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Stephen Fortune, Carolee Schneeman, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Gillian Wearing. See more at: www.andfestival.org.uk.

 

Link Cabinet is a single web page hosting solo shows where artists exhibit a single, site-specific artwork. Conceived as a white and neutral exhibition space with an essential interface, Link Cabinet is a blank space that will be transformed by the works on display. After the show, the projects won’t be available on the site anymore. Link Cabinet is a project by Matteo Cremonesi for the Link Art Center.

 

The Link Center for the Arts of the Information Age (Link Art Center) is a no-profit organization promoting artistic research with new technologies and critical reflections on the core issues of the information age: it organizes exhibitions, events, conferences and workshops, publishes books, forges partnerships with private and institutional partners and networks with similar organizations worldwide.

 

AND and Link Art Center are part of Masters & Servers, a European adventure focused on a new generation of digital interventionism.