In My Computer 2015 Open Call: Winning Entries

The Link Art Center is proud to announce the winners of the “In My Computer” Call for Proposals, that invited artists, thinkers, and computer users to submit proposals for its ongoing book series “In My Computer”, published by Link Editions. 
The applications have been evaluated by the Link Editions editorial team, that decided to award the right to be published in the series along 2015 to the following projects: Command-Shift-4 | Screenshots 2001-2014 byUBERMORGEN; What Color Is My Internet? by Greg Leuch; and Profile Page by Florian Freier.

 

 

Over the last 13 years, Austrian duo UBERMORGEN (lizvlx and Hans Bernhard) have been documenting their window to the world and their working and living environment from all laptops, iPhones & desktops. Command-Shift-4 | Screenshots 2001-2014 is a photo book documenting the private and public existence of one of the more relevant and controversial subjects in net art history, incidentally providing a backdoor over the recent history of the networked computer.

 

 

For about three months, US based artist, designer, and Free Art and Technology Lab (F.A.T. Lab) fellow Greg Leuch has tracked and processed his own Internet browsing, storing this information into a database and producing color maps of his daily surfing, in order to determine what color is his internet.What Color Is My Internet? is an attempt to provide an intimate glimpse at the daily surfing habits of a single internet user, through visual color maps, stats, and notes.

 

 

In 2014, German artist Florian Freier started documenting the student living rooms in a huge uniformed housing unit with more than 600 flats – taking a photograph of each room. Equivalent to the principles of our social network culture, every apartment of the building has the same default layout to be filled with a private life. Confronting each student’s apartment with a screenshot of his / her Facebook profile page, the book is an attempt to analyze the relationship between default layouts and user customization, and a visual study into how we inhabit space, both physical and digital.

 

 

Additionally, Link Editions decided to collect under a single issue three applications featuring essays and visual essays, and revolving around the common subject of image collecting with very different yet complimentary approaches. In My Computer # 11 | Photodump will be published lately this year, and will include: “Achieving or archiving images today?”, a visual essay on the trophy image by Italian researchers and contemporary art curators Valeria Manicinelli, Chiara Nuzzi and Stefania Rispoli; “Suddenly in the Digital”, by designers and editors Davide Giorgetta and Valerio Nicoletti, a collection of epiphanies experienced by our tired, overexposed eyes within the digital realm; and “Saved”, by artist and writer Marta Ravasi, a collection of images documenting the author’s interest in contemporary iconography in relationship to painting’s history.

 

“In My Computer” is a series of books collecting unpublished material available in your computer, produced by Link Editions and available for free download in digital form and in printed form through the print-on-demand (POD) service Lulu.com, Amazon.com and other online stores. The book can take any shape compatible with POD’s production and distribution standards. The concept wants to give value to the contents stored on our computer, a personal archive that is, from time to time, a den for our researches, a private diary, a place of accumulation and storage of digital contents. Since the distinction between public and private, online and offline is becoming increasingly blurred, the series is open to contents circulated online in any form. In this perspective, the book is an extraordinary tool for the rematerialization of the ephemeral, for archiving the impermanent, and for ordering the digital chaos we are living in.

 

Link Editions is a publishing initiative of the Link Center for the Arts of the Information Age. Link Editions uses the print on demand approach to create an accessible, dynamic series of essays and pamphlets, but also catalogues and artist books. A keen advocate of the idea that information wants to be free, Link Editions releases its contents free of charge in .pdf format, and on paper at a price accessible to all. Link Editions is a not-for-profit initiative and all its contents are circulated under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) license.

 

The Link Art Center is part of Masters & Servers, 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 recently awarded with a Creative Europe 2014 – 2020 grant. For 24 months from now, Masters & Servers will explore networked culture in the post-digital age.