Art & Technology #13: Aram Bartholl
Against the Prevalence of Digital Media
By imbibing and amalgamating forms of the past, digital media re-interprets existing media in a meta method. Although it has emerged an entirely new form of media, digital media still bears traces of the past. This remediation of absorption and integration is being accelerated by the transformation of fundamental qualities into digital. As the digital begins to encode our world in 0s and 1s, those that embody physical bases are being converted into abstract masses, void of instructive basis.
A result of this process is that people are now faced with functional, convenient and pleasant media encounters, which were once limited within the realm of time and space, but are now fully in the realm of infinite possibilities. German artist Aram Bartholl meticulously examines the ubiquity of the media world, in particular the changes in environment and circumstance that resulted from the digital rise. While digital media has opened up new worlds of possibility, its drastic changes have also come with loss and chaotic junction—this is what Bartholl explores. The contemplation of these issues is an essential metaphor that constructs the context of his work.
The distance between digital and analogue
Bartholl was placed in the global spotlight with his seminal work Map (2006), an augmented reality-based installation that bridges the real world and the virtual. Using the iconic Google Map pins to demarcate real destinations, the installation points to the conjunction between reality and virtuality. As anyone who has ever used Google to navigate unfamiliar terrain understands, the imagery of the virtual world has percolated into aspects of daily life. In the past, mankind emblemized the significance of grasping the real world through the medium of maps, which existed virtually as combinations of lines and symbols that provided direction. However, a limitation of the physical map was that it could not be catered according to current position, and its function was curtailed when one was not aware of their location.
Today, on the other hand, the consilience between analogue and digital media has enabled maps to mark where one stands in a virtual image. From this perspective, images provided by media of the past have become pertinent to the real world, where virtual images are no longer recognized as disparate. Although these images are restricted to its characteristics that make it distinct from reality, they exert powerful influence over people by confusing a sense of reality and virtual location. This superposition of the virtual onto the real creates a gap of which we remain aware. Bartholl plays within that ambivalent space, encouraging viewers to recognized the relationship between the real world and digital media. Paradoxically, Map triggers audiences to recognize virtuality through reality.
0,16 (2009) is another work that blurs this dichotomy, using an interface constructed of pixelated images. Although it appears digital, it is an analogue process that comprises the façade. At the backside of the work is a stereopticon emitting light and the movement of the audience within the space. The work deceives viewers into believing that these analogue actions, the shadows formed by light and movement, are digitally projected. The title indicates the resolution of the screen in pixels per inch, conveying the poor quality of the screen and reinforcing the digital characteristic. Bartholl seeks to deconstruct fixed ideas of the boundary between the digital and the analogue. Digital surfaces concealing analogue processes is simply one current of the “digilogue.” A reality completely substituted with the digital seduces viewers with a familiar analogue, but the artist here emphasizes that such a dichotomy is not longer relevant at all.
The hidden interior of technology and the exterior of art
If Map and 0,16 wittily bridge the distance between virtuality and reality, then Dead Drops reveals the contrary nature of digital networks. When the concept of digital was initially suggested, it received attention not only for potential expansion and conversion, but for its economic and democratic quality. Digital became a synonym as the opportunity to overcome the temporal and spatial restrictions of analogue media, and was recognized as the land of opportunity and equality. The internet, once a space for infinite sharing and anonymity, is now another version of reality in which each new network imposes additional costs. In other words, content and material sources are not required to transmit data, but they are needed to utilize the network through which data is transferred. The problem of data sharing in today’s cyber space is analogous to feudalism, in which physical lands are conquered and privatized by the powerful. This network of data and technologoical potential was regarded as a brave new world, but has long been incorporated into the capitalist system. Today, there is no virtual space for alternative democracies or free economic zones.
Dead Drops opens the possibility for the exchange of unknown information, unfettered by restriction. Bartholl has initiated a cycle of data transfer, by downloading content onto a USB drive and concealing them at random city corners for the anonymous public, art aficionados, and treasure hunters to seek, exchange and re-upload with new content. Found in locations in Manhattan and Brooklyn, the thumb drives become a source for new democratic exchange. Through the work, the artist resists the present system of usage and bandwidth fees for an invisible data network. Bartholl investigates traits of digital media today and deconstructs the paradoxes that it provides. His works contain counter-technology tendencies, revealing the hidden side of the media rather than merely accommodating it. ■ with ARTINPOST
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<0,16> 2009-2013 light installation
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<0,16> 2009-2013 light installation
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<0,16> 2009-2013 light installation
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<0,16> 2009-2013 light installation
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<Dead Drops> 2010-2012 Public intervention
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<Dead Drops> 2010-2012 Public intervention
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<Dead Drops> 2010-2012 Public intervention
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<Map> 2006-2013 Public installation
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<Map> 2006-2013 Public installation
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<Map> 2006-2013 Public installation
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<Map> 2006-2013 Public installation
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<Map> 2006-2013 Public installation
Profile
Aram Bartholl was born in Bremen, Germany, in 1972. After graduating from the Berlin University of the Arts in 2002, he held solo exhibitions in Germany, the Netherland, France, and the U.S. He has participated in diverse group shows and fairs in Switzerland, Cuba, Denmark, Austria, Spain, Slovenia and Israel.
