This Connection is Untrusted (2014)

This Connection is Untrusted / Addie Wagenknecht (2014)

Abandon Normal Devices and Link Art Center were proud to present This Connection Is Untrusted by artist Addie Wagenknecht, as part of our programme The Lost Hour.

The programme launched on Oct 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 was 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 was 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 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 played with procedures like hiding sensible data from classified documents (sanitization) and online distribution of pseudo-porn images (bubble porn). The audience could interact with the work choosing whether and to what extent they reveal the underlying images. The visual results generated were saved together with the users location data, thus creating a new archive of sensitive information.

The exhibition was on show at Link Cabinet from Oct 25 to Nov 22, 2014. Access it here.

About the Artist

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, she just published the book Technological Selection of Fate.

About Link Cabinet

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.