identities – investigating life and data

Pavillon am Milchhof, April 2016

The exhibition showcases the works of Awst & Walther, Alexine Chanel,
Jörg Hasheider, Viola Kamp and Daphna Reves. Media are (video)installation, painting and photography.
The mutual aspect of the works is their occupation with the perception of individuals and the change of individual perception in a surrounding that is determined by digital data flows – a discursive and poetic self-assertion of uniqueness in the days of
data-mining and self-optimization.

introduction

With the still rapidly growing possibility of capturing and analysing huge amounts of data and the growing availability of data from on-line trading and on-line
communication, the providers of services and producers of goods obtain insight into the individual behaviour of consumers. These consumers are subsumed into relevant or
non-relevant groups and recieve specially created or modified offers.
Aside from commercial aspects, the surveilance of citizens by state-run agencies was
largely discussed in the context of the information revealed by Edward Snowden.

Questions occuring in this context are:

— what remains of our ideas of individual freedom and uniqueness being subjected to
those processes?
— what is the methodology behind the subsumption of individuals in groups of specified
consumers or suspects and how is it influencing our lifes?
— are the binary codes, that push these processes, the base of a standardized and
codified perception of „world“?

In this discursive context the artists present works, that:

— grasp individual aspects and keep them autonomous,
— show the complexity of everyday life inter-actions,
— confront the uniqueness of individuals with their standardization and codification.