Lucas Bambozzi, meta4walls, 2001.
Image: Courtesy of the artist.


Online Exhibition
Lucas Bambozzi, Radical Software Group and Brooke Singer
Curated by Richard Rinehart
Wednesday, 19 Jan 2005 to Saturday, 19 Feb 2005

Art Works and Artist Bios

Zapped!
Beatriz da Costa, Jamie Schulte and Brooke Singer

SWIPE Toolkit
Brooke Singer

Carnivore
Radical Software Group

meta4walls
Lucas Bambozzi

Exhibition Related Links

"The boundaries between individual, corporate, and civic spaces have shifted dramatically, driven by technological advancements in data-mining, data-surveillance, sensors, and other tracking technologies. These shifting boundaries provide opportunity and danger on all sides. From encryption for the common person, to companies tracking our every habit with membership cards and internet 'cookies', to advancements in military/law enforcement data-mining and surveillance, elements of our identity are increasingly translated into code, creating a new "data-self".

This data-self leads a second life and mediates our experience within the new civic, corporate and private worlds. Our data-selves are nearly invisible yet have little privacy. They are vulnerable in very real ways. Identify-theft, credit record errors, and medical information sharing all affect us directly. Prick our data-self and we bleed.

This exhibition goes beyond digital avatars created out of choice for purposes of entertainment, education, or socializing in the form of video games or online chat forums. The exhibition focuses on the data-self that is an unself-conscious and unwitting by-product of the common person's everyday activities. This data-self can be pictured as a cyphernetic or information organism (cyphorg), an updated version of the industrial age hybrid, the cybernetic organism (cyborg).

Without taking a simplistic or polarized dys/utopian stance, this exhibition explores the process whereby citizens are represented as data or physically tracked with devices that attach codes to our bodies. The art projects in this exhibition map the new civic and private territory in which our data-selves live. The artists in this exhibition also ask how we can take control of our data-selves, guiding them between the benefits and dangers of these new territories?

Is there such a thing as a healthy cyphorg-citizen? These questions and more are explored in four online artworks; some old, some brand new, and none exhibited before in the Western U.S."

- Richard Rinehart





Go Back to network events