PEBKAC IMHO, installation view of wallpaper. Photograph by Alexandra Gronwald.
Located in the building of the former Warteck brewery, the LISTE is a reprieve from the glam of Art Basel. The House of Electronic Arts Basel (HeK) invited four young media—namely, Aram Bartholl (Germany), Constant Dullaaart (Netherlands), Evan Roth (United States) and Raquel Meyers (Spain)—to occupy a booth together that functions like a single collage, titled PEBKAC IMHO: a reference to the acronyms for “Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair” and “In My Honest Opinion.”
After climbing down a narrow staircase, one arrives in a small digital world that should be familiar, yet confuses. Every spot of the floor has been covered with pictures of office chairs. Settling in front of the computer—or inside it?—the visitor can hardly relax, given the continual coming and going in the passage space—quite different from home. With a second look one recognises that the pictures on the floor also don’t show office chairs at home behind the desk, but in courtyards, parks or shopping streets. Just so: isn’t it the office, brought increasingly online, in fact everywhere?
The only real, physical office chair in the show room is not meant for the visitor, but occupied by his loyal friend and companion: the laptop. The screen shows the image results for “Hirsch” (German for “stag”). This work of art, The Sleeping Internet, by Constant Dullaart falls into sleep mode and then jerks back awake every few seconds. Drawing on the context of the art fair, Dullaart synchronised this rhythm with the lights that illuminate the small room between the staircase and the actual gallery hall, such that they come on and off as visitors enter. The whole room enters sleep on occasion, with the other sculptures cast into shadow or light depending on the visitor traffic.
Aram Bartholl, Greetings from the Internet, 2013, ongoing postcard series.
Silhouettes, by Evan Roth, stands in front of Adam Bartholl’s greetings from the internet, a a postcard stand filled with photos of hand-written notes recording passwords and WLAN names. Bartholl collected all these small memos on his journeys in restaurants, hotels and other public spaces, which can be reassuring; the first sight of the handwritten memos leaves one slightly uncomfortable, like a voyeuristic glimpse into someone else’s keyhole.
This password jungle opens onto silhouettes of the internet landscape by Evan Roth. The silhouette, popular in the 19th century in cut paper as a cheaper form of portraiture, is a particularly efficacious means of compressing complex information. Roth applied this technique deftly through laser cutting his personal internet browser data in the shape of an abstract map into black cardboard.
In Bartholl’s work, the first glance emphasized the individual through the handwriting, whereas a closer look invited contemplation on the impersonality of these codes used by hundreds of random people. In contrast, Roth’s work on first impression deceives by showing an arbitrary-seeming cipher, but the artist has in fact visualised one of his more intimate behaviors.
Evan Roth, Silhouette, 2014, laser-cut black cardboard.
The sensation of physically inhabiting a machine recurs in this patchwork, evoked not only in Roth’s visualisation of the guts of the web, but also by Dullaart’s sleeping mode light and the sounds coming from Raquel Meyers video installation. Fingers of Doom shows a Commodore 64 animation in which pixel characters (familiar to some of us from old computer games) take shape, dissolve, or transform into different monsters and animals – never standing still and running in an infinite loop. Different from our own computer games, this play cannot be influenced or manipulated by the visitor – neither can the glitchy Game Boy-like music, which recalls sci-fi cockpits and lighter clubs.
The exhibition, or single installation, mates nostalgia to uncanniness in a single living machine. As the infinite loop of the animation and its sounds, the helpless laptop sitting on the office chair, and the breathing patterns of the sleep-mode light, all suggest to the visitor that, rather than using the machine, the machine is using us.
Raquel Meyers, Fingers of Doom, 2015, single-channel video.
