Aram Bartholl

He addresses socially relevant topics, including surveillance, data privacy and technology dependence, through his work by transferring the gaps, contradictions, and absurdities of our everyday digital lives to physical settings. The effect is twofold. The works create an at-times bizarre confrontation with our own ignorance of globally active platform capitalism, and they renegotiate network activities as political forms of participation on an analog level using the potential of public space. Bartholl thus initiates a performative process to catalyze a renewed understanding of individual action within a collective and self-determined network discourse. Conceptually and technically, he uses the same aesthetics, codes, and communication patterns that users are familiar with from YouTube, Instagram, and video games. A purposeful contextualization employs the logic of the Internet while at the same time undermining it with individual strategies.