This Connection Is Untrusted - Addie Wagenknecht

Link Cabinet presents This Connection Is Untrusted by artist Addie Wagenknecht.

The exhibition is co-commissioned by Link Art Center and Abandon Normal Devices in the occasion of AND Festival 2014, focused on the main concept: The Lost Hour. The festival will take place between October 25 and 26, the day of the year when in various countries throughout the world clocks are brought back 1hr, switching from summer time to winter time. This hour will be taken as a space to face the panoptican of pervasive surveillance, celebrating the move in social networks towards the ephemerality of the lived experience.

This Connection Is Untrusted by Addie Wagenknecht is a visual investigation on the notion of surveillance and the role of group think around public decisions to reveal or conceal private informations. The artist collected several banned or censored images from the Internet and covered them with a layer of opaque color. Exploring the notion of private vs public spaces, the artist plays with procedures like hiding sensible data from classified documents (sanitization) and online distribution of pseudo-porn images (bubble porn). The audience can interact with the work choosing wheter and to what extend reveal the underlying images. The visual result generated will be saved together with the users’s location data, thus creating a new archive of sensible information.

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.