FDIC Insured - Michael Mandiberg

On the occasion of the launch of the book FDIC Insured, by Michael Mandiberg, the Link Art Center and Abandon Normal Devices (AND), Liverpool are pleased to present a preview of the web project associated with the publication, available for one week at Link Cabinet.

FDIC Insured was selected out of a call of proposals issued in 2015 by the Link Art Center and Abandon Normal Devices (AND) in the framework of Masters & Servers. The issue #12 of the In My Computer series, published by Link Editions, the book is available now as a 500 pages color paperback and a free download pdf. Starting in 2008, Mandiberg methodically downloaded the logos of the many banks that failed during the Great Recession, and were taken over by the United States Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). During this process, these corporate visual identities were erased from the web. Except that every Saturday morning the artist downloaded the logos, preserving an otherwise lost history. Since then, more than 500 bank logos were saved on his computer as low resolution images, which he carefully recreated as vector files.

Michael Mandiberg is an interdisciplinary artist, scholar, and educator. His work traces the lines of political and symbolic power online, working on the Internet in order to comment on and or intercede in the real and poetic flows of information. He lives in, and rides his bicycle around, Brooklyn. His work lives at Mandiberg.com.