Artists Statement

Keywords: electronic waste, hard drives, collaborative art practices, data privacy, found footage, DIY data forensics

For most of us consumers electronic devices such as smartphones, tablets, notebooks, printers or digital cameras are a fundamental and indispensable parts of our daily lives. As a result of rapid growth and constant innovation, the electronic industry is the world’s fastest growing industry. Moore’s Law, a near golden law within the world of computing predicted the computer revolution in which the rate of innovation within electronics has decreased to as little as 18 months . The ‘Internet of things’ is increasingly adding electronic devices onto our shopping list. Devices, that are adding up to a 24h surveillance system tracking every aspect of our life, functioning as containers of our private data. When the devices break these black boxes are in many cases mysteries that are cheaper to replace than to repair. Broken or obsolete electronics linger a while in our shoe boxes, yet eventually their value decreases and while containing extremely toxic substances they are offered to recycling. Jennifer Garbys in her book ‘Digital Rubbish’ calls our attention to the delusion of recycling in terms of the repurposing the device with its intended function. According to her the various practices of salvage are connected to extracting value from the trash, yet each practice will produce remains which eventually become landfill. While some of our devices end up in regulated e-waste centrals in Europe, still a lot of them are dumped illegally on electronic-wastelands in developing countries where they become a serious environmental threat. At the scrap yard the value is extracted from the electronics in form of raw materials like copper and aluminum. As we know data is valuable as well, at the e-waste dump hard drives are sold in bulks representing an opportunity of extracting value in form of information.
In 2014 the artist duo KairUs visited the biggest electronic-waste dump in the world, Agbogbloshie in Accra, Ghana. After reading a number of reports of recovered files from hard drives acquired at e-waste dumps, we bought 22 hard drives. Would these hard drives actually contain data that could be abused? In February 2015 we started an AMRO (art meets radical openness) research lab in collaboration with servus.at approaching these hard drives with a number of questions. Can data be recovered from these hard drives? What do we expect to find and what do we actually find on the hard drives? What kind of questions rise in terms of privacy and ownership of the data? What ethical issues are we confronted with when treating the data as found footage in art works? To this date we have without special expertise recovered data from five of the hard drives. The remaining hard drives are to be processed with the help of professionals at ‘Datarescue Austria’. In May 2015, for an extended weekend, we have invited 6 international and 2 local artist for an ArtLab to work with us using the recovered data as found footage. Each artist will be provided in advance with the data from a recovered hard drive. During the weekend ideas are discussed with an emphasis on our research questions and prototypes will be developed. A final presentation of artworks will be organized during the ‘Art Meets Radical Openness’ -festival 2016. At ISEA 2015 we would like to present our work-in-progress to open a wider discussion on practices of saving and deleting with a focus on the materiality of data storage.

Link to research blog: research.radical-openness.org (videos, texts, images, work in progress). Link to Blog post from Agbogbloshie e-waste dump: kairus.org/082014-artist-in-residence-agbogbloshie-ewaste-dump

KairUs (Linz, Austria) is a collective of two artists Linda Kronman (Finland) and Andreas Zingerle (Austria). They explore topics such as vulnerabilities in IoT devices, corporatization of city governance in Smart Cities and citizen sensitive projects in which technology is used to reclaim control of our living environments. Their practice based research is closely intertwined with their artistic production, adopting methodologies used by anthropologists and sociologist, their artworks are often informed by archival research, participation observations and field research. Besides the artworks they publish academic research papers and open access publications to contextualize their artworks to wider discourses such as data privacy & security, activism & hacking culture, disruptive art practices, electronic waste and materiality of the internet. kairus.org

• Linda Kronman is a media artist and designer. She is currently a PhD candidate at University of Bergen in the Machine Vision project. She holds a MA in New Media from Aalto University, Finland (2010). In her artistic work she explores methods of interactive and transmedial storytelling, visualizing data and creative activism. She is part of the artist duo KairUs and has been producing art together with Andreas Zingerle since 2010. Their artistic research topics includes surveillance, smart cities, IoT, cybercrime, online fraud, electronic waste and machine vision. Together they have edited the books Behind the Smart World (2016) and Internet of Other People’s Things (2018), both open access publication bringing together critical perspectives on everyday use of technology focusing on artistic research and tacit knowledge that is produced through cultures of making, hacking, and reverse engineering. She has organized several participatory workshops, taught at Woosong University, Daejong, South Korea (2017-2018) and presented her work at international exhibitions and conferences including Moscow Young Arts Biennale, Siggraph ASIA, WRO Biennial, ISEA, ELO and Ars Electronica.
• Andreas Zingerle is a media artist from Austria. He received his PhD from the University of Art and Design Linz (Austria) researching topics such as Internet crime, fraud and scam, vigilante counter-movements and anti-fraud activism. He implements social engineering strategies that emerge in his research into interactive narratives, artistic installations, data visualizations and creative media competence trainings. In the last years he worked on several installations exploring a creative misuse of technology and alternative ways of Human Computer Interaction. Since 2004 he takes part in international conferences and exhibitions, among others Ars Electronica, ISEA, Aksioma, Siggraph, Japan Media Arts Festival, File, WRO Biennial.
• Ushi Reiter studied graphic and design at the Kunstuniverstät Linz. As artist and project developer with a special interesst in net.activism and audio-visual communication she has been collaborating with different groups and artists since 1998. From 2005 till 2017 Reiter run the non-profit cultural backbone organisation servus.at/Kunst & Kultur im Netz. She continues to research Free/Libre/Open Source Software in the frame of cultural production and art as well as work on conceptual and performative setups. She is one of the main founder of Art Meets Radical Openness and since 2018 still active at the board of the association. Currently she works for the architekturforum oberösterreich. [source: esc.mur.at]