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<div class="ce_text block" id="datum_headline"> <span
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href="http://www.kunsthalle-d%FCsseldorf.de/index.php?id=351">http://www.kunsthalle-düsseldorf.de/index.php?id=351</a><br>
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5 April – 10 August 2014</span><br>
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<h1>Smart New World</h1>
<strong>Xavier Cha (US), Simon Denny (1982, NZ), Aleksandra
Domanović (1981, SI), Omer Fast (1972, IL), Christoph
Faulhaber (1972, D), Kenneth Goldsmith (1961, US),
International Necronautical Society,</strong> </div>
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<div class="ce_text block"> <strong> Korpys/Löffler
(1966/1963, D), Trevor Paglen (1974, US), Laura Poitras
(1964, US), Tabor Robak (1986, US), Santiago Sierra (1966,
ES), Taryn Simon (1975, US)</strong><br>
<br>
The truth is: Industrial capitalism is transforming itself
into digital capitalism. That changes things.[1] The world
is ruled by the binary code. The upheaval in the fields of </div>
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<div class="ce_text hyphenate block"> information and
communications technology revolutionised the
business world and society.[2] What does it mean to be
an individual in the information society? An
information society is always also a surveillance
society. It is not the information that yields the
surveillance, the surveillance yields the
information: As soon as human utterances and
emotions become quantifiable, they are recorded in
order to optimise somewhere something economic,
bureaucratic or ideological.[3] Since Edward Snowden
uncovered the wide-spread surveillance carried out
the American National Security Agency at the
latest, the post-privacy thinker is certain of one
thing: The private sphere is dead, the NSA solely made
it official.[4] Powerful computers sometimes know
more about us than we do. The storage capability of
these systems increases every year, consistently, by
orders of magnitude. It's getting to the point where
you don't have to have done anything wrong, you just
eventually have to fall under suspicion from
somebody, even if it's by a wrong call, and then they can
use the system to go back in time and scrutinize every
decision you've ever made, every friend you've ever
discussed something with, and attack you on that
basis to sort of derive suspicion from an innocent
life and paint anyone in the context of a
wrong-doer.[5] Three letters, most experts are agreed,
will play a decisive role in the future of modern
warfare: NCW for Network Centric Warfare. Behind this
designation lie networks that link military units to
each other and to their commanders—thus offering them
the possibility of rapid, flexible and
asymmetrical warfare. The goal has been
unambiguously formulated: the attainment of
information superiority over the enemy.[6] As a
piece of business jargon, and even more so as an
invocation of coming disruption, the term Big Data
has
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<div class="ce_text hyphenate block"> quickly grown
tiresome. But there is no denying the vast
increase in the range and depth of information
that’s routinely captured about how we behave,
and the new kinds of analysis that this enables. By
one estimate, more than 98 percent of the world’s
information is now stored digitally, and the
volume of that data has quadrupled since 2007.
Ordinary people at work and </div>
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at home generate much of this data, by sending
e-mails, browsing the Internet, using social media,
working on crowd-sourced projects, and more—and in
doing so they have unwittingly helped launch a grand
new societal project. We are in the midst of a great
infrastructure project that in some ways rivals
those of the past, from Roman aqueducts to the
Enlightenment’s Encyclopédie.[7] The digital
reflection of today’s person is fragmented into
hundreds of individual parts.[8] Knowledge on the
Internet is dynamic. It is fleeting. It is volatile.
It changes its shape every day. We know little about its
sources, the interests standing behind it and its
reliability.[9] The result is the growth of a cut,
copy and paste-culture without true appropriation
of the contents.[10] Information wants to be free.
Information also wants to be expensive.
Information wants to be free because it has become
so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine – too
cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it
can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient.
That tension will not go away.[11]
<p> </p>
The <em>Smart New World</em> exhibition focuses on
digitalization – the dissolution and
transformation of analogue information into
digital codes for the purpose of storing and
processing them – and the radically fundamental
changes it has brought about on society. The invited
artists not only find inspiration for their
pictorial worlds in the rapid developments <br>
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<div class="ce_text hyphenate block"> in the field of
digital technology, but they above all also
reflect upon their cultural, social, and
political dimensions.
<p>Their diverse pieces likewise deal
perceptively, critically, and humorously
with the possibilities, visions and also
dangers of digitalization. In the process,
they examine the effects of economic and state
censorship, which constitute</p>
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<div class="ce_text hyphenate block"> an attack on
democratic knowledge production and the private
sphere of each and every
<p>individual, as well as the impact of the
Internet on our structures of thinking and
knowing. All of the works in the exhibition
have an investigative potential in common.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The <strong>International Necronautical
Society (INS), </strong>a<strong> </strong>neo-avant-garde,</p>
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stringently hierarchically organized network of
artists, writers and philosophers, has developed a
complex admission procedure for the exhibition.
Every visitor must sign a consumer contract on the
basis of the INS’s philosophical doctrine. Signing
this declaration, which is based on the conditions
of present-day digital-capitalism, is absolutely
required in order to visit the exhibition. <strong>Christoph
Faulhaber’s</strong> filmic artist biography tells
among other things about his uncomfortable and
provocative performances with which he
demonstrates the mechanics of state-run
surveillance apparatuses while it was the artist
duo <strong>Korpys/Löffler</strong> themselves, who
employed intelligence-gathering methods in
conjunction with their observation and
documentation of the German Intelligence Service’s
new Berlin headquarters. The films of <strong>Omer Fast</strong>
and <strong>Santiago Sierra</strong> take very
different but equally effective approaches in
examining the digitally-controlled drone missions
that have come to play a defining role in modern
warfare. The largely unknown and invisible and yet
huge and physically tangible components of the
American military and intelligence services such as
buildings and satellites are at the heart of <strong>Trevor
Paglen’s</strong> comprehensively researched
works. <strong>Laura Poitras</strong>, who along with <a
href="http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Greenwald">Glenn
Greenwald</a> was the first person to have had access
to the global surveillance and espionage documents
made available by <a
href="http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden">Edward
Snowden</a>, combines film material documenting
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<div class="ce_text hyphenate block"> of the NSA
surveillance warehouse in Bluffdale, Utah over
the course of several years. For his part, the
writer <strong>Kenneth Goldsmith</strong> takes
the utopian potential of the Internet
seriously and is active on behalf of freedom of
information and educational equality by
declaring privatized information to be
public property. At the same time he calls
attention to the sheer </div>
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<div class="ce_text hyphenate block"> inexhaustible
flood of digital data that is virtually
impossible to get under control. The artist <strong>Taryn
Simon</strong> in turn subjects the flood of
Internet images to a conceptual intervention
which clearly shows that search engines are
never “neutral” and that they determine our
imagination to a considerable extent. <strong>Aleksandra
Domanović</strong> likewise reveals how the
keyword-based </div>
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<div class="ce_text hyphenate block"> acquisition of
knowledge influences our thought and
perception, and in a performance accompanying
the exhibition <strong>Xavier Cha</strong>
translates the often compulsive use of digital
media into a choreography. <strong>Tabor Robak</strong>
presents advertising’s seductive strategies by
means of the possibilities of digital imaging.
<strong>Simon Denny</strong>, finally, turns
hardware into sculpture in his contribution to
the exhibition, broaching the theme of the
significance of technical development,
communications and interface. His massive
block of squashed television sets and analogue
television images on printed canvases create
a link both visually and contentually to the
expansive black box in the entrance area in which
the INS archives the visitors’ signatures it
collected: This black box is part of a system that
only makes communications and the transfer of
information possible via the interface,
without making the internal processes visible.
<p> </p>
<p><span style="font-size: 9px;"><a
href="http://www.kunsthalle-d%C3%BCsseldorf.de/#_ftnref1">[1]</a>
<a
href="http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-14838490.html">www.
spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-14838490.html</a>
<em> </em></span></p>
<div>
<p><span style="font-size: 9px;"><a
href="http://www.kunsthalle-d%C3%BCsseldorf.de/#_ftnref2">[2]</a>
<a
href="http://www.fes.de/aktuell/documents%202013/130215_Digitaler_Kapitalismus.pdf">http://
www.fes.de/aktuell/documents%202013/
130215_Digitaler_Kapitalismus.pdf</a> </span></p>
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<p><span style="font-size: 9px;"><a
href="http://www.kunsthalle-d%C3%BCsseldorf.de/#_ftnref3">[3]</a>
<a
href="http://irights.info/eine-informationsgesellschaft-ist-immer-eine-uberwachungsgesellschaft">http://
irights.info/
eine-informationsgesellschaft-ist-immer-eine-uberwachungsgesellschaft</a>
</span></p>
</div>
<div>
<p><span style="font-size: 9px;"><a
href="http://www.kunsthalle-d%C3%BCsseldorf.de/#_ftnref4">[4]</a>
<a
href="http://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/leben/gesellschaft/Die-PostPrivacyBewegung/story/18211611?track">http://
www.tagesanzeiger.ch/leben/gesellschaft/
Die-PostPrivacyBewegung/story/18211611?
track</a> </span></p>
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<p><span style="font-size: 9px;"><a
href="http://www.kunsthalle-d%C3%BCsseldorf.de/#_ftnref5">[5]</a>
<a
href="http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/06/top-spying-experts-even-good-people-should-oppose-spying-because-if-someone-in-government-takes-a-dislike-to-you-the-surveillance-can-be-used-to-frame-you.html">http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/06/top-spying-experts-even-good-people-should-oppose-spying-because-if-someone-in-government-takes-a-dislike-to-you-the-surveillance-can-be-used-to-frame-you.html</a>
</span></p>
</div>
<div>
<p><span style="font-size: 9px;"><a
href="http://www.kunsthalle-d%C3%BCsseldorf.de/#_ftnref6">[6]</a>
<a
href="http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/armeen-der-zukunft-technologien-und-taktik-fuer-den-krieg-von-morgen-a-846443.html">http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/armeen-der-zukunft-technologien-und-taktik-fuer-den-krieg-von-morgen-a-846443.html</a>
</span></p>
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<p><span style="font-size: 9px;"><a
href="http://www.kunsthalle-d%C3%BCsseldorf.de/#_ftnref7">[7]</a>
<a
href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/12/theyre-watching-you-at-work/354681/">http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/12/theyre-watching-you-at-work/354681/</a>
</span></p>
</div>
<div>
<p><span style="font-size: 9px;"><a
href="http://www.kunsthalle-d%C3%BCsseldorf.de/#_ftnref8">[8]</a>
<a
href="http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/identitaet-im-netz-das-digitale-ich-liegt-in-scherben-a-567899.html">http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/identitaet-im-netz-das-digitale-ich-liegt-in-scherben-a-567899.html</a>
</span></p>
</div>
<div>
<p><span style="font-size: 9px;"><a
href="http://www.kunsthalle-d%C3%BCsseldorf.de/#_ftnref9">[9]</a>
<a
href="http://www.julius-leber-forum.de/projekte/digitale-oeffentlichkeit/2012/06-wissen-der-welt.html?np_all=1">http://www.julius-leber-forum.de/projekte/digitale-oeffentlichkeit/2012/06-wissen-der-welt.html?np_all=1</a>
</span></p>
</div>
</div>
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<div>
<p><span style="font-size: 9px;"><a
href="http://www.kunsthalle-d%C3%BCsseldorf.de/#_ftnref10">[10]</a>
<a
href="http://www.zeit.de/studium/hochschule/2011-05/lehre-google">http://www.zeit.de/studium/hochschule/2011-05/lehre-google</a>
</span></p>
</div>
<div>
<p><span style="font-size: 9px;"><a
href="http://www.kunsthalle-d%C3%BCsseldorf.de/#_ftnref11">[11]</a>
<a
href="http://www.librarianoffortune.com/librarian_of_fortune/2011/08/information-wants-to-be-free-or-expensive.html">http://www.librarianoffortune.com/librarian_of_fortune/2011/08/information-wants-to-be-free-or-expensive.html</a>
</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 9px;">[last accessed: 4
March 2014]</span></p>
<p> </p>
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