Aram Bartholl

Description

As a media artist, Aram Bartholl has grappled with the social and political implications of digitalisation since the early days. In his time as Real Research Fellow at the Free Art and Technology Lab, for example, he supported the campaign for open licenses and fought against copyright monopolies and patents. His work Dead Drops was genuinely subversive, using publicly accessible USB drives cemented into a brick wall to provide a free, anonymous, chance infrastructure for unmonitored file-sharing. Data retention? My ass!
In terms of methodology and visual vocabulary, Bartholl’s practice is therefore, despite all its digitality, a child of street art: icons, pictograms and pictorial jokes – key means of visual communication in both spheres – form the link between these two embattled public spaces. Bartholl uses these means to create sculptural projects – and not merely in Münster. By taking the pins that mark a search location on a digital map, for example, or the emojis we use in messaging apps, and then placing them in real urban spaces, Bartholl references the referential nature of these small reference points. This is fine,  his work for the Urban Art Biennale 2024, forms a neat cultural-historical hyperlink to the Völklingen Ironworks: a flame not only provides the inspiration for the fire emoji, signifying something very attractive and exciting, but also refers to the beginnings of the industrial age, which ultimately led to the digital systems and platforms that today seem such a natural part of our world. Fire!

Robert Kaltenhäuser