DEADARTIST.ME

Abstract

On 6 May 2016, the web application deadartist.me was released. Although not disclosed to the users, it was the first component of an art project devised to experiment with data collection procedures and their social implications. The web app was conceived as a data collection performance that reenacted typical online practices. The data it generated were later presented as an installation containing several visualizations as traces of the app’s activity. Additionally, a live performance was held in which we, the artists, manually anonymized data rows out of the database tables. This performance took place in the project’s premiere, in the context of the collective exhibition Foreign Objects held in 2016 in Aalborg, Denmark, at Nordkraft, a cultural venue in the city’s harbor area. The installation was also later shown in 2017 at Ars Electronica, based in Linz, Austria, at the PostCity venue.