Aram Bartoll
Aram Bartholl (1972) is a media and concepual artist based in Berlin. Bartoll was born in Bremen and studied at the University of the Arts Berlin.
He was a member of the Free Art and Technology Lab a.k.a. F.A.T. Lab web initiative, founded by Evan Roth and James Powderly, from 2009 until its dissolution in 2015. Map (2006-)—the Google Maps pin presented as a large-scale installation in cities in-cluding Taipei, Berlin Arles, Tallinn, and Kassel—drew international attention, as did the ongoing Dead Drops project, which began in 2010. Dead Drops—USB sticks cemented into masonry—has initiated local data exchanges in more than 1400 locations so far.
Bartholl has exhibited at MoMA Museum of Modern Art NY, Skulptur Projekte Münster, Palais de Tokyo, Hamburger Bahnhof, Seoul Museum of Art and the Thailand Biennale among other as well as conducting countless workshops, talks and performances internationally. Aram Bartholl , he lives and works in Berlin.
Aram Bartholl uses sculptural interventions, installations, and performative workshops to question our engagement with media and with public economies linked to social networks, online platforms, and digital dissemination strategies. He addresses socially relevant topics, including surveillance, data privacy and technology dependence, through his work by transferring the gaps, contradictions, and absurdities of our everyday digital lives to physical settings. The effect is twofold. The works create an at-times bizarre confrontation with our own ignorance of globally active platform capitalism, and they renegotiate network activities as political forms of participation on an analog level using the potential of public space. Bartholl thus initiates a performative process to catalyze a renewed understanding of individual action within a collective and self-determined network discourse. Conceptually and technically, he uses the same aesthetics, codes, and communication patterns that users are familiar with from YouTube, Instagram, and video games. A purposeful contextualization employs the logic of the Internet while at the same time undermining it with individual strategies. (2020)
