Breadcrumbs
Aram Bartholl

©Friso Gentsch
He puts socially relevant topics such as surveillance, data security and technology dependency up for discussion by translating the gaps, contradictions and absurdities of our everyday digital lives into spatial settings. On the one hand, this results in sometimes grotesque confrontations with his own ignorance of a globally active platform capitalism; on the other, he also uses the potential of public space to renegotiate network activities as political forms of participation on an analog level. In this way, Aram Bartholl's works initiate a performative process that enables individual action to be understood again within a collective and self-determined network discourse. Formally and conceptually, he draws on the aesthetics, codes and communication patterns used by users on YouTube, Instagram or in video games in his artistic works. The targeted contextualization visualizes the logics of the Internet and at the same time subverts them on the basis of their own exploitation strategies.