In cyberpunk worlds political and economic elites use modern information and communication technologies to produce, process and distribute information that monitors and processes all aspects of life. In the worlds of the lone hacker, artificial intelligence (AI) replacing the working class and multinational corporations wielding political power, we learn about a segment of the tactical media and Do It Yourself (DIY) culture of the future through the tools of the protagonist: the conscious use of cheap digital technology to fight power, reaching the lower classes of society. The exhibition will present the less processed areas: objects and motivations of cyberpunk DIY culture focusing on its visual culture.
Life Tracking / Castle Gallery
Digital and network-based tools and services are pervading everyday life, radically transforming the way we engage with the world. In the process of digitalisation more and more dimensions of human life will become measurable, storable and therefore calculable. This is fundamentally useful, because it will provide a lot of extra information, but it requires a change in the way we approach the world and information. Just as the steam engine, the camera or electricity revolutionised experience, so the systems developed over the last 10 years have brought a new paradigm to perception, to the description of the world, to the language of representations. The only common feature of these systems is that they assign discrete values to what is happening in the world, thus providing a number of benefits to their users. These systems are not tied to a particular medial or representational schema, but are ubiquitous. The basic unit of the paradigm: the computable parameters of reality. What we might today call infrastructure services all use digital profiling to serve the consumer as satisfactorily as possible. From the obvious, such as a mobile phone tower the examples could go on and on: traffic management and control, logistics, law enforcement, shopping habits, navigation, news dissemination, contact with friends.
These are, of course, infrastructures that have been in place for decades, but the internet has made it possible to synchronise the data collected by these systems and link them to individuals. Algorithms have become an inescapable part of everyday life. The internet and smart products are expanding the range of life spaces that can be calculated. The information processed by vast server farms, which can be linked to our lifestyles creates a different aesthetic experience than ever before. It is very difficult to define the essence of this experience because it manifests itself differently for everyone. Depending on the number of digital-based services and devices used by the individual the perceptual field varies! There is no one global general interpretation, so it is important to have a reflective knowledge of the economic and security factors that intrude and shape our lives.
Concept by Gábor Áfrány, Mátyás Csiszár, Dávid Karas
