Data Shop by Varvara and Mar

Data Shop is a shop-like installation, which speculates with the idea having a shop that sells, and at the same time, stores personal data. The artists have put on the pen drives their personal data extracted from Facebook, Google Takeout, Visa and Mastercard, Fitbit, Estonian ID-card, and surveilled themselves with a video camera for 24h. The pen drives were carefully canned and labeled accordingly as the real products.

For the Pixelache festival will be released a new product range with the personal data from Booking.com, Paypal, and Netflix.

The aim is to bring up the topic of data market that is exponentially growing and how users are constantly exploited. Our data is collected, used, sold, stolen and traded constantly. On one hand, Data Shop confronts the audience with the questions about the value of personal data, and on another, the value of an artwork and the relation between them.

The cans are definitely a hint to Andy Warhol’s Campbell Soup, whose work was an attempt to convert an artwork to a product. Also the personal data has a connection to Piero Manzoni’s work Artist’s Shit from 1961. Manzoni explained the content of art piece as his personal DNA. Likewise with Data Shop contains artists digital DNA. Personal data can be seen as residual products of data bodies of the contemporary time.

 

/// DRIES DEPOORTER - Quick Fix /// VARVARA AND MAR - Data Shop /// BIOSIGNALS - Audio Archive /// HEYON HAN - Instant Materialisms /// Solu, Luotsikatu 13, 00160 Helsinki Finland, Katajanokka /// 20.5 - 26.5 /// Vernissage 20.5. at 17:00 // Opening hours: Tue - Thu 14:00-18:00 Fri - Sat 10:00-18:00 Sun 13:00-17:00 //

/// VARVARA AND MAR /// Data Canning Workshop /// Solu, Luotsikatu 13, 00160 Helsinki Finland  , Katajanokka /// 25.05. /// 10:00 - 14:30 ///