By Unnur Andrea Einarsdóttir

Darknet Spa is a guided meditation through anonymous internet browsing on the Dark Web. The Dark Web is that part of the internet that operates outside the fringes of digital society, a lawless, virtual land where you are free to roam without government regulation or corporate intervention. The terms ‘surface web’, ‘deep web’, and ‘dark web are often used to illustrate the “geographics” of the internet and to explain the different levels of accessibility and encryption. Freud ́s model of the human mind categorises three levels of consciousness: the conscious, subconscious, and unconscious, relating to how easily we can access  stored knowledge and memories.  From the comfort of your own home, the participants are offered to leave their body and temporarily merge into the physical infrastructures of our global networks. Can we see a glimpse of ourselves when looking into the darker pits of our collective psyche? What responsibility do we place on our technologies and can they be a mirror that reflects back to us the broken parts of our society? In a hyper- digitalized society, is the physical body becoming more and more irrelevant?

Unnur Andrea Einarsdóttir

Unnur Andrea Einarsdóttir (IS/NO) is an Icelandic visual artist and musician. Her work explores our relationship with technology and the utopian and dystopian manifestations of our digital present. It investigates the divide between our virtual lives and physical bodies, and how global networks influence our identities, societies and collective perception of reality. Unnur Andrea works mainly with video, performance, and installation, often seeking to create an immersive and encompassing experience for the viewer. As a singer and music producer, the sonic elements remain an important and central factor in most of her work.

www.unnurandrea.net

 

By Anja Malec

No Strings Attached – A Profound Doubt explores the heavy use of algorithms in self-help apps and softwares found online. If choosing the right partner is the most crucial decision in life, then love is an essential key to human happiness. No Strings Attached haunts with our mental state when caught up fighting for perfection in love-life. Exploiting popular technological trends, the artwork is yet another tool to reassure and soothe our deeply human insecurities when seeking love. Ironically, by offering a set of dysfunctional self-help tools, the artwork haunts your dating life.

Anja Malec

Anja Malec (HR/NO) works in video, audio/visual performance, and installation, moving from the static object toward the interactive installations and engagement of the audience with work. The internet and media culture define Malec’s art practice. Through artistic practice, she explores the phenomenon of human flaws as a side effect of the digital lifestyle or the ones emphasized by digitalization. She takes a creative and playful approach to represent this somewhat complicated social state of mind. Anja Malec graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Croatia, and gained a BA in animation from Volda University College, Norway.
www.anjamalec.com

Anne Cecilie Caroline Brunborg Lie

Digital ecologies are inextricably linked to the extraction of the Earth, human and non-human bodies. Anne Cecilie Lie’s Intersected Waterbodies is an online continuation of her artistic research project that reflects on the ethical and ecological consequences of the deep-sea mining industry.

Intersected Waterbodies exhibited at Meta.Morf took Trondheim as its reference point with its long history of digging deep into the landscape. Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and other actors are presently exploring potential extraction below the Norwegian seabed to, allegedly, create an ethical and sustainable technological future. But can a truly just future rise from excavating the place from which all life on Earth most likely originated?

The online iteration of Intersected Waterbodies takes a critical look at the work’s own physical and digital manifestation. Digital ecologies pose new ways of worlding worlds beyond the confines of physical restraints. But what real-life consequences does the material and energy used to create this online artwork have on the already painfully excavated earth surfaces, seafloor, and exploited labour?

The Internet, the energy to run it, and its resulting economic and power structures could be perceived as intangible materials, existing out of periphery, out of mind. Yet they have profound impact on humans and non-humans alike. Waterbodies Intersected is chipping away at the medium of which the artwork itself is made of.

Anne Cecilie Caroline Brunborg Lie
Through her work, Anne Cecilie Lie (1983, NO) examines how to create in the Anthropocene, with its accompanying philosophical and ethical questions, as well as for possible futures. She points out blind spots in social and built structures and proposes new alternatives for co-existence to the human-centric/exceptional. Site-specificity and cross-pollination are intrinsic to her work, inspired by Donna Haraway’s theories of tentacular thinking, based on feministic, post-colonial, scientific and science fabulating approaches to collaborative futures with humans and non-humans alike. Object-Oriented Ontology and Timothy Morton’s concept of Dark Ecology are also significant influences, where ecology includes all life and “non-life” such as technologies.

http://www.annececilielie.com