request for funding -- digital immortality []

From the second half of the 20th century musea have taken an active role in initiating artworks that contribute to a general understanding of the audience of the cultural and social context, and even provide a moral reference with respect to the major issues of our time, e.g. the dominance of materialism and the loss of individual autonomy and personal experience in an increasingly institutionalized society. This has led to a transformation of the artwork from a static entity to be displayed for a passive audience to the notion of the artwork as performance inviting the active participation of the audience in a museal context. As documented in reference [1], new media played an increasingly important role in this transformation of our conception of artworks!

In our current time frame, the second decade of the 21th century, we are confronted by many issues, among which environmental hazards, as well as the increasingly pervasive use of (big!) data that threatens to govern our behavior in both the domains of health and consumption, leading to a potential loss of autonomy for the individual!

From this background we wish to invite the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam to get involved in funding our project THE CASE AGAINST FACEBOOK, which exemplifies our struggle to create a digital identity, fighting against the forces of the giants that more and more control our personal data. Whereas we also have taken initiatives to obtain crowdfunding as a way to invoke the participation of the general audience, we have the opinion that the involvement and support of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam will help us to articulate the goals for our project, of which we conceive primarily as an artwork / performance for which winning or loosing is altogether irrelevant, and which may eventually lead to a more effective public exposure of our endeavors, for example in the form of an exhibit in the museum space, giving expression to our experience, the choices to be made, and even challenging the audience to actively participate in our "struggle for digital life", by engaging with our exhibited materials and, why not, playing (serious) games!

To give somewhat more background to our art project THE CASE AGAINST FACEBOOK, we wish to emphasize that it is part of a large number of projects, in cooperation with others, both artists and intellectuals, that aim at creating digital identity using storytelling, new media, games and (increasingly) the ubiquitous social media, such as (indeed) facebook, that have undeniably a great impact on what we may call the "physics" (that is forces of repulsion and attraction) of our social life, see reference [2]. Ultimately our project must lead to what we have called "digital immortality" for which we have to engage in a battle against the (evil?) forces of those governing big data, another factor that, as we have indicated before) may influence the course of our lives dramatically, in such a way that it motivates our attempt to draw the public's attention by means of an artwork, to be understood as a performance, yet simultaneously inviting an aesthetic appraisal!

To conclude, in short, we wish to invite the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, to activily support our project THE CASE AGAINST FACEBOOK, financially as well as in terms of guidance for art-wise fruitful directions, to establish our role of providing a moral reference for how to deal with (big) data while maintaining our individual identity and autonomy, possibly leading to an exhibit, presenting our activity explicitly as (contemporary) art performance, together with our collaborators from the Terragon Broedplaats, in a museal context!

23/1/2017

references

1. Susan Morris, MUSEUMS & NEW MEDIA ART (2001), research report The Rockefeller Foundation
2. A. Eliens, topical media & game development (2009), online: http://media.eliens.net

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