Temporary Services
Wednesday, 11 May 2011
Work from Designated Drivers
“For Designated Drivers, we invited an international selection of twenty people and groups to each fill one four-gigabyte USB flash drive with material of their choosing. These drives will then be presented in exhibition spaces, attached to wall-mounted retractable laundry lines. Visitors will be able to load their own drives or laptops (or use a host computer and CDrs or DVDrs) with any of the material they would like from each of the flash drives.
The drives include images, films, audio, programs, and many publications worth of writing and graphic design. File types include: MP3, JPEG, PNG, AIFF, TIFF, PSD, WORD DOCs, PPT, MPEG, PDF, AVI,and more. The participants have included mountains of material – often at higher resolution than is commonly seen on a personal website, and in many cases material that is not duplicated online at all. Some participants have used this opportunity to present a few recent projects with great depth, while others have chosen to survey their entire creative output over more than a decade.
The contents of the flash drives in Designated Drivers are deliberately not available online from one centralized location. We want you to get out of your house. We want you to mingle, in person, with others and talk about which files look interesting to transfer and which might be more to someone else’s liking. We want to make file sharing a bit more physical, social and special again – the way that tape traders in the 1980s would duplicate music onto cassette for another another and mail amazing obscurities to each other all over the world. We also recall those who linked their VCRs together to share obscure films and concert footage. Technology has come a long way, and today we can make these exchanges without a quality loss with each generation that gets removed from the original. We can fit more copies into ever smaller packages. But we question our own growing dependence on the internet as a means of detached information exchange and want to try another approach.
The following people are participating:
Lisa Anne Auerbach
Cara Baldwin
Matt Bua
Cake and Eat It Collective
Electronic Disturbance Theater/b.a.n.g. lab, Brett Stalbaum, Micha Cárdenas, Amy Sara Carroll, Elle Mehrmand, and Ricardo Dominguez: www.thing.net/~rdom & bang.calit2.net
Dan Gleason
Ryan Griffis & Sarah Ross
Terence Hannum
Hideous Beast
IC-98
Tim Ivison
Gregory Jacobsen
Vladan Jeremic & Rena Raedle
Tim Kerr
Loud Objects
Alexis O’Hara
Rob Ray
Deborah Stratman
Adam Trowbridge & Jessica Westbrook
You Are Here ” –Temporary Services