User:Max/rwm/3works50words

DESCRIBING 3 WORKS (WHAT HOW WHY)

MOSTLY CLOUDY

The installation consists of several computer screens. Some seem to be white and do not reveal their content until you put glasses on. After that you can see clouds flying over different cities. If you take a closer look you can see that these clouds are actually data centers.

Because the locations of the data centers were mostly hidden by the Cloud giants (Google, Amazon, Apple…) research was a major part in this work. I then looked for the data centers on maps services, cut them out and placed them in an identical scale over a city.

"The Cloud" is maybe one of the most misleading metaphors in computer history. By visualizing the data centers I want to restore the gone(missing?) materiality of the computer and make the people aware that there is still a physical place for their data.

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INVISIBLE

"Invisible" is a homage to the scrollbar which is(exists?) since the very beginning of graphical user interfaces. It’s a small website that seems to be empty and pure white. When you start hovering the website with your cursor scrollbars become visible and hide again.

In this work I play with the fact that the scrollbar by default is not visible for the user anymore when he is not scrolling. When the user hovers parts of the website he triggers scrolling, the computer system reacts on this and makes the scrollbars visible.

There is a big trend in user interface design to make the GUI look more tidy and clean. Software manufacturer declare things as unimportant and hide them (and sometimes remove them). Today the scrollbar, tomorrow buttons followed by urls. I want to question this.

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VERSIONS OF THE PAST

The photographs of the work "Versions Of The Past", based on "looking into the past" pictures, (a trend on the internet where people put old photos in the same modern space then take a new picture) leads the viewer through the digital past. Instead of black and white architecture and old street lamps, there are the monochromatic beginnings of the Mac OS interface.

By exploring Mac OS 1 I noticed that there are strong similarities to the actual version of OS X. I startet taking screenshots of significant parts of the software and printed them out in style of "looking into the past" pictures. Then I joined the two periods of times together in one photograph.

Whoever closes his eyes to the past is blind for the present (Richard von Weizsäcker). Structures, metaphors and symbols of the graphical user interface beginnings have not changed over about 30 years. Thats an interesting fact I wanted to capture in photographs.