For TO THE SQUARE 2
Drawings on banners and leaflets on Lasipalatsi Square.
Googleheim is a museum that collects artistic practices which have emerged during popular revolutionary waves and protests over the last decade. The collections show stuff artists and activists have disseminated through online social networks as acts of resistance against, and provocations directed at various political regimes.
The museum acquires its collection from companies that trade in statistics and information collected from online social networks. Information packages are on offer for any taste and use, yet are mainly designed for political purposes and marketing campaigns. For example, an election candidate can acquire localized information packages in order to enrich and elaborate a political speech or election campaign – so as best to respond to the most popular issues being discussed on social networks in that particular area. The Googleheim Museum selects the most thrilling and “dangerous” data packages for display.
In the world of the Googleheim Museum, exposed in galleries publicly visible from all over the world, previously politically-relevant acts and demands lose their politicality… There is no easier way to absorb critical and antagonistic practices.
What are the counter-strategies that open up ways to avoid the totalizing enormity of the digital archives of the Googleheim Museum? Can the neutralizing power of Googleheim be confronted with forms of organizing and communicating beyond digital networks? Networks that can’t be traced and spied on over satellite, radio-waves or from drones? How can one produce a revolutionary artistic practice that is resistant to becoming ice-cream from the Googleheim Museum’s deep-freeze?
Starting with the Googleheim museum allegory, Jeremić & Rädle are mapping the set of issues around digital archives, proprietary social spaces, the co-option of social practices, museology and current conflicts in (Finnish) society. Their primary media are drawings, textile banners and leaflets mounted and distributed on Lasipalatsi Square.
