Shell Performance

Installation / Software Art Shell Performance is a partially sexually explicit software art installation from 2016. As part of the Art Meets Radical Openness exhibition 2016 in Linz, Austria, Shell Performance is a software art installation. A program running independently on three different machines is constantly analyzing the content of three hard drives that were found on an e-waste dump in Ghana by the KairUs art collective. The software art installation takes its visual aesthetics from ASCII art which constantly reassembles itself based on the content of three different hard drives. The hard drives (which once belonged to the personal computers of unidentified individuals) contain mainstream pornographic images, commercial music as MP3 files as well as personal (sometimes highly sensitive) textual and graphic material,- the data that is fed into the algorithm that exposes it in a completely textual, thus codified way. The software working itself through the massive amounts of data creates a performative space: the computer performs the software on the basis of the hard drives contents – and the effort is visible as the outcome on the TV screens.

Reiche Martin