The works of Crash-Stop - Playing with Hydra

The telegraph, telephone, radio, and television, as Marshall McLuhan pointed out, turned everywhere and every time into here and now. An ordinary person today with a coin and access to a telephone booth commands powers over time and space that the potentates of antiquity never dared covet. People who routinely accept such power as part of their reality think of themselves in a certain way. Like previous historical changes, such as the transformation from people who thought of themselves as subjects of royalty to people who thought of themselves as citizens of democracy, this one has started at the fringes and is working its way toward the center.

Similar to the way previous media dissolved social boundaries related to time and space, the latest computer-mediated communications media seem to dissolve boundaries of identity as well. One of the things that we "McLuhan's children" around the world who grew up with television and direct-dialing seem to be doing with our time, via Minitel in Paris and commercial computer chat services in Japan, England, and the United States, as well as intercontinental Internet zones like MUDs, is pretending to be somebody else, or even pretending to be several different people at the same time.

Howard Rheingold

The humans of the 21st century are cyborgs, indivisible from their machines and avatars, but also reflected in countless digital reflections created of them. From its beginning, information technology and cybernetics are linked to structures of control and oppression. The roots of the first computers touch slave plantations, cybernetics - that had a great influence of for both the post-modern society and the development of computer systems - was informed by eugenics and the analysis of colonialized societies. It was subsequently used to observe and catalogue the behavior of any internet users and leads to modern "A.I." surveilance tools and mechanisms, that are now used by the military and polices around the world.

Attempts to break these systems to construct novel identities and seize rooms out of the control of the hegemony date back to the early phreakers culture which utilized errors in the telephone companies hardware to escape the system. Later, hackers transfered this ideo onto digital computer systems - and also attempt to escape and question the outer structures through the development of independent systems and software, turning IT-Technology into a tool of rebellion.

The images and videos in this room are created by manipulating and rigging hard- and software that project virtualized people. The resulting art might depict a room where humans evade omnipresent digital routines by detonating the definitions set by the algorithms. They might be a commentary on our transformation into cyber-beings, or the attempt to construct a new reality independend of both the old and new codes, rules, and power relations.

The works of Crash-Stop - Digital People

an obsessive eye

We dream of death

Pinksome blues and blurs

Ghosts from the city

the modern atomic family

Self portrait

Black and blue

Dark mode

Here's looking at you kid

Five faces

You are my search history

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