/Interview/ The brains behind : Dead Drops

Berlin-based artist Aram Bartholl has been embedding USB sticks in walls in New York to create an offline filesharing network, with the locations of the “dead drops” posted online. Tanya Combrinck finds out why

.net: What made you decide to do this?

AB: It evolved from a series of projects. I find it very interesting to mix up the digital world and the physical world, and I have undertaken a couple of other urban interventions where I placed objects from the digital space in the street. This project has this “spy” theme, so it’s about hidden treasures and things like that. I’m interested in the vision of people holding their laptops to a wall and embedding data literally in the wall, in concrete. We are living in a time of super-connectivity, and I like the idea of breaking it down to a more simple way of connecting. I like this idea of infiltrating the city itself with data.