Do you want to be anonymous or famous? I want my work to be known and my name to be hidden. V.V.
“deuxpiece has invited Valentina Vetturi to present her latest work A Bit for Your Thoughts. This site-specific installation is the second part of her ongoing field-study-based work cycle, which explores the environments, motivation and philosophies of hackers. Going beyond a mere technical interest in the matter, the artist tries to find the human beings and their backgrounds behind the anonymous programs. Placed like randomly notes all over the exhibition, her short, statement-like stories deal with the core issues which are widely discussed inside the web: anonymity, cryptography, digital money, rights and the relationship to the public media.Using sound and text, Vetturi brings us close to the individuals that compose this crowd, their theoretical background and to the framework of their actions. In her sound piece, she takes and re-contextualizes fragments from a speech held by John Perry Barlow in Davos in 1996: A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. It is a manifesto advocating for the complete independence of the World Wide Web as a zone free of governmental control and censorship. Barlow’s voice from the past now seems to directly address the visitors in the exhibition space. Listening to this vision of an ideal future where people should be able to act free from any restriction and depression, we feel the striking contrast to the complexity of our actual situation in the era of google and facebook. As the third integral part of Valentina Vetturi’s installation, there are the two basic philosophical terms “think” and “do” written in ASCII-code, one of the most widely used binary text-codes for computers. These abstract terms condense human activity to its most elemental substance and bring a formerly purely digital code into the physical space.”
