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Wk 11 - Artist - Eva and Franco Mattes

  • Kennedy Nguyen
  • Aug 10, 2017
  • 2 min read

Eva and Franco Mattes

About the Artist

Eva and Franco Mattes (both born in Italy in 1976) are a duo of artists based in New York City. Since meeting in Berlin in 1994, they have never separated. Operating under the pseudonym 0100101110101101.org, they are counted among the pioneers of the Net Art movement and are renowned for their subversion of public media. They produce art involving the ethical and political issues arising from the inception of the Internet. The work investigates the fabrication of situations, where fact and fiction merge into one. They are based in Brooklyn, New York, but also travel frequently throughout Europe and the United States.

Analysis

In art, abstraction usually means taking a nonobjective approach to sculpture, painting and photography. In their 2015 exhibition, Eva and Franco Mattes dealed with something even more intangible: images, videos and information on the Internet that have disappeared completely at the hands of “content moderators.”

An avatar of a “content moderator” discussing a case of wiping material from the Internet.

Three short color videos, shown on monitors that are arranged in the gallery like sculptural kiosks, tell the stories of current and former content moderators. Some are hired by Internet companies like Vimeo to manage its content; others work as independent contractors for anonymous “requesters,” which could even be governments. In the videos (part of a yearlong project titled “Dark Content”), the unidentified subjects appear as avatars with computerized voices, reflecting their shadowy existence within Internet culture.

Based all over the world, these workers, are virtually invisible, like the low-paid employees who scan books for Google. But they are everywhere, working in office cubicles or next to you in a Starbucks. The content they’ve erased ranges from the tame (ordered up by the Mormon Church) to the gruesome (suicides and “fringe fetish” pornography) and the political (images of Osama bin Laden and videos of imams preaching). Most of those interviewed in the videos argue that they are not censoring content but meeting “criteria” set up by their requesters and Internet “community standards.”

In many ways the subjects here are the opposite of artists who create (something like original) content and seek visibility. Yet, as this exhibition suggests, content moderators have a significant cultural impact. It’s just that, like many aspects of digital culture, their labor and contributions remain hidden and abstract.

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©2017 by Kennedy's House of Art.

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