Presented at
Still Hacking Anyway (SHA2017),
Aug. 7, 2017, 8:15 p.m.
(60 minutes)
How does internet influence your life?
This lecture will be about my ongoing project Life Needs Internet (2012-2017) which documents digital culture through handwritten letters. Recent letters came from Brazil, China, France, India, Ghana and Papua. All handwritten letters are translated and documented on www.lifeneedsinternet.com. Together these letters create an archaeological insight into digital culture. The audience can participate in the project by writing their own handwritten letter during the lecture.
#Society #Sharing
The goal of Life Needs Internet is to document how we currently feel about the Internet. This differs per culture, generation, country or even city; there is no global digital culture. While in 2016 47% of the world’s population had access to the Internet, writing a letter is still a technology that is roughly available to anyone. It’s a simple, low-cost and low-tech way to document thoughts and feelings. The global influence of the Internet is preserved through a traditional medium; each handwritten letter is a unique cultural artefact.
How we feel about a technology today greatly determines how we will behave towards a new technology tomorrow. One day the Internet will become outdated and it will be replaced by a new medium. New technology is often met with the same shortsighted critique of society’s technophobes and technophiles. In order to understand the new, we need to understand the present.
In time, perhaps when the Internet is no more, Life Needs Internet will offer the opportunity to reflect and contemplate about the (non-) impact Internet had on our lives. To quote network-scientist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi; “Without cultural artefacts, humanity has no memory, and without memory it cannot learn from its success and failures.”
Presenters:
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Jeroen van Loon
Jeroen van Loon (b. 1985 in ’s Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands, lives and works in Utrecht, The Netherlands) received a bachelor in Digital Media Design and a European Media Master of Arts from the HKU University of the Arts Utrecht. His fascination revolves around the revealing, documenting and visualising of digital culture. Earlier work focussed on it’s personal and societal impact while recent work focusses on the internet itself: it’s architecture, physicality and connectivity - speculating how these will change in the future.
Van Loon gave two TEDx Talent talks, won the European Youth Award and was awarded the KF Hein Art Grant. Recent work is included in the Verbeke Foundation, Belgium, collection. Recent exhibitions include the Central Museum, “Beyond Data”, Netherlands,; Dutch Design Week, The Netherlands; Z33, “Design my Privacy”, Belgium; Cyberfest 9, Russia/USA/Colombia; V2_, The Netherlands and Tech Art Expo, Berlin.
On the Art of Jeroen van Loon
By curator Michel van Dartel
The hybrid field of art and technology is seeing a radical change in the approaches taken by its artists. Rather than working from blueprints based on desktop research, emerging artists in this domain increasingly often choose to embed themselves in a technology’s sphere of influence while keeping a relatively open agenda. Working one’s way towards artistic outcomes from an embedded position encourages a new emphasis on the process of development and the bodily experiences it brings about in the artist. Consequently, the significance of any art objects produced along the way is reduced, challenging the art world’s strict conventions regarding what artistic practice, presentation and spectatorship can and cannot be.
The work of the artist Jeroen van Loon is a quintessential example of this emerging approach. He embeds himself in subjects such as the production of identities through social media (Kill Your Darlings, 2012), pre-Internet societies (Life Needs Internet, 2014–2016), and the evolving market in human genetic data (Cellout.me, 2016). Van Loon makes a significant contribution to our understanding of and relationship to contemporary digital culture and the new realities produced by technological advancement. This contribution is a necessary and timely one, pulling our attention away from the direct, everyday consequences of technology to cast light on its broader impact and structural effects. In an age in which the short-term benefits of new technologies are generously celebrated in the media, promoted through government innovation policies and highlighted in product campaigns, there is a critical need for the efforts of artists like Van Loon to counter this techno-euphoria with an unbiased exploration of technology’s effects on our lives, climate and culture.
Van Loon’s work has been displayed in solo exhibitions and international group shows and has earned him a European Youth Award and a KF Hein art grant. He regularly gives presentations on his artistic explorations of technology, both in the art world and through institutions that promote innovation, such as TEDx. Van Loon holds a bachelor’s degree in digital media design and a master’s in European media. He is currently based in Utrecht, the Netherlands.
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