14.15 PRIVACY

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

Simon Denny is fascinated by tech culture and the rapid obsolescence of technology as we perpetually upgrade our lives. Often described as a ‘post-internet artist’, in his work Denny addresses life as we know it in the age of this global network. The term is also used to describe a generation of young artists who use and comment on the culture of digital technologies more generally.

These two works relate to an exclusive gathering in Munich known as the Digital-Life-Design Conference. This invitation-only event bills itself as ‘Europe’s leading digital innovation conference’ and the annual line-up of speakers is a who’s who of global tech companies alongside leading academics, journalists and tastemakers. Denny, who has been living in Germany since 2007, secured an invitation to the 2012 event and it became the focus for a new body of work. Mimicking the design and format of the conference, he offers us tidy sound bites and ‘takeaways’ from its various sessions. These particular works reflect upon and remix two conference events: 14.15 PRIVACY documents a panel discussion on privacy in the age of big data, while 18.15 SUPER-EARTHS speculates on a future beyond this planet.

The privacy panel featured social media entrepreneurs, a German politician and a New York Times technology reporter. Denny’s excerpts are damning: ‘We left a lot up to Mark Zuckerberg [founder of social media platform Facebook] and a lot of it didn’t go so well’ and ‘People don’t understand that oil is the data of the 21st century’. In the ‘super-earths’ session, Harvard astronomer Dimitar Sasselov discussed his new book The life of super-earths: How the hunt for alien worlds and artificial cells will revolutionize life on our planet, 2012, with international curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist. Denny quotes Sasselov’s observation that ‘100 million planets in our galaxy are potentially habitable’.

These works were first shown in Denny’s solo exhibition All you need is data — The DLD 2012 Conference REDUX at the Kunstverein Munich (shortlisted in 2014 for the Walters Prize in New Zealand) and were subsequently included in Denny’s 2015 survey show, The innovator’s dilemma, at MoMA PS1, New York.

Sarah Farrar