Written by Roos Giethoorn / Graphic Design Festival 2010 publication #2

Congrats, if you can read this you are human! Today you proved that you are not a computer just by reading this book. Nowadays people need to be tested by computers to check if they are not one of them. It is this new relationship between humans and the computer that fascinates Aram Bartoll.

Aram Bartholl is a digital immigrant, as people put it these days, an individual who grew up without digital technology and adopted it later. As a kid he had access to computers through his friends, so he never had the time to get stuck in a game. His fascination grew in observing rather than obsessing. With a healthy distance and without an inner struggle to get sucked in the digital world Arams work is mainly inspired by that second world that has changed humankind forever.

During his study in Architecture at the art academy in Berlin he shifted from designing houses to designing 3d spaces, computer games and websites. These two fascinations put him right in between these two competing worlds. To Aram it comes very naturally to connect the two by placing elements from the digital world into public space. But for most people this encounter isn’t so obvious. During the GDFB Captcha codes were placed on the Breda streets, for the close observant to discover.

Captcha (Completely Automated Public Turing-test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) is a computer-generated test that relies on the visual perception of humans. By recognizing a randomly generated series of letters and/or numbers you must prove to the computer that you (yourself) are not (one of his kind) an automatic script used by spammers. He will then know you are one of the good guys, although it cannot read the code itself. When put in the public space these Catpcha codes blend right in with the graffiti tags on the streets. These codes used in graffiti, meant to be decoded by a certain group of people, debate the relationship between people and public space. It is the same public space that Aram uses to raise a debate on the relationship between people and the digital world.

Aram Bartholls work brings together the best of both worlds. He is not giving answers or offering solutions to the questions he is raising. He is mainly triggering people to think about their own relationship with their computer and inviting them to discuss about it on the street. Right here in our first world. 

During the GDFB Bootcamp a group of young designers were loosing themselves in their computers, working hard on designing OpenFramework projects. Aram pulled these designers away from their computer by presenting a selection from his big archive of projects. I you want to to read more about his project, check his website and his blog, but be warned, before you know it you’ll be stuck there for several hours.

Copyright 2010 Roos Giethoorn