KW Digital:
Open Secret
16 July – 31 December 21
Featuring Nora Al-Badri, Maithu Bùi, Erick Beltrán, Tara Isabella Burton, Caroline Busta, Jennifer Chan, Wendy Chun, Joshua Citarella, András Cséfalvay, Inland (Ed Davenport), Constant Dullaart, Orit & Tal Halpern, Adam Harvey, Vladan Joler, Bea Kittelmann, Katerina Krtilova, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Lukáš Likavčan, Jen Liu, Eva and Franco Mattes, Tom McCarthy, Lisa Messeri, Ramak Molavi Vasse’i, New Models, Lisa Rave, Rachel Rossin, Gillian Russell, Konstanze Schütze, Caroline Sinders, Dirk Sorge, Charles Stankievech, and others, as well as the AURORA School for ARtists, Jugendgremium Schattenmuseum, and MOTIF
Image: Joshua Citarella, Choose Your Future, 2021. Still from the website; Courtney the artist
Open Secret is a six-month long online program exploring the role of the hidden in our apparently “open” society. Information technologies are supposed to increase our access to knowledge, making the world more legible, while undermining ignorance and superstition. But sometimes the feeling prevails that we have entered a new dark age of black boxes, projections, and paranoia. Techno-culture is obsessed with the unseen, the inaccessible, the known-unknown. Open Secret pursues things that are obscured–through artistic commissions, a suite of essays by leading thinkers, and an intensive public program dedicated to critical reappraisal of the digital infrastructures that organize civic life. With new contributions released on a monthly basis, the Open Secret website will bring together art, technology, politics, and new patterns of exchange.
Curators: Nadim Samman, curator digital sphere, in collaboration with Katja Zeidler, head of education & mediation
Part of project: KW Digital Program
KW Institute for Contemporary Art sits at the intersection of virtual and material worlds, and the creative use of emerging technologies. We understand that the digital is not just online or onscreen—but increasingly conditions analog or ‘real’ space. For this reason, we consider the continuum between digital and physical domains to be a key issue in contemporary culture. Exploring, criticizing, or reinventing it through art is in the public interest.
The KW Digital Program showcased cutting-edge developments in line with this vision. The program did not place the virtual in a subordinate role to the physical (or vice versa). As everyday life becomes more saturated with tech, one’s experience straddles both. Addressing this condition, our program played out across various platforms—rather than being proprietary to any particular device or location.
Throughout, we trained a close eye on the relationship between culture and innovation. We were guided by dialogue with artists and scholars. We also pursued meaningful engagement with the tech sector—to better discover the implications of applied science, and intellectual frameworks for the future.
The program was curated by Dr. Nadim Samman, Curator Digital Sphere at KW.
Overview
2021–2024
KW Digital:
Poetics of Encryption
2023–2024
KW Digital:
Poetics of Encryption
17 February – 26 May 2024
Poetics of Encryption
Conference
27/28 October 23
Poetics of Encryption
Book launch
28 April 23
KW on location:
Rachel Rossin
THE MAW OF
15–18 September 22
Tieranatomisches Theater
Open Secret
16 July – 31 December 21
The Last Museum
30 April – 6 June 21
Open Secret was developed as part of dive in. Programme for Digital Interactions of the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation) with funding by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (BKM) through the NEUSTART KULTUR program.