Artists

Veneta Androva
Raphaël Bastide
Bruno Gola
Kathrin Hunze
Yehwan Song
Shinji Toya

Shinji Toya
trashpicking.cloud

Website

Art Swap with Yehwan Song

For her works [Soft pocking] and The Way We Touch Each Other, Yehwan Song collected data on how users interact with touchscreens. She gave Shinji Toya the JSON files on which the coordinates of touch were stored. She also gave him a folder with graphic components from Song’s work as a web designer.

The work trashpicking.cloud builds on Toya’s interest in the expiration and decayof files and electronic waste. He designed a website for the exhibition where he dumped Song’s graphics and his own superfluous files. It has the appearance of a watery urban wasteland, a place where trash is typically thrown away in real life without thinking. Using the coordinates from the JSON files, he stored junk data on the website. Visitors are invited to delete the files by clicking on them. The size of the wasteland is displayed together with the CO2 emissions that are saved by deleting files. In contrast to the endless expanse of the internet, this small piece of landscape on the web is a closed system, like a sandbox. Cleaning it up becomes a manageable, satisfying and almost meditative task.

Shinji Toya lives and works in London. His artistic work is inspired by processes of decay and aims to make the materiality of media and the associated environmental destruction visible through code and imagery. His recent work focuses on the creative reuse of the internet. Toya’s prototypes question the shiny surfaces of physical devices and metaphors such as the cloud.