Opening: Friday, March 11, 2016, 8:00 p.m.

The infrastructure of modern societies is largely dependent on data streams. Our data are stored in clouds and maintained on server farms. The database as a digital archive stands both for the potential to gain insight as well as the information excesses in a media culture in which the collection, administration, and evaluation of digital information play an increasingly important role. Massive subsidies, private and public labor power, as well as entrepreneurial, government, and military capital flow into the generation, gathering, and analysis of data. The question of who possesses what data, how these are processed, and how this changes the economic power structure and social concepts of the private sphere, knowledge, and responsibility is becoming more and more urgent. Against this backdrop, the group exhibition “Digital Archives” assembles works that deal in a multifaceted way with the networked world and the seemingly limitless possibilities for circulating, archiving, and processing digital information. Besides data and communications streams in global networks, the exhibition addresses the highly complex and invisible forms of political and economic shifts of power as well as exposes and reflects the omnipresence of surveillance and censorship. Concurrent with the CeBIT and the HANNOVER MESSE 2016, the presentation at the Kunstverein Hannover once again draws attention to the opportunities, visions, and dangers associated with digital change.

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