We Are The World

by Wim Vanhenden (B)

Is it the real time experience, in which the data is altering continuously and by that making it unpredictable? Or is his fascination related to some kind of voyeurism, in which case the work of art can be seen as a paradigm for our world.

About We Are The World

The artist starts from random data that he plucks real time from the internet by means of a specialized technique, which in the jargon is called ‘scraping’. This method is used to extract relevant information off certain web pages in order to process it afterwards.In his case, the artist consults several search engines. From the obtained pages he then extracts the search terms that at the same moment are being entered by the anonymous internet users. The latter cannot suspect that their key search terms will be the subject of this installation. Once the data is collected, the artist processes it in a rather unusual manner: he experiments with the form, rather than with the content that remains intact. The scraped search terms are projected according to a specific algorithm and are furthermore converted into sound fragments.

The way in which the information reaches the observer is defined by the spirit of the age: volatile, fragmentary, incoherent. Nevertheless the visitor is fascinated by the information he perceives. His amazement is in place here: in this spectacle he is after all a mere passive observer, looking over the shoulder of the non-suspecting internet user. And yet he seems extremely captivated (by what he sees). The interactivity does not exist by means of the visitor but exists by means of his fellow human feeding the application. Is it the real time experience, in which the data is altering continuously and by that making it unpredictable? Or is his fascination related to some kind of voyeurism, in which case the work of art can be seen as a paradigm for our world. The visitor can observe the whereabouts of his fellow human in real time on the internet. We Are The World is a mirror: sooner or later the observer will be confronted with a search term which he could have entered himself.

About Wim Vanhenden

Born in the late seventies, Wim Vanhenden is a child of the first generation that grows up with a personal computer in the living room. He was raised in a creative family: his father owned an art gallery and teaches painting, his mother is a ceramic artist and his sister is a graphic designer, he himself has always been more attracted to computers than to a painter's canvas.

In the mid eighties he started drawing his first experiments in BASIC on his Tandy TRS-80 Coco II home computer. From that moment onwards, life without computers is unthinkable for him.

For Wim Vanhenden the internet is his main source of inspiration. With his 'objective observer approach' he let's the spectator use his work as a paradigm to interpret the 'real world'. In some cases he confronts the visitor with himself and the virtual world that surrounds him.

In the artists opinion the internet is 'multi layered'. We all use it in our daily lives, like sending e-mail's, for looking up things, work, travel booking, entertainment, education, communication, etc... It has taken such a place in our lives that most of us even forget they are using the internet. It's just there.

Different from the content we all use daily there a many other layers of data. Underneath booking a journey or looking up a cooking recipe there is extreme violence, tons of (hardcore) porn, holocaust denial but also free news gathering, non commercial and free music, archives, people indexes, ... It's all under our fingertips but most of us never go there...

Wim Vanhenden's works use the internet but mostly they do not run on the internet. It's art that uses the internet but it's not internet art. They are meant to be presented outside of the familiar environment people are used to be in when dealing with the internet. By doing so he places the spectator in a position where he/she is forced to look at the internet, forced to know about it's existence and forced to look at the multi layer content presented.

Wim Vanhenden's work was selected and exhibited at the Bozar gallery in Brussels for the 'Canvascollectie'.

http://www.wimvanhenden.be