My essay “What remains? The way we save ourselves” has been published as part of the publication ‘Behind the Smart World’, edited by KairUs (Linda Kronman and Andreas Zingerle). The publication is the result of a one year research collaboration between Servus.at and KairUs investigating one of the fundamental problems of our times: the saving, deleting and resurfacing of information.

The book can be read as epub, pdf and online.

“The smart world. Created by policymakers, the advertising world, creative industries, and persuasive UX-designers that portray to us a world of shiny brand new technologies, apps that solve all our daily problems and smart cities collecting big data that will eventually solve all the problems of human kind. If we take a slightly more critical look at our smart world, though, our shiny gadgets become obsolete faster than ever, turning into toxic e-waste; our apps and smart cities have turned into an effective all-encompassing surveillance apparatus, and we have no idea who is collecting our data, who accesses it, and where it is stored. There may be issues that the smart world can solve, but at the same time, it raises new problems concerning data breaches, data privacy, data ownership and electronic waste. In this publication researchers and artists unfold some of these issues in three parts: Saving Data, Deleting Data and Resurfacing Data. Each part begins with theoretical texts that address some of the concerns, followed by strategies of artists and activists that expose problematic power structures, creatively reveal how we lost control of our data and offer strategies to deal with our data in this smart world.” (Behind the Smart World, page 7)