"YOU:R:CODE", an interactive installation with multi-channel projection

"YOU:R:CODE" opens the »Open Codes« exhibition. The title can be read in two different ways: the interpretation »your code« indicates that in the installation visitors experience different kinds of digital transformations of themselves. Whereas on entering, a visitor still sees their familiar reflection in a mirror – the most real virtual depiction that we can imagine – the mirror image gradually transforms into a digital data-body until finally, the visitor is reduced to an industrially readable code. In the end he/she breaks free from the virtual depiction, and is materialized in a flip-dot display. The second way of reading the piece’s title, »you are code«, emphasises that we ourselves consist of code, which amongst other things is manifested in the genetic code. The genetic code constitutes the algorithm of life and from birth it determines what we do. In current research projects synthetic DNA strands even serve as long-term storage for digital data. And for the data analysts and artificial intelligences operating in cloud computing, too, which via smartphones give us our daily instructions for acting, we are only perceived in a mediated way in the form of sensor data and via our electronic traces and expressions – to them we are codes.

Idea: Peter Weibel
Concept, realization: Bernd Lintermann
Audiodesign: Ludger Brümmer, Yannick Hofmann
Flip-dot display: Christian Lölkes
Technological support: Manfred Hauffen, Jan Gerigk
Setup, planning: Thomas Schwab
Inspired by: Peter Weibel
Production of the ZKM | Hertz-Lab