Memory: Evan Roth
In 1969, the Whole Earth Catalog declared that “we are as gods and we might as well get good at it”. It aimed to provide the reader with tools “to shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested”.
The artist Evan Roth works in the same anti-authoritarian do-it-yourself spirit as the 1960’s American counterculture. A spirit he shares with open source programmers as well as graffiti writers and Anonymous activists.
Roth’s works are tools for empowerment aiming to modify our physical and digital surroundings by misusing and parodying social structures, technical devices and popular culture phenomena. Among his projects is the transformation of an airport X-ray machine to a medium for sending messages to security staff, and a replica of the TED talks stage, which is open for everyone to use.
In Memory, Evan Roth stages a confrontation between human memory and the unconscious of the Internet.
Our technical devices remember much more than we want them to. The computer cache memories register all our movements in digital space. Roth turns these memories inside out and brings forth a manifold of hidden stories. Thereby he is letting us view ourselves with the indifferent eyes of technology.
The exhibition is an archive of an archive, with portraits of various person’s daily online activities, a 42 meter long vinyl print with four months of Internet history compressed to a sculpture, laser etchings and the thoughtful little book Since You Were Born, dedicated to the artist’s daughter. The book can be read in two opposite ways: as a beautiful story about the relation between a father and his new-born child, and as a reflexion of our intimate relationship with the web.
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Memory is Paris-based artist Evan Roth’s first solo exhibition in Sweden. His work is in the permanent collection of Museum of Modern Art NY and has been exhibited at the Centre Pompidou, the Kunsthalle Wien, the Tate and the front page of Youtube. Roth is a co-founder of the Graffiti Research Lab and The F.A.T. Lab.
