With the dramatic development of digitalization and quantification of human behavior, it has become quite a task to stay up to date. The Big Printer is supposed to make people ask their own questions and encourages confrontation with the issue. In fact, data of humans in public space will be collected automatically, with or without our permission. It will be used and trashed, it will possibly be made unreadable for us – but it certainly won’t disappear and will stay decodable in a rapidly growing cloud of information.

This installation by kling klang klong and schnellebuntebilder was conceived as part of the Goethe-Institut Pop Up Pavillion in Breslau and was presented during the summer 2016 in the Plac Nowy Targ for 3 weeks.

Simply put the installation “Big Printer” reacts to passerbies. It photographs their faces without being asked, prints the portraits and shredders them immediately afterwards. Thereby “Big Printer” wants to provoke reflection on our approach to personal data, especially on the fact that we give them away recklessly all too often instead of protecting them.

NOTE:
After our vernissage we met David Ebner and Tobias Zimmer with their work “Database”, that was presented some months before Big Printer and deals with the same topic in a very similar way. We would like to bring your attention to their work as well: Database