SITUATION #32

Since the new millennium, the city of Valencia has been hosting the Campus Party, an annual technology festival and LAN party that invites “young geeks” to gather and share their digital knowledge and experience. With their laptops plugged in and connected over a local area network for 24 hours a day over the course of a week, thousands of digital natives, gamers, hackers, software developers and creative minds meet to design and shape the digital space of the future. In his large-scale installation , Roc Herms sets out to portray this event, from the plugs and random piles of cables, to the individual computer desktops and files, to the participants sitting in front of their screens that have become gateways to the world they inhabit. No longer just a working device, the computer has become a virtual extension of their personal space. Personal archives and individualised desktops become expressions of our identity; captured by the artist, they become records of our virtual lives, like intimate self-portraits.

More by Roc Herms: rocherms.com