Arend deGruyter-Helfer

January 18 – 30, 2012

"Everybody likes to see the loner hitched. It tells them everything is right with the world." –Philip Ó Ceallaigh, “Another Love Story”
The rise of online social networking and the “participatory web” of Web 2.0 has created an atmosphere where participation in online communities is not only facilitated, but actively encouraged. To increase usage of their products, social networking sites attempt to engage users by enlisting algorithms that attempt to predict their relationships to their friends, their obligations, and their own beliefs. These content suggestion engines have met with some success, but their presumptuousness is often a source of user frustration. And as users interact with each other simultaneously with interfaces online, the social side-effects of the human-machine interface, which began with "does not compute" in the 1960s, have developed into a matrix of political nuance. Arend deGruyter-Helfer's new work uses found text from interactions online, displacing them from the social network environment and recasting them into a long list on a scrollable interface, a gesture towards user impatience. In "Scroll", deGruyter-Helfer has compiled a surprising and humorous litany of encounters with the unintended meanings, trivial narrations, misplaced censorship, intolerance of solitude, and stubborn quantification of human factors which make up the new lingua franca of the social web.

Exhibitions