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Hello World!

EXHIBITION

Christopher Baker: Hello World! or: How I Learned to Stop Listening and Love the Noise

Jul 18 — Nov 6, 2011

Hello World! or: How I Learned to Stop Listening and Love the Noise (2008) stitches more than 5000 video diaries gathered from MySpace, YouTube, and Facebook into a massive, panoramic crowd of individual talking heads. It is simultaneously a critical look at the growing cacophony of participatory media and an optimistic meditation on its democratizing potential.

Each video diary consists of a single speaker candidly addressing an imagined, potentially massive audience from a private space such as a bedroom, kitchen, or dorm room. The individual monologues are mundane–records of daily activities, opinions, feelings, and frustrations–but together they reveal a fascinating patchwork of life lived online.

Artist Christopher Baker, originally trained as a scientist, examines the complex relationship between society and its technologies by recontextualizing captured communications and visualizing large sets of data. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Art and Technology Studies department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.


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