‘Connecting the Dots’

Recent developments in digital technology, for example collaborative software such as Wiki, reflect a desire for a more democratic and emancipated approach to knowledge production and dissemination.
Collectively produced wiki websites differ from static paper-based sources of knowledge in significant ways because the content of a shared page can be continually created, hyperlinked and updated by a multiplicity of users.
Even though most Wikis offer a backlink feature, which enables us to trace back the history of edits and changes, we seldom make use of the opportunity to critically analyse the editorial processes of inclusion or exclusion that inform a page content at a specific moment in time and space. When we read an entry that appears as a still text on our computer screen - for example on Wikipedia -, we rather often seem to process information in a similar way as we would do when reading a scholarly text in a traditional encyclopaedia. Instead of taking into consideration the temporary, propositional and process-based nature of such a collectively produced content, we often tend to treat the offered information as a fixed and objective representation of the real.

The title of this project, Connecting the Dots, acts as a metaphor to illustrate the ability to associate, link (back) and connect a sequence of ideas, as well as navigating through an aggregation of data, in order to reveal the often overlooked 'bigger picture behind the scene'.
By presenting visual works by Jee Oh and Dario Taraborelli, Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia and Moritz Stefaner (Notabilia), and texts by Maria Molinari and Felix Stalder, Connecting the Dots aims to reflect on the role that collective software plays in the formation of truth and knowledge in the digital age.

The works and writing of the selected artists and writers, who all critically map and visualise the dynamic processes of open source pages, shed light on the often omitted restrictions, hierarchies and complex sets of rules and regulations that govern shared content production online.

 

Connecting the Dots, Page 1 of 6.

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