since you were born

#5In My Computer

Since YouWere BornEvan Roth

Evan RothSince You Were Born

Publisher: LINK Editions, Brescia 2014www.linkartcenter.eu

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. This license lets you remix, tweak, and build upon this work non-commercially, as long as you credit the Author and license your new creations under the identical terms. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/.

Copyright © 2014 by Evan Roth

Originally exhibited as part of ‘Memory’Gallery Niklas Belenius, Stockholm, SwedenJanuary 25 - March 2, 2014

Printed and distributed by: Lulu.comwww.lulu.com

ISBN 978-1-291-78884-6

For Octavia.

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Editor’s note

Since You Were Born is a book composed of the chronological history of every website visited on the artist’s computer over a three month period beginning with the birth of his daughter Octavia (July 19, 2013). It thus belongs to the genre that once someone with a sheer fantasy and a bad taste for names called “autobotography”: it shows a portion of the artist’s life as it is preserved by bots – in this case, the “Chronology” function of the browser.

The book is dedicated to Octavia, and we have to take this dedication seriously. It’s not just a re-enactment of authors’ habit to dedicate whatever they put on paper to their loved ones; and it’s not a mere consequence of the fact that the book tells us about her, too. Reading it made me sure that Octavia is the intended reader of the book; the book is for her - and if she were the only reader, this would be a sufficient condition for the book to exist. While Roth’s prints and installations using the information stored in his own or other people’s cache are meant for public display, this book is a more private outcome. What you are about to read is a personal, intimate communication from a father to a daughter; a private collection of memories, something in between the diary and the family album. Maybe one day the Roth family will go through it, sitting on the sofa, commenting on a link and the memories triggered by them. “Look, this is when you didn’t poo for two days – we were so worried!” Like pictures in a family album, it will trigger memories that weren’t intended to be pictured and saved, and that the image or the link will make re-appear vividly in mind – like that Breaking Bad episode downloaded and watched the night that the baby could’t sleep.

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And yet, this is not a diary. The whole book can be seen as a found, unintended picture of the artist and his life beyond the screen. It was taken by Mozilla Firefox, namely to allow him to rapidly go back to his browsing history if needed - and, more covertly, to store information about the human beyond that IP address. It explores a form of portraiture commonly addressed as “profiling”. On a very basic level, it makes it visible to us. Like all Roth’s work based on the cache, it has a biopolitical relevance for the very fact to make the invisible visible. It shows us that, when we are sitting in front of our screen, we are in fact inhabiting a corporate controlled space where every single thing we do goes noticed – or, at least, noted. Maybe we already know this, maybe not – but in both cases – it makes it visible through the effectiveness of a familiar artifact – a book, an image.

At another level, the book questions the effectiveness of profiling as a form of portraiture. How much does the big G actually know about us? How much of this detailed record of an individual’s browsing activity is relevant to portray him / her? How much is negligible, uninteresting or even deceptive?

Finally, Since You Were Born offers a picture of the web, taken at an instant that is meaningful in the personal life of one of its users, but completely random in the life of the medium, and from a very specific point of view (a single user’s computer) that is rarely shared. While I’m writing, Facebook lets me know that today the web has turned 25. Although the internet is a bit older, it’s still in its infancy in terms of a successful medium usual lifespan. Twenty-five years after the invention of print, people were still making books in the way they used to make them in the Middle Ages: precious, hyper-decorated, and with elegant, Gothic typefaces. We call these books “incunabula”. It took about fifty years for people to fully understand the democratic potential of print; and it took centuries to make this potential really effective. The web we experienced in

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1994 is, twenty years later, archeology; and so it will the web as we are experiencing it now, in twenty years.

In twenty years, Octavia will be 21, and probably an active web user, if we will still be using such words as “web” and “user”. And from this book (yes, books will still be around and won’t look like archeological remains) she will learn something about herself, her family and the place where her parents were spending most of their time in 2014. And so will your children as well.

– Domenico Quaranta

Written in Carrara, Italy, March 12, 2014, from 8.46 to 12.25 AM, while sitting in an hotel room (online), a park bench (offline) and a classroom (online).

12:14Edge of Art – Autobotography | Anna Wernerannagwerner.wordpress.com

12:14autobotography - Cerca con Googlewww.google.it

12:13sheer - Dizionario inglese-italiano WordReferencewww.wordreference.com

12:09resto - Dizionario italiano-inglese WordReferencewww.wordreference.com

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11:57Incunable - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaen.wikipedia.org

11:56incunabola - Cerca con Googlewww.google.it

11:47deceptive - Dizionario inglese-italiano WordReferencewww.wordreference.com

11:46trascurabile - Dizionario italiano-inglese WordReferencewww.wordreference.com

11:44Facebookwww.facebook.com

11:44Spam - quaranta.domenico@gmail.com - Gmailmail.google.com

11:44I: Conferma attivazione Backup MySql Sql736794 - quaranta.do-menico@gmail.com - Gmailmail.google.com

11:43Posta in arrivo - quaranta.domenico@gmail.com - Gmailmail.google.com

11:43Proposition for publication, Research Program, University of Art and Design, Geneva - quaranta.domenico@gmail.com - Gmailmail.google.com

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11:42qrndnc - Yahoo Mailit-mg42.mail.yahoo.com

11:40The Andy Warhol Show Skira Editorewww.skira.net

11:40the andy warhol show skira - Cerca con Googlewww.google.it

11:38ESAMI - Storia dell’Arte - Ceci n’est pas un Pips - YouTubewww.youtube.com

11:34Storia dell’arte – da ridere – con Caterina Guzzanti al top di you-tube | Stile Artewww.stilearte.it

09:29World’s Saddest Nets Fan Shits Into Urinal While Vomiting (NSFW)deadspin.com

09:27(9 non letti) - qrndnc - Yahoo Mailit-mg42.mail.yahoo.com

09:26Since You Were Born.... - quaranta.domenico@gmail.com - Gmailmail.google.com

08:46Facebook Bans Mother For Posting Photos Of Her New Born Son Who Was Born With Severe Birth Defect - SMAG 31

LINK Editionshttp://editions.linkartcenter.eu/

CloudsDomenico Quaranta, In Your Computer, 2011Valentina Tanni, Random, 2011Gene McHugh, Post Internet, 2011Brad Troemel, Peer Pressure, 2011Kevin Bewersdorf, Spirit Surfing, 2012Mathias Jansson, Everything I shoot Is Art, 2012Various Authors, Best of Rhizome 2012, 2013Domenico Quaranta, Beyond New Media Art, 2013

In My Computer#1 Miltos Manetas, In My Computer # 1, 2011#2 Chris Coy, After Brad Troemel, 2013#3 Martin Howse, Diff in June, 2013#4 Damiano Nava, Let the Right One In, 2013#5 Evan Roth, Since You Were Born, 2014

CataloguesCollect the WWWorld. The Artist as Archivist in the Internet Age, 2011. Exhibition Catalogue. Edited by Domenico Quaranta, with texts by Josephine Bosma, Gene McHugh, Joanne McNeil, D. Quaranta

Gazira Babeli, 2011. Exhibition catalogue. Edited by Domenico Quaranta, with texts by Mario Gerosa, Patrick Lichty, D. Quaranta, Alan Sondheim

Holy Fire. Art of the Digital Age, 2011. Exhibition catalogue. Edited by Yves Bernard, Domenico Quaranta

Ryan’s Web 1.0. A Lossless Fall, 2012.By Ryan Trecartin

RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting, 2014. Exhibition Catalogue. Edited by Antonio Caronia, Janez Janša, Domenico Quaranta, with texts by Jennifer Allen, Jan Verwoert, Rod Dickinson

OpenBest of Rhizome 2012, 2013.Edited by Joanne McNeilCo-produced with Rhizome, New York (USA).

The F.A.T. Manual, 2013.Edited by Geraldine Juárez, Domenico Quaranta.Co-produced with MU, Eindhoven (NL).

Troika, Edited by Domenico Quaranta, 2013.Co-produced with Aksioma - Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana (SLO).

LINK Editions is a publishing initiative of the LINK Center for the Arts of the Information Age. LINK Editions uses the print on demand approach to create an accessible, dynamic series of essays and pamphlets, but also tutorials, study notes and conference proceedings connected to its educational activities. A keen advocate of the idea that information wants to be free, LINK Editions releases its contents free of charge in .pdf format, and on paper at a price accessible to all. Link Editions is a not-for-profit initiative and all its contents are circulated under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) license.