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Digital Artist Paul B. Davis Hacks His Way To Institutional Critique

The digitally inclined fine artist was commissioned to make a piece for a new “mini museum”, and turned a default screensaver into a work of art.

Datamoshing Creator Paul B. Davis is the first artist to feature in a new project by Domenico Quaranta called The MINI Museum of xxi Century Arts, which is actually a portable digital device utilized as an exhibition space rather than a physical gallery. In the MINI museum’s inaugural piece, 01_Davis_Untitled_2010, Davis turns the museum on itself using his hacking prowess. Initially wanting to remove the default screensaver slides on the device, which for some reason are set in Greece, he realized these were immovable and so instead took some photos of them displayed on the device, copied these to its memory card and laid a chopped up soundtrack of Manuel Göttsching’s track “E2-E4” over the top. What he ended up with is essentially the media player’s own default images reformulated as self-reflective art.

Davis says about the piece:

You are looking at a video of digital photographs of the built in photographs of the device, re-sequenced and put to music. The behaviour of the device in it’s “default” state is almost identical to this, except for some differences in the image quality, which you can notice on close inspection, and of course Manuel Göttsching.

You can check it out for yourself in the video above, or read more over on his website.