You’re walking down the street, and you see a USB flash drive stuck into a wall, inserted into a stair, or into a tree: there is an explanation, and it’s that the USB pen drive is part of the Art project called “Dead Drops”, by artist Aram Bartholl.
Started as a personal project in 2010, while Bartholl was in New York, Dead Drops is based on the spying method to exchange secret information withouth the necessity to meet in person. The term, in fact, comes from this practice for which the spies individuated an agreed hidden place where to exchange safely and maintain anonymity in both parts. The first person leaves the stuff, such as documents or encrypted messages, and the other one keeps them up after the first has left. No human interaction needed.
The great difference, however, is that Bartholl chooses public places to leave information: he placed the five first USB Flash Drives in transition areas in New York, inserted and cemented between wall slots, sidewalks, phone booths, so that only the metallic parte of the flash drive was visible to passers by. There is no intended agreement about contained information in the flash drives, and nobody knows which people are involved in the exchange. Anybody can connect to the flash drive with his own laptop, download the contained documents and upload something else.
How does Dead Drops Art Project work?
Revolution happened when Bartholl’s project turned into a participative art action: the artist created a website where he invited every person from all over the world to become part of his work. The only thing you need to participate is USB flash drive. Then you need to find a suitable public place, preferably in the city, and finally to stuck the flash drive with plaster or cement, just like Bartholl did.
The requested conditions to participate are:
- Upload in the device a file with an explicative text of the project, downloadable from the website
- Indicate the geographic coordinates of the place where the USB flash drive is placed, together with three photographs of the installed pen drive.
In this way, the new USB flash drive can become part of the Dead Drops official map, expanding more and more with the passing of time. Since the first five versions in 2015, in fact, now there are thousands of flash drives, spread all over the world. And they’re not stopping to grow.
Every time a flash drive is added to the project, Bartholl shares a tweet:
Il valore artistico di “Dead Drops”
Why should a person should, best case scenario, go through the city to share and download files, if there are easier ways, wireless and online? Actually, this is the point: as you can read on the Manifesto, Dead Drops main scope is to value data freedom and distribution, in the age where files are de-localized and stored in cloud services. Dead Drops is an offline project, requiring an active participation. It’s not only a treasure hunt – which certainly is catchy to people, given Pokémon Go success – but first of all is a different way to reconnect to reality.
In real life you cannot keep everything under control. If you connect to a dead drop, you don’t have idea what you will find, because somebody could have arrived there before, erased existing documents and uploading new ones. And you can literally find anything, from musical tracks to drug recipes. There’s also a risk to being attacked by malwares, but it’s part of the work concept: it’s up to you whether you want to take precautions before connecting or you don’t. And also, even if a flash drive is in the map, there’s no guarantee you will actually find if there: someone could have damaged it, or stolen it.
Given all that, Dead Drops is still a success, because it leverages on the thrilling sensation to find something unknown, or to find secret information, or it can be an alternative way to share your interests. Maybe the best reason to take part of this participative art project, however, is the awareness to be part of a global artistic happening. And this gives you satisfaction.
