#3 Dead Drops
Recently, I was on a visit to New York to close an insurance deal. While passing through the endless blocks of banks, insurance companies, stock brokers and Forex companies, I came across this strange USB jutting out of a wall. After a bit of analysis and research, I found out the real story. And you too will be amazed when you find what I found and see what I saw. But to understand what this is, you need to know who Aram Bartholl is.
And to find out what it is just go to the next page.
#2 The Possibilities Are Endless
Aram Bartholl is a Berlin-based conceptual artist. Being a conceptual artist it is in his nature to do whacky and fun things. Bartholl is fascinated by the digital world and most of his projects incorporate bringing the digital world into the real world. He made giant life sized location Google map pins in the exact location that Google Maps identifies as the enter of a city. He called this project 'maps'. But this is a different project by Bartholl, it's called 'dead-drops'.
Dead Drops is an ambitious project taken up by Bartholl in 2010. The idea is to embed a pen drive in a wall and leave nothing in it but one text file explaining what project 'dead drop' is. Aram Bartholl himself traveled from London to Paris setting up these dead drops in places.
The USBs are left in walls or public places so that anyone can see them and use them. The objective? Bartholl essentially wanted to create a peer-to-peer file sharing network. This network would be offline, completely anonymous and located in public places. Anyone lucky enough to find it can access it and share files for the next person to see. People from all over the world found out about this, and they wanted to contribute. People began making their own dead drops. There's even a website to monitor them all! Go to the next page to see just how far people have taken this.
#1 Aram Bartholl
The project kicked off 5 years ago and ever since then it has been replicated throughout the world where USBs are waiting to be explored. Want to set one up yourself in your town? Just watch this video and follow the simple instructions.
This is probably not the last you will hear of Aram Bartholl. He has many other interesting projects such as 'Dust'. 'Dust' is a 1:1 scale replica of one of the most played computer game maps in the world. The idea is to build the 3D model of 'de_dust' of the first person shooter game 'Counter Strike' as a permanent 'building' from concrete, making this map accessible as a large scale public sculpture. Find him interesting? Go check him out. And tell all your friends about this ambitious project by sharing this story.
