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Performing the Media - Online Identities

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Johannes P Osterhoff (DE)

The Map Is Not The Territory

Osterhoff tiles zoom 3

Osterhoff shows his location real time online.

Osterhoff tiles zoom 2

Although Osterhoff’s presence is quite specific, the position can be hard to calculate.

Osterhoff tiles zoom 1

Although Osterhoff’s presence is quite specific, the position can be hard to calculate.

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Osterhoff google portrait

Google queries for 99 cents each. Photo by Anke-Madelaine Jaeckel.

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About Johannes P Osterhoff (DE)

Johannes P. Osterhoff is a German Interface Designer and Artist. Osterhoff deals with and reflects on the effects that digital designs have on their users, especially if these are turned into an alternative and critical use.

Osterhoff shows different perspectives on user interfaces, often through performative pieces, that highlight aspects of digital culture and everyday media usage. Osterhoff has previously worked with durational performances related to his own use of mobile devices, for example, his one year long iPhone Live performance (2012), where he published his iPhone activity on the web daily, and also with the earlier Google One Year Piece (2011) that documented all Osterhoff’s Google searches. Each search query created a new webpage that again was indexed by the search engine, and thus created a feedback loop of the Google searches.

As we also see in Tobias Leingruber’s artworks, Osterhoff’s focus is on critical and subversive media usage and consumption. He also thrives for more control of the user’s online experience and a greater awareness of the data-collecting of big companies such as Google.

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Osterhoff first tiles
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About the artwork: The Map Is Not The Territory

For the Performing the Media exhibition, Johannes P. Osterhoff creates a new online performance work called The Map Is Not The Territory, where personal tracking is in focus.

The performance will be launched at the event at Supermarkt in Berlin on April 3rd 2014, where Osterhoff will be remotely present through a projection of his real-time location at another place in Germany. The performance deals with alternative representations of tracking and location. These are shown via randomly distributed map tiles, showing Osterhoff’s real-time location. This creates a distributed and networked presence of the artist.

The context for this performance is the everyday data-collection and surveillance done by media devices and pages. Osterhoff wants to make this process more visible to its users, to gain a critical awareness. Devises can in this context be misused with the user not being aware of what is actually going on in the background, and how his/her data are collected by the big companies in question.