!Mediengruppe Bitnik
Download Finished

For their Internet project Download Finished, the Zurich-based artistic duo !Mediengruppe Bitnik (Carmen Weisskopf and Domagoj Smoljo), known for the media-reflective application of hacking strategies, use films from P2P networks and online archives:

"The found footage of the original images is dissolved into pixels, thereby making the hidden data structure visible. The users and file sharers of the work become authors themselves by reinterpreting their favorite films.

Before a film that comes directly from a camera or a DVD is digitalized and fed into a file-sharing resource, it has already undergone numerous transformations. Download Finished uses this data structure to transform the image layer: What otherwise is known as a compression error becomes a new aesthetic and demonstrates the digital nature of the data.

Because this so-called 'glitch' or error in data transmission reveals operating modes that are mostly hidden and implicit but already in the system, it expands and enriches the way images are usually employed and simultaneously clarifies the nature of digital artifacts."

(Text: Carmen Weisskopf and Domagoj Smoljo)