Kairus – The Zombification of the Media
#3 min Vojtěch Märc
10. 3. 2021
The name of the Finnish-Austrian artist-researcher duo KairUs, which is composed of Linda Kronman and Andreas Zingerle, must be understood as a play on words related to the Greek term for the qualitative, rather than the quantitative, character of time. Explorations into the temporality of media, as well as the quality of life and death with them and inside them, represents the broad framework of their longstanding interest in spam, scam and internet fraud in general.¹
In 2014, KairUs completed a month-long artist residency in Accra, the capital of Ghana. They visited Agbogbloshie, an infamous e-waste dump located in the heart of the city, and purchased twenty-two discarded hard drives to discover how easy it would be to extract (and potentially misuse) personal data. This interest then resulted in organizing a “collaborative, practice-based research laboratory” called Behind the Smart World Artlab (with the Linz based net/culture initiative servus.at). In addition to other outputs, 2016 saw the creation of an installation trilogy titled Forensic Fantasies. In its first section, the artists present one of the original hard drives along with a letter to the original owner in which the artists offer to return his drive (Not a Blackmail). The second installation focused on the phenomenon of the romantic scam. The artists introduce these through a collage of local low-budget melodramas relating to the topic, bought on DVDs on the streets of Accra. The video is complemented by a notice board covered in photographs of girls found on one of the hard drives, as well as on several other (probably fake) internet profiles (Identity Theft). The third part then consisted of resuscitated photographs of celebrations, trips and parties, on which the same faces reappear, just as unin- teresting as they are familiar.
Arranging these pictures into albums, the artists claim, is a reference to established artistic methodologies in using found material (Found Footage Stalkers). In texts accompanying their work, the artistic duo refers to the concept of “zombie media”, introduced by media theorists Garnet Hertz and Jussi Parikka.2 In a way, it is a literal fulfillment of their challenge for media archeology to be applied as an artistic methodology that provides new perspectives on neglected dimensions of media. This also relates to a certain didacticism that their work shares with a majority of what is known as media art: as if the subtle visuality were not to overshadow the moral dilemmas presented here. More specifically, the work of KairUs brings to mind Hertz and Parikka’s statement that media never die. Instead, they become somewhat ambivalent zombie media: either their undead remains poison the land, or they come back to life through the “methods of artistic DIY”.3 The media-archeology process of ‘unblacking’ represents a return of that which was shut out. In this case, that is planned obsolescence on the one hand, currently the basis of our political economy and also a major contributor to its ecological collapse, and the oppressive materiality of information on the other, here so graphically embodied in the heaps of e-waste and the awkwardness of returning personal data.
Since 2010, Linda Kronman (Finland) and Andreas Zingerle (Austria) have worked as KAIRUS. Their practice operates on the borders of art, academic research and digital activism. They focus on the possibilities for civilian life in technological environments, for instance in the form of cyber-crime or the pitfalls of what are known as “smart cities”.
Text: Vojtěch Märc
Image captions
All images | Behind the Smart World Artlab, 2014–2016, with the Linz based net/culture initiative servus.at
- The popularity of scams – particularly romantic scams – among contemporary artists perhaps suggests a certain internal relation between scams and art. See also Hito Steyerl, “Epistolary Affect and Romance Scams: Letter from an Unknown Woman”, “October”, 2011, vol. 138, pp. 57–69.
- Garnet Hertz and Jussi Parikka, “Zombie Media: Circuit Bending Media Archaeology into an Art Method”, in Jussi Parikka, “A Geology of Media”, Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2015, pp. 141–144.
- This partially erases the economic significance as spectres of pure profit, exploited workers from whom their lords extract all profit. I believe zombie media should also be considered in this context.
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