Andreas Nicolas Fischer: A Week In The Life

Though there’s been a lot of art inspired by government and political ongoings in the United States as of late, the impending election isn’t the only worldwide example of government policy affecting the artistic landscape. In Germany, the government recently proposed the telecommunications data retention act that would would require service providers to store connection data of all customers for six months, making the data available to law enforcement agencies. Plenty of Germans see this act as a breach of their privacy. One such German sharing that point of view is artist Andreas Nicolas Fischer, whose A Week In The Life data sculpture is a ‘three dimensional visualization of movement and communication made with a cell phone during a week roaming around Berlin’ made in response to the aforementioned act and the breach it constitutes. The sculpture was designed with the help of a specific software written for Fischer’s cell phone which accounted for his ability to keep track of the his longitudinal and latitudinal positions while roaming the city. The gathered data was then transfereed to a processing sketch which resulted in the final product that makes quite a statement both visually and politically.