Challenging the inconsistencies in the real-digital relationship, Aram Bartholl’s installation highlights how the world is portrayed through visual language.

Framed Picture, a cliché of an artwork – a copy of a copy – represents the constant streams of discourse that impose ideas of value and meaning from the offline world onto the online one, distracting or setting unrealistic expectations of what technology is and what it stands for.

Facing this painting is Friendly Reminder: an oversized emoji flame, consisting of a wall-sized QR code connecting us to the environmental costs and material realities of the technology we use. Scanning it brings us to the Keeling Curve website, the graph that chronicles the steady increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide since the late 1950s. The work highlights how our mundane use of technologies – like the scanning of a QR code – contributes to the heating of our planet. Making visible the relationship between rising CO2 levels and our everyday consumption and communication patterns, the installation challenges the viewer to think about the broader crises these emojis are moving through, and the little understood logic of computation that introduces these anxieties.

Both works were commissioned by Kunsthalle Osnabrück. Supported by Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg.