Max
Dauven
Max
Dauven
Assuming
Control
Assuming
Control
Assuming Control
Max Dauven

KHM Academy of Media Arts Cologne ● Beate Gütschow, Lilian Haberer, Sam Hopkins

7 inkjet prints; 80 × 64 cm; framed in aluminium (black)

Assuming Control—Trojan Horses as a Means of Artistic Approach

Max Dauven, 2021

Originating and circulating within the flux of our internet communities, memes are the viral and volatile carriers of a system of symbols in the digital loop. While reforms in verbal languages of the physical world often take years to become binding and canonized, it is precisely the internet’s speed that gives life to memes. In Assuming Control, a sort of field study, Max Dauven preserves the invigorating transitoriness of memes by banishing them onto a photographic surface in a thoroughly analogue process using real-life components. According to the rules of the cyber community, anything that is codified is already dead. In this respect, Dauven’s pictorial works are visual images of a species that is going extinct, visual images that enable the artist to walk us letter by letter through the basic alphabet of a pop-culture generation of digital natives.