Ruben Aubrechtʼs work subversively negotiates living conditions at the nexus between analogue and digital culture, often adding a touch of irony to productively invert the structures he addresses.
In Walking a Straight Line, Aubrecht analyses the perpetual need to understand the digital world, in which constant availability and fluidity with regard to authorship prevails. In this work, the metadata of his mobile phoneʼs GPS movement profile, generated by a straight line tracing the artistʼs path, is lasered into a black stone slab; he ‘records’ the date that would be current if all the time wasted on the internet was deducted (IF I SUBTRACT ALL THE TIME I HAVE SPENT USELESSLY SURFING THE INTERNET).
In his 472-page book of «cookies» from the magazine «Monopol», he identifies the pages that we, as users, agree to when we load the page and which, in turn, create an image of who we are in the background, based on the standards they impose.
(Lit. e.g. from Kunstraum Lakeside, 2021, Franz Thalmair and Gudrun Ratzinger)

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