Video shot/edited by Nathan Finch. (video link)
If you saw a USB dongle sticking out of the wall of your building, what would you do? That’s part of the premise of dead drops, a media arts project started by Germany’s Aram Bartholl in 2010. Dead drops consist of USB sticks that people place in the world—in any public place—to encourage anonymous file sharing between strangers.
Bartholl was staying in New York as artist in residence when he began leaving dead drops in the Big Apple; they were eventually featured as part of the “Talk to Me” exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. While dead drops appear to focus on information sharing, it’s not the first GPS-based discovery system of its kind. Geocaching has been around much longer than dead drops, and it even has an app that records where the hidden objects—geocaches—are located.
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