ABSTRACT
Aram Bartholl works in Berlin, the site of the infamous eponymous Wall and decades of Cold War spying. His Dead Drops may not have been informed by any direct memory of that climate, but it does coopt their surveillance dynamic–one that continues to infuse information technologies regardless of their intended uses. Medical technologies promise the most intimate of futures, that of our bodies, while alternative fuel technologies promise the most ambitious of futures, that of a viable planet. For citizens of the twenty-first century, technological change has become a nonevent. Time is becoming synonymous with speed, thanks to the technology’s promise of instantaneity. Technological appliances like telephones, automobiles, and refrigerators were no longer instruments of awe, but familiar fixtures in middle and upper-middle class homes. Domesticated and taken for granted, technology is receding into the background; it is designed to take up less physical space. Technology is designed to defeat time and space.
