This year is the 30th anniversary of the start of the Gulf War (1990-91), also known as 'The First Space War' because of the prominence of satellite navigation in the conflict. I have been looking into histories and practices of GPS navigation for a new work I am making for the Kuwait Pavilion at the Venice Architecture biennale, which may or may not take place this summer. While I'm online on artwillsaveus.club I will use a digital radio piracy method to emulate GPS signals that overpower the signals broadcast by satellites. This way, I can move my current location on Google Maps to any place in the world, without leaving my studio at the Ujazdowski Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw. If you send me your GPS coordinates I will come and visit you. On Google Maps. The session will probably last for about half an hour, unless I need more time to travel to all destinations.
Dani Ploeger is an artist and cultural critic who explores situations of conflict and crisis on the fringes of the world of high-tech consumerism. Quasi-journalistic journeys often form the starting point for the development of his work. He has been embedded with frontline troops in East-Ukraine, travelled to e-waste dumping sites in Nigeria, stole barbed wire from the Hungarian anti-immigration fence, and interviewed witnesses of US drone attacks in Pakistan about sound and technologies of violence.
Dani’s artwork is shown at galleries, museums and festivals, such as ZKM Karlsruhe, transmediale (Berlin), Venice Architecture Biennale, WRO Media Art Biennale (Wroclaw), Museum of Fine Art Leipzig, National Gallery of Zimbabwe (Bulawayo), and V2_Lab for the unstable media (Rotterdam). His writing has been published in Leonardo, The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Imagination, and the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, among others. Holding a PhD from the University of Sussex, UK, he is a Research Fellow at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, Artistic Researcher at Leiden University and Associate Research Fellow at De Montfort University in Leicester. He is currently a resident at Ujazdowski Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw as part of the Mondriaan Fund (NL) international residency programme.
