Facebook data center, Prineville, Oregon
Jarik Jongman introduces waiting rooms, data centers and film sets as a stage for ideas about reality and human behaviour in the ‘post truth’ society. More than ever, ‘truth’ seems to have become a fluid concept. Furthermore, the paradoxical situation has arisen, wherein the abundance of information available is merely contributing to our insecurity. In his current work the artist constructs new, imaginary visual spaces, departing from personal memories and associations and found imagery from newspapers, magazines and the internet.
His data center paintings embody both the incredible progress being made, the possibility of a form of immortality even, in which they resemble religious houses of worship, but simultaneously they symbolise the reduction of man to sets of data; marketable, controllable and ultimately vacuous.
