In collaboration with Anna Pech and Lauren Brand

Masquerading as a piece of contemporary art, Untitled (Chandelier) catches, decodes and decrypts the secured radio communications between police officers. By making use of contemporary art’s insistence on endless representation and multiplicities of meanings, the project sets out the use the “safe-space” conditions of the white-cube to install insurgent critical functions. The polished aluminium housing, fluorescent circular tube and the aestheticization of the antenna makes its illegal function secondary to its visual appearance. Untitled houses a custom software running computer that has been developed in collaboration with a hacker collective, this software catches the specific radio frequency through an antenna. The software extracts data packages from the police frequency, the data packages are decoded and decrypted in order to extract metadata of these radio calls, metadata that shows the duration, time and the signifier code. Due to its legal status, Untitled (Chandelier) is only able to exert its critical function in the white-cube. It is a piece of contemporary art after all.