Whitney Biennial 2017

Floor 4

Born 1979 in Billings, MT
Lives in Portland, OR and Seattle, WA

With his Footer/Content Chassis/This Pull Request, Aaron Flint Jamison invites Whitney visitors into a space reserved for employees: a conference room visible but usually inaccessible from the Museum’s central staircase. In its unused utility closet, Jamison has installed a Dell computer (purchased on eBay) identical to one that he found in this location during a site visit. The first computer, which lacked a power cord, monitor, keyboard, and mouse, appealed to the artist as “a redundant institutional object.” 

In his installation, Jamison’s own minitower runs a custom application written in a language called Python on the Ubuntu Server operating system. Throughout the Biennial, Whitney employees can opt to use the program, which will insert a “footer” into every email sent from participating users in the whitney.org domain. This footer makes visible information typically hidden in “headers,” including the recipient’s geographic location, every location in which an email has been opened in the past, and any times when emails have been read by someone other than the intended recipients.