Addie Wagenknecht: Believe me

2017

A cracked screen showing a distorted image of the American flag and a floral arrangement.

Addie Wagenknecht’s Believe me references the familiar sight of a device’s broken screen. It overlays the visual effect of cracks on a series of images that can be manipulated and loaded successively by refreshing the browser. Using the seemingly damaged screen as a central metaphor, Believe me evokes the distortions that digital technologies impose on their functionality and users' experience of the world. The failed or failing pixels change the colors, spaces, and meanings of the project’s imagery, which ranges from politically charged scenes to the vernacular of the online environment, familiar interface elements, and internet folklore. The slightly glitched, broken, abstracted yet readable imagery of Believe me—the two most frequently used words by Donald Trump according to sociolinguist Jennifer Sclafani’s 2017 analysis for CNN—questions the status of reality as mediated through screens in a “fake news” and “post-truth” environment.

Viewers can manipulate Believe me by clicking and refreshing the page.

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Addie Wagenknecht (b. 1981; Portland, Oregon) blends conceptual art with forms of hacking and gestural abstraction. Wagenknecht is known for pioneering the use of drones in painting and other mechanized forms of art in the early 2000s while based in New York. She has collaborated with CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research, Switzerland), Chanel, Coinbase, and Google’s Art Machine Intelligence (AMI) Group.

Her works have been collected by and exhibited at institutions including MuseumsQuartier, Vienna; La Gaîté Lyrique, Paris; Istanbul Modern; Whitechapel Gallery, London; the New Museum, New York; and MU Hybrid Art House, Eindhoven, Netherlands. She has been featured in publications such as Time, the Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, Art in America, and the New York Times.

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