Harris David Harris: d0ntb33vil

Title:

d0ntb33vil

Artist(s) and People Involved:

Creation Year:

2014

Medium:

Site-Specific Installation with Wireless Routers, Custom Software, Digital Video, and Smartphone

Artist Statement:

Since 2005, Silicon Valley’s largest corporations have operated private commuter shuttles between their corporate campuses and San Francisco. In recent years, these so-called “Google buses” have become prominent symbols in the debates surrounding housing displacement, privatization of city services, and the economics of the tech sector. Staged in the spring of 2014, Harris David Harris’s d0ntb33vil is a tactical media intervention that mimics the network names and passwords of the buses in order to temporarily disrupt the daily activities of riders. The work attempts to highlight the particularity of each city space and to gesture toward the consequences of replacing public, embodied environments with privatized virtual worlds.