Quick Fix
Dries Depoorter (BE)
Quick Fix is an interactive installation that allows the audience to buy followers or likes for small change in just a few seconds.
The concept of purchasing ready-to-go products from vending machines on the streets is well known. Usually the offered products satisfy our essential or addiction needs; tampons, cigarettes or cold drinks must be available on a bank holiday as much as in the midst of the night.
But is the same true for likes and followers on social media? By approaching Quick Fix in the natural habitat of vending machines, the public space, passers-by can answer this question by listening to or ignoring their inner desire to be popular online. The piece questions the inflation of online attention and the disconnectedness of our personal with our online lives.
Quick Fix is commissioned by Pixelache Festival in Helsinki, where it premiered in 2019.
Dries Depoorter is a Belgian artist and creative technologist living in Ghent. After studying electronics for six years, he switched to media arts at the KASK School of Arts in Ghent, where he graduated in 2015. His work addresses themes such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, social media, privacy and surveillance. Assembling, sharing and experimenting with private data of himself and random people found on the internet, he tackles in a thought-provoking way issues like social identity, big data sharing, encryption and (the lack of) protection of our online privacy. His media installations have been exhibited internationally, recently at the Barbican, Bozar, IDFA Doclab, Ars Electronica, Athens Digital Art Festival, and Heidelberger Kunstverein. He is a lecturer and a speaker at several festivals, and works as a freelance concept provider.