Street Art Project, since 2018

Plastic, NFC chip, film

Funded by the Stiftung Kunstfonds, Bonn

Animals have always developed strategies to make themselves invisible using perfect camouflage. The digital age raises the question of what it means for people "to be visible" today. What consequences do visibility and invisibility have and how do they change people? Will it become our second nature to be constantly public and always accessible?

Thousands of small figures were manufactured industrially for the project "hide in plain sight".
The cross between a human and an insect, as if conceived in a surreal comic, carries an NFC chip* in its wing pattern, resembling an eyespot on some butterflies.

If this chip is scanned with a smartphone, it opens a 4-minute film on the phone's display that combines a text collage (including quotes from H.G. Wells's "The Invisible Man" and Günther Anders's "Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen") with motifs of mimesis and metamorphosis.

Using an international distribution system, the figures are released into the public space, either individually or in small groups. They crawl inconspicuously on facades in Zagreb and on walls in Berlin, suddenly appear in a Graz museum locker and on a New York library window, or find themselves on a relief in Buenos Aires and the portal of the Prehistoric Museum in Viareggio...

Sooner or later, passers by take most of the figures away, which is planned and certainly intended.

* Near Field Communication, or NFC, is an international transfer standard for the contact-free exchange of data using wireless technology over short distances.