Constant Dullaart's Target Audience at de Balie, Amsterdam

From 20 September to 31 October, Constant Dullaart's Target Audience (2019) is on view at De Balie in Amsterdam. De Balie is a venue for contemporary arts, politics and culture.

Dullaart explores how online activity can be manipulated to generate social capital. His interventions on social media have shown the impact these platforms have and how they influence us in our daily lives. Additionally, he critically investigates the concept of digital identity, which has gained importance through the daily use of social networks.

With his fake Instagram follower works, Dullaart points to the implications of the attention economy, based on the audience as the ultimate commodity. These handmade banners are physical realizations of fake follower profiles, quilted on flags of different countries, with a female and a male side. Dullaart shows how identities are capitalised and what worrying implications this has, for instance, when buying followers, an American male follower is worth more than an Iranian female. It is also a direct reference to war typology and thus to today’s online wars, an often invisible theme that has a major impact on our contemporary society.

Constant Dullaart (NL, 1979) lives and works in Amsterdam and Berlin. Exploring how social and cultural values reverberate in tools and technology, Dullaart creates works to emphasize an enjoyable friction between old and new, manual and automated, online and offline, real or not. He deconstructs and analyzes the specific human circumstances under which technological instruments are created, and how this influences the way the instruments are consequently used. Dullaart investigates these processes through creating his own ‘artisanal’ social media platform common.garden. Revisiting his research into neural networks, he probes how phenomena like glossolalia and apohenia can create a bridge between person and technology. Dullaart is professor Networked Materialities at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Nürnberg.

More info about the exhibition at de Balie here.

More info images of the works and pricing information here.

Publication date: 18 Oct '24