Arantxa Gonlag

“It felt like I was living in a city without a map and without any form of municipality. No one in charge and everywhere I look there are cables, hundreds, thousands, kilometers of cables,” says Dutch photographer and visual artist Arantxa Gonlag. For her graduation project at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam (2014) she started investigating the way we trustingly and indifferently put all our personal information on the internet. For her latest project Data Diary Gonlag searched for the physical locations of her own digital data and tried to follow her internet cable for as long as possible. This search brought her not only to data centers but also to the beach sides where the international cables come to shore. During this search questions arose about our digital identity and (the importance of) our privacy. Who’s got the control and how safe is this control? She tried to find the answers to these questions and wrote down her findings and feelings in a diary. This diary contains images of the places she visited and metadata about her location during specific times.

www.arantx.com