Dataghost 2, 2016

French collective RYBN.orgpresent Dataghost 2, a work which essentially questions the rationality of technology systems. Dataghost 2 is an introspective, recursive and kabbalistic computational machine. It tirelessly studies every single written trace of its internal activity, the logs. The exegesis of those logs gives form to a series of compulsive commands, which are frenetically executed.
The machine generates and shapes fragments of codes following the ancient hermeneutic techniques of kabbalah, the Gematria. It operates by alpha-numerical transformations, associations and substitutions of signs, to interpret the different kinds of logs (of the dameons, the kernel, the network, the authorisations, etc.), generating in the process millions of shell commands, mostly incoherent or nonfunctional.
However, from time to time, and despite of their heretical syntax, certain of the generated tasks manage to be executed. It is the performative dimension of the computational language that comes to life in their execution. At this precise moment, the machine achieves the invocation ritual of a digital Golem.
The ritual puts the machine at risk, as the executed commands might saturate the memory capacity of the machine, provoke a definitive stop within the software layer, or overpass several critical limits that results in an overheating of certain electronic components, or lead to the destruction of parts of its physical layers.
This self-destructive activity is revealed by the continuous print of all the different commands in the exhibition space, until the definitive and inevitable stop of the system.

RYBN.ORG (FR)
°1999, Parijs

In 1999-2000 the extra-disciplinary artistic research platform RYBN.ORG opgestart. is created in Paris. In its interactive installations, its digital and analogue performances and interfaces the platform explores the world of high-frequency economics and information technologies. RYBN’s practice exists of writing esoteric datamining algorithms, inserting suicidal trading machines into financial markets, perverting neural networks and hunting ghosts in the noise of data traffic. With their work, RYBN.ORG tries to deconstruct and to subvert the ideology that lies behind the cybernetic capitalism.