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  Ghost Hardware

  Anika starts with broad brushstrokes.

  A swipe of her hand is enough to brush away the initial debris on the face of the billboard—hastily scrawled felt-tip pen tags, random stickers, cartoon monkey faces, and ironically pixelated icons—until the surface is clean and nothing interferes with the now-pristine Volkswagen advertisement that fills the twenty-by-ten-foot space. She pauses, not knowing where next to focus her efforts. She has only reached back a matter of days, and the VW branding still appears relatively fresh. Undisturbed topsoil. Pulling this first layer down completely would take too long—a noob error. Better to invite an element of chance, to make seemingly random exploratory digs. She reaches out to the far right side of the board. Her hand physically falls well short of the actual distance, but the gesture is enough for the software to suss what she means.

  In response, the image tears, paper-like, at the edge of the board. A long, thin section of the torn edge begins to curl back toward her, flapping lazily in the cold air. She jerks her arm back and, with convincing momentum and a satisfyingly synthesized rrriiippp, the tear cuts across the billboard’s surface. The torn material frees itself, curls and flaps like a Chinese dragon taking flight. It flees to her left down Oudezijds Voorburgwal, as if assisted by a nonexistent gust of wind, like it knows its fate: it dissolves in the air, pixels turned to particles, scattered by lazy Brownian motion across the surface of the dark canal.

  History, nothing else. The present discarded.

  Anika steps back, just slightly. At first the billboard looks like the flag of some long-failed state, the relatively sparse white space of the VW poster horizontally bisected by a thick strip of red. But when she looks closer she can see the software-calculated tear marks between the red and the white, where the app has decided the outer skin of the paper has come free, exposing compacted wood-pulp fibers. Irregular, erratic, unnecessarily complicated white borderlands between two disputing territories on a map. She smiles at the irony—if there is any dispute here, it’s over time, not space. Relevance and redundancy rather than land and control.

  Her second tear is vertical, from the top to the bottom, crossing the first to exaggerate—perhaps subconsciously—the flag effect. This second rip goes deeper, though; where it crosses the first a third layer is exposed, a rough square of tropical blue sky meeting golden sands, the hint of bronzed flesh. Now the surface reminds Anika of a child’s pass-the-parcel prize, cheap wrapping paper impatiently mauled at by sticky infantile fingers while the music pauses.

  She doesn’t give it too much thought and starts to work faster. She knows without even glancing at the clock that hangs in her periphery that she needs to dig deeper—much deeper. These advert layers are superficial, fleeting in their inherent disposability, each paper-thin strata little more than a couple of weeks, at most a month. Barely measurable on the archaeological scale. She needs to go back years.

  As she continues to rip—forgotten textures cascading into the acidic air—she makes claws with her fingers, and the app instantly senses her urgency. Now she’s shadow-tearing away layers an inch deep, the numbers on the floating digital clock spinning back in a blur of skeuomorphic, rose-tinted LED kitsch while the air fills with the dissolving shrapnel of corporate identity.

  Within two minutes she’s gone back roughly five years, according to the clock. She pauses, catches her breath. Looks at the mess she’s uncovered/created. The entirety of the billboard’s surface is now chaos, a collage of torn material, like someone has rooted around in a paper-recycling vat and pulled out everything they could before throwing it at a paste-soaked surface. Scruffy, virtual paper shards flap lazily in a simulated breeze. At first it aggravates her, the unregulated explosion of not just colors but textures—the different adverts seem to have been printed on a range of subtly varied material. In places they intersect with stickers and spray-painted throw-ups, creating map contour lines. The effect is like gazing down into valleys and weather-eroded inlets. Snatches of language flow down typographical riverbeds, rain and grime stains cut circular bays into patchwork fields made from long-forgotten club-night flyers and hookers’ calling cards. Infinite fucking detail. She wants to reach out and touch it all, to run her fingers over the rough rust spots, the sodden paper, the smooth domes of dried paint drips, but she resists. There’s nothing to feel. Plus she’s unsure how the app would interpret even the smallest of intimate, caressing gestures.

  Instead she removes her spex, rubs the bridge of her nose. The mess is gone in an instant; only the VW advert of the LEGO-like self-driving electric Polo car floating in weightless Kubrickian white space remains. Time has been traveled. For the first time in a while she’s aware of the micro-drones floating above her; a swarm of six, flitting like hummingbirds on whirring quad-rotors, recording and broadcasting her every move. She makes a mental note to check her follower count, but when she returns the spex to her face and the mess returns, that’s quickly forgotten.

  There’s a certain beauty to it, she admits reluctantly to herself, even though it bites against her usual leanings for aesthetic minimalism. She’s looking for signs now, clues for what might lie below what has already been exposed. Ripping and tearing has gotten her this far, but any further unguided excavation could be dangerous. The last thing she wants is to dig too deep, to damage what she’s looking for and force a rewind, especially not with a live audience.

  So she scans it. At first, as always, she tries to be methodological, systematic, but her mutinous eyes refuse; they dart across it semi-randomly. She reminds herself to allow for chance.

  It pays off. In less than twenty seconds she’s found something: a rough triangle, about four inches on each side, caught between cloud-insurance blue and unmistakable Chocomel-brand yellow. A triangle of black and white, executed with carefully hand-guided spray from a can with stencil-like precision. The telltale sign.

  Anika blinks through the drop-down menus in her periphery. In her hand appears an archaeologist’s brush, a long slim handle with a mass of black bristles, soft yet wiry. Slowly and patiently she works at the area around the black and white triangle, skillfully flicking away pixels that fall away as blue and yellow dust. Her hours of practice are paying off; the area starts to expand, more contrasting stencil lines emerging before her eyes. After a few more minutes she’s revealed enough to be sure she’s on target. She flips the brush over in her hand, using its flat, pointed tip to pry away at the layer above. It’s frustrating at first, like trying to find the end of a roll of Scotch tape, but satisfying when eventually a section big enough to grasp between her thumb and index finger peels away. She teases it at first, gently separating it from the billboard, hoping the tear doesn’t run. She ends up just pulling away a few inches’ worth. She holds her breath for a few tense seconds, and no rip comes. Accompanied by the damp sound of wet wallpaper disobediently freeing itself, the whole layer—and the many fragments adhered upon it—comes away, dissolves, is forgotten.

  Buried treasure unearthed.

  Even though she knew what to expect, she’s a little disappointed at first. The sleek image of a U.S. strike drone is angled slightly along its axis so its long, straight wings reach up and down to form a cross, a bright green olive branch in its beak. It makes Anika think of flags again. A flag sewn from a billion dollars of semi-autonomous military hardware. She can’t tell what poster it’s been painted on top of, so much of it has been blacked out.

  Anika almost sneers at the graffiti’s naive, simplistic political sentiment. With a blink, she switches into ghost mode.

  The sky above Oudezijds Voorburgwal darkens, the canal’s waters turn black, neon reflections shimmer on its surface. She’s punched herself in at the date the clock was showing when she pulled the final layer away, 2:00 a.m. Too early, but best to come in too soon. Her hand works an imaginary jog wheel and everything goes into time-lapse—ghost figures walk up and down the pathways, moving impossibly fast, stopping too suddenly, blinking in and out of existence. 3:00 a.m. The dark cloudscape above her shifts like water churned up by subaquatic propellers. 3:45. The reflections on the canal start to strobe. 3:58.

  She releases the jog wheel as a ghostly figure appears in front of her, its translucent bulk blocking her view of the billboard. It’s him, she knows. His hands hang at his sides, fingers flecked with black and white paint, holding similarly splattered cans. He’s wearing a baggy stormsuit, his limbs highlighted principally by the Adidas triple stripe. His head is hidden inside a fur-lined hood.

  Beyond him on the billboard hang three shapes, insectlike and mechanical. They’re billboard beetles, the most infamous of his tools, graffiti cleanup robots hacked into autonomous spray cans. They s curry away on the surface, their movement an unsettling mélange of mechanical precision and animal erraticism. In their wake they leave sections of the drone image in the same black and white patterns that have been painted onto their plastic shells, simultaneously evoking bar codes and savanna grassland camouflage.

  She pauses time. Edges around the figure to try and catch his face, two of the micro-drones following her. No luck. It’s unpixelated, at least, but hidden by his tinted spex and bulky, paint-splattered industrial respirator mask that looks like a prop from a pre-millennial science fiction movie, nostalgia for a lost industrial future.

  Disappointing. But expected. Two more chances.

  She flips out of ghost mode, back into excavation, daylight returning, and looks back at the finished bombing. Drone cross, green olive branch. She blinks to take a reality grab, then blinks a few more times to post it to the watching world, vocalizing tags as she does: “#amsterdam #graffiti #street_art #naive #activism #drones #hippysters #simplistic #stencil #beetles #changetheworldLOL #occupy #politicLOL #3Cube.”

  Sonic Acts 2023, Amsterdam—Forgotten Futures

  Performance—Excavating 3Cube

  Artist—Anika Bernhardt

  Location—Citywide/live stream

  In association with—Quartier Latin Studios, NL

  Opening the festival, and exploring our chosen theme of Forgotten Futures, Sonic Acts 2023 is thrilled to present renowned social media performance artist Anika Berhardt’s real-time piece Excavating 3Cube, live from the streets of Amsterdam.

  Using the groundbreaking Urban Archaeology AR app developed by Quartier Latin Studios, Berhardt will attempt to unearth what are considered to be the final works of infamous British street artist 3Cube in real time, to SA2013 attendees as well as a global audience. It promises to be a unique experience as well as a stunning demonstration of what the city’s best developers can produce.

  About Anika Berhardt

  Anika Bernhardt has been working in performance art for just four years, but has already achieved critical acclaim worldwide for pieces such as Waiting for Buses: 3 Continents and the controversial, perpetual game art Stalk Me, now in its second continuous year of play and with over a quarter of a million active followers. Utilizing first- and third-person spex cam footage, timeline posts, and vanity drones, her work argues that social media has made not just all public, but also private, life a continuous stream of artistic performance.

  >>Blink for more<<

  About 3Cube

  Born and raised in the graffiti mecca of Bristol, British street artist 3Cube gained his earliest recognition in the medium of digital AR, hijacking QR codes on corporate advertising billboards to present his work to an often unsuspecting audience. Although he would transition to two-dimensional painting in his later career, 3Cube gained wider recognition through the use of hacked utility drones and maintenance robots to create illegal public art on unprecedented scales, while always questioning the barriers between public and corporate spaces. After taking his work across Europe, he was pursued by fans and law enforcement agencies alike. The anonymous artist vanished over six years ago. Theories suggest he left for one of the Future 3 nations: Brazil, India, or China. However, nothing that can be unquestionably identified as his work has emerged in any of these territories at this time.

  >>Blink for more<<

  About Urban Archaeology

  Developed by Amsterdam-based Quartier Latin Studios, the Urban Archaeology spex app has already made headlines with its revolutionary, if often controversial, data-mining technology. By cross-referencing archive imagery from Google Street View with publicly accessible web and social media content, it allows the wearer to step back in time while observing the urban environment around them. Particularly popular with street art aficionados, its gesture interface allows users to peel away architectural surfaces to expose long-lost, painted-over, or removed murals.

  In Excavating 3Cube, Anika Berhardt will be unveiling the app’s new ghost mode, still currently in beta, which allows the user to also see moving 3-D imagery of past events reconstructed from the unearthed data, in an attempt to finally reveal the identity of the elusive artist.

  The next dig site is Leidseplein, just a short walk away.

  It’s the American Hotel, a 120-year-old homage to the Berlage style, an atemporal mismatch of neo-Gothicism and modernist architecture. Anika vaguely remembers when 3Cube’s piece was up; it was quite hard to miss, even if its life span was fleeting.

  She stands in the middle of the square taking deep breaths, blanking out the passing commuters and bumbling squads of stoned tourists. She looks straight at one of the huge building’s corners as she raises her hands into the air. Ignoring the hotel’s intricate stylings, she treats it as though it’s one huge solid cube, placing her hands so that from her point of view it looks as though each one is grasping the top of the two intersecting corner-forming walls. She makes her hands into claws again and starts to exert downward pressure. Gently at first. There’s no feedback from her hands or arms, obviously, but she can tell from just looking that it’s not enough. A little more.

  The tops of the walls start to crack, then crumble, the aging facade falling away in small chunks at first, smashing into pixel dust as they hit Leidseplein’s cobbled floor. She could just tug away at the whole thing a little at a time, ripping away chunks of masonry to get at what’s beneath, but she’s conscious of her audience of followers. This is performance art, after all.

  She concentrates on her arm movements, assuring she continues to ramp up the pressure while keeping the downward movement fluid, steady. At first the walls seem to bend and flex outward as she unzips the building. The corner unravels like a seam, but then the simulated momentum is too much; both sides of the building start to collapse under their own weight. Huge sections of wall are falling away now, and as they do she’s reminded of early-century Hollywood action movies that tugged at consumer heartstrings with computer-generated 9/11 sense-memories. As the sections hit the ground, they explode into dust, and before she knows it a huge storm cloud of fragments and debris is rolling across Leidseplein toward her, swallowing up oblivious pedestrians and loiterers. In a few short seconds she’s covered by it herself, day turning to night as pixels extinguish the sun. In the disorienting darkness inside of the cloud she allows herself a sly grin, satisfied not just with her performance, but also with the fleeting moments of quiet and solitude.

  And they are fleeting. As quickly as it rolled over her the cloud is gone, leaving no traces of debris as the displaced masonry dissolves into air. She looks back at the hotel, now a flat cube plastered on both visible walls with huge KLM branding, white and blue. A smiling stewardess stands in front of a faux-augmented-reality global map, countless dotted lines expanding out from Schiphol, and she’s instantly reminded of old images of massive NORAD display screens, similar lines tracing the lazy but unstoppable reentry arcs of world-destroying intercontinental ballistic missiles.

  The huge wrap-around billboard, seven stories high, is made from panels, a grid of rectangles affixed to the scaffolding they used while applying some nano-particle-based anti-weathering treatment to the hotel’s exterior back in ’19. She checks the clock—with that one quick, ostentatious move she’s gone back five years. She must be only weeks away. Smaller steps from here on.

  She returns her hands to the top of the walls, exerts downward pressure again. This time as the walls flex out they quickly break into their individual panels, each seeming to pop away from its supporting frame and hanging in the air for a fraction of a second before falling and dissolving.

  Underneath is another grid. Unmistakable red and white Coca-Cola branding replaces the KLM-sponsored global annihilation. She repeats the gestures; panels fall, dissolve. Coca-Cola becomes HSBC. Again. HSBC becomes BMW. Again. BMW becomes IBM. She continues, dismissing branding to history.

  And then she’s there. Pay dirt.

  The two-sided billboard is white, but filled with a pattern that emanates from its center, like the rays of a stylized rising sun. Anika strides forward to get a closer look. The pattern is made up of strike-drone silhouettes, flying overhead from one point on the horizon, becoming larger as they approach—a massive squadron of them, all black against the white, almost blocking out the pale sky. Again, the whole image is monochrome apart from one bright glimpse of green, as one lone drone, near the top of the whole image, holds a wilting olive branch in its bulbous non-beak.

 

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