More old paper
In January, 1920, Ilse Kluge had or managed 244,707.85 Papiermarks. Germany was in the midst of hyper-inflation. In 1914, 244,700 Papiermarks would have been worth roughly $5,826 USD. By 1923, it would have declined to less than $0.05 USD.
Between 1st October, 1882 and 16th March, 1883, Minna Wollf, born 27th August in Teltow, Stiegliz, missed zero days of school, wasn’t late once, and received neither special praise nor reprimands.
I’m fascinated by the old papers I’ve been finding in our flea markets lately.
As I go through them, I feel an interesting conversation starting to happen. We’re all becoming more aware of how our private data is being collected and used by giant tech & advertising companies. The geolocation data our phones generate, our online browsing history, and the databases companies we have accounts with being hacked and giving up our social security numbers & bank accounts - this is data that’s being traded and used without our consent or knowledge. It’s data that should belong to us.
And here I am, finding these once-private, once-important documents in old suitcases and in mouldy cardboard boxes. At some point this data stopped being important to someone, and it wound up in a flea market, and then in my hands.
My first reaction to these papers is aesthetic. They’re old. They have lovely typography, and incredibly nice handwriting. The corners are yellowed and they have creases. They’re “vintage porn” (not “vintage” porn). On a purely visual level, scans of this stuff is all over Etsy and scrapbooking sites. Lots of people (myself included) think “old stuff” looks cool and a ledger book from 1920 scratches that itch.
I think there can be something more happening here though. There’s the possibility of a conversation about data, why it’s okay (or not okay) for me to use someone’s private information in my artwork, and then why it’s not okay (or is it) for Amazon to sell my browsing data to a health insurance company. This conversation’s certainly not explicit in my work, but it’s looming larger and larger in my mind as I select papers to use and think about what to do with them. I’ll use this blog to think through some of these ideas. Stay tuned!
(There’s another part of this, in which I’m consciously choosing to use only the increasingly fewer pieces of paper I have and not scans or reproductions of them - but that’s for another blog post.)