Portfolio: Since you were born

Abstract

In today’s context of digital imagery access and exchange in high-speed flux, Evan Roth’s series Since You Were Born addresses the everyday digital production of images by exploring the concept of the internet cache as a self portrait. This is a project he has been developing since 2014, when his second daughter was born, and it is presented in room-sized installations displaying non hierarchised and uncensored images, texts and data from the artist’s own online search history. 

Contradicting the meaning of the word itself – since “cache” is a collection of hidden things, or, in computing terms, a temporarily stored memory which is not supposed to last –, Roth shares a very personal depiction of himself through his online behaviour throughout nearly a decade. Built with the use of an algorithm, the installation presents a stream of photographs of the artist’s friends and family, together with a varied collection of images, including corporate logos, advertisements and maps searches, among others, revealing what can be seen as personal preferences and patterns regarding the person conducting the web searches. 

Displaying in a material form that which should be an ephemeral, digital and personal archive, Roth’s installation impacts the visitor with the vast amount of images we are exposed to intentionally and unintentionally when surfing the web. Encouraging people to think about their own relationship with technology is one of the main subjects of Roth’s works, who has received a degree in architecture from University of Maryland and a MFA from the Communication, Design and Technology school at Parsons The New School for Design. He has worked at the Eyebeam OpenLab, a not-for-profit art and technology centre in New York City, in which he has worked with graffiti, open source technology and the public space, and has received grants and awards, such as the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award (2012), and most recently the Neustart Kultur Stipendium of Stiftung Kunstfonds (2022).