Life Sharing (2000-2003)

«Life Sharing is abstract pornography» Hito Steyerl

In January 2001 we started sharing our personal computer through our website. Everything was visible: texts, photos, music, videos, software, operating system, bank statements and even our private email. People could take anything they wanted, including the system itself, since we were using only free software. It was not a normal website, you were entering the computer in our apartment, seeing everything live. It was a sort of endurance performance that lasted 3 years, 24/7.

Previously we were re-using and mixing other people’s work, while now we were sharing everything with everybody.

Working with a computer on a daily basis, over the years you will share most of your time, your culture, your relationships, your memories, ideas and future projects. With the passing of time a computer starts resembling its owner's brain. So we felt that sharing our computer was more than sharing a desktop or a book, more than File Sharing, something we called Life Sharing.

No social network existed at the time, and Life Sharing felt rather absurd, if not plain wrong.

You could read all our emails. People often happened to read them before we did, like when we were traveling. There was definitely a lot of voyeurism involved (and, I guess, exhibitionism on our side).

Some Life Sharing screenshots and software experiments:

To extend the idea of exposing ourselves we started wearing a GPS transmitter that was sending our coordinates to the website. Anyone could follow in real time our movements around the world.

Performing at Manifesta, Frankfurt (2002)

Access logs is where you could see how many people were viewing Life Sharing, where they came from, what they were watching, how much time they were spending there etc. etc. We were totally obsessed with traffic logs, waking up in the middle of the night to check "the traffic":