OWE ME EVERYTHING

Solo exhibition by Manja Ebert

At: Projektraum Alte Feuerwache, Marchlewskistraße 6, 10243 Berlin - Friedrichshain

Duration: November 29, 2024 – February 2, 2025

Curated by Peggy Schoenegge (peer to space)

The sharing and consumption of personal content has become an integral part of our daily lives. We post photos on Instagram, participate in video challenges on TikTok, and read posts on the microblogging platform X. Social networks and the underlying technologies have become an expanded arena that shapes our interactions. However, this does not occur solely through the direct interplay of individual users. Behind every online interaction lie technological processes: data is collected and leveraged with the help of algorithms and AI to steer our behavior. These processes largely remain invisible, even though they fundamentally shape how we present ourselves and interact with each other.

The artist Manja Ebert engages with these hidden mechanisms and brings them to light. Her sculptural media installations critically reflect the nature of current technologies and analyze the structures of social networks. In this context, Ebert explores the impact of digital media on our social order, illustrating how they shape our understanding of society and reality. She visualizes the connections between digital phenomena, the implied (power) structures of the media, and technological influences. Within these interrelations, our values shift, creating a new societal image that becomes visible in her works.

At the core of her artistic exploration is the self-construction through digital technologies and their intertwining with embedded surveillance techniques. She reveals how our self-perception is now tied to the media. To do this, Manja Ebert often uses found footage from various entertainment platforms, which she links with reflective perspectives to make visible the tension between online and offline and to highlight the relevance of media. Ebert shows how these changes not only affect self-representation but also penetrate the psychological and social processes of users. Thus, the urge for self-presentation becomes a central theme in her work, while she simultaneously exposes the underlying technological processes—such as data generation and surveillance.

The exhibition Owe Me Everything makes the intricate, sometimes playful entanglement of consumption, production, and constant data collection in social networks tangible, bringing the significance of these processes to the forefront. Behind the alluring potentials of new media — such as global connectivity and the boundless, instant access to information — lies a sophisticated interplay of major tech giants like Google and Meta, whose economic success relies on our behavior online. These companies not only create an infrastructure that offers us seemingly endless possibilities for action and entertainment but also exploit the data we generate daily to optimize their business models. Every click, every interaction becomes a golden resource that captures users precisely and makes them more transparent. From the flood of collected information, detailed profiles emerge, allowing companies to not only analyze but also dictate and predict our behavior. In this system, we users seemingly take on a passive role. Owe Me Everything asks the question: What role do we want to play in a system that, on the one hand, offers us the technological potentials of our post-digital era, but on the other, increasingly controls and monitors us? How much control do we want to retain, and who, in fact, owes whom?

Image credits: Bernd Bochardt