The exhibition delves into the traces we leave, often unknowingly, on- and offline. Like Cinderella, who accidentally left a slipper behind as she rushed from the party at midnight. In the exhibition I’ll Recognize Her by Her Dancing Shoe, artist Rune Bering revisits the old fairytale and interprets it through contemporary concerns about privacy and the invisible personal information that we constantly scatter unintentionally across our digital and analogue worlds. In the story, the prince used the lost shoe to track down Cinderella and to identify her as the shiny potential princess-consumer she was behind the veil of ashes and torn clothes. The shoe’s unique fit is an example of metadata: its origin was Cinderella’s foot. Comparable to the abandoned shoe, Rune Bering found a DVD of the Czech 1973 film, Three Wishes for Cinderella while dismantling old laptops for an artwork. The movie was especially popular in East Germany (GDR) and is gaining new popularity today, pointing to a relationship between surveillance and the dangerous romance of being found and recognized. The metadata imbedded in seemingly generic uploaded or printed photographs contains detailed personal information and encompasses GPS location, speed of movement, and height above sea level of its moment of origin. Personal information is a major currency in the global digital economy, where this data is voraciously collected and traded. Through photogravure, laser print and sculpture, Rune Bering continues his artistic exploration of the infrastructures that create the frameworks of meaning of our digital media, cultures, and practices.
