We started looking into 'Pubilc Interventions' in our art workshop, this week, and we went into a little of the work done by artists with this idea such as Polish artist Krystof Wodizcko (sorry for all mispellings of other people's names), Jeff Walls or Sophie Calle. And then came an assignment onto ourselves to stage our own public intervention!

So we hauled our asses into what is probably the most public area of Gothenburg, called Aveny (i think, the geography of this city is still not so clear to me) where there a soo many pubs, so many shops, and also a library, museum, theatre and a huge statue (pronounced the 'Poseidon', a Greek god, possibly of the sea). So we had to get a feel of the place, get inspired and come up with ideas for a public intervention.

I looked around a bit and got this idea for a very destructive exhibit. I decided to call it simply 'I hate computers'. I tend to get aggravated by the computers sudden misbehaviors... like hanging while doing something important, unexpected error messages, and of course there are the incidents recently with my laptop which is causing me a lot of pain and cost a lot of money. I think that might have triggered this line of thought. So, the idea was to gather some old computers and to put them in this very public space and invite people passing by to come and vent their rage (if they ever felt any) on these machines. Swedish people are very reserved (publicly at least) with their emotions of rage and anger, and this would be also interesting to see if they would do it or not. To test people's appetitte for destruction.


Getting the machines was the major problem of the day of the exhibition. We were supposed to be able to walk to a store room behind our block and see lots of computer components waiting to be taken away and destroyed. But as luck would have it, that place was cleared away two weeks ago, and never to be used to store junk computers again. We got the computers later tho from another campus, and Ivan, Anand and I had a merry tough time carrying them to the place where we would do our little thing.

Then we found a corner behind the massive statue of Poseidon which we liked, and put up our sign by the wall which said "I HATE COMPUTERS" (which weren't attached to the wall with any adhesive, and would get blown away by the breeze!). People noticed this sign, some would stop and see and some would just glance at it while going their own way.

Surprisingly, people took part in it. We tried explaining to them what we were doing and why, and some of them bought it... they had felt the anger at some point and they came forward to destroy the pieces. We had two casings/towers, two monitors (one a Dell, and another a very classic small Mc), and a scanner. One guy climbed up on a tower and the Dell and smashed the other tower into the scanner.






Contradictory to the concept of hating computers, the most enthusiasm was shown by this girl who said 'I looove cooomputers' and she tried to convince us to give the small 'cute' monitor or even the bulky Dell monitors to her! But later, it turned out that she had the biggest appetite for destruction! She tried to crack the Dell's screen with the heel of her boots while her other friends kept it steady. Then two of them climbed up to a higher point to throw the monitor down from there! You can see that from the picture to the left.

She did not stop there. She started inviting other people to have a try at this! And we did not even ask her to help us! We thank her a lot, since her inviting in Swedish probably did more than our invitations.

An old lady stopped by on the invitation of Alberto (the one who is conducting the workshop) to give a mild kick to one the things.


An old businessman had none of it. According to him, his machine never misbehaves and he never gets angry! Which is good of course, i think. :)



Here are pictures of the damage: