Flight Mode

Régine Debatty, Belgian curator, critic and blogger, writes about the art of Evan Roth, focusing on his TSA Communication project. Evan Roth is a graffiti artist, a hacker and an open source coder. He believes in the free circulation of anything that is digital. His works with F.A.T. lab steer attention onto the fantastic five – Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft – and related issues with humor and a mix of digital and analogic practices. In TSA Communication, he has taken his artistic creativity inside one of the most controlled and liberty-killing places in our contemporary world: airports and airplanes. He has managed to alter the airport security experience, inviting the government to learn more about passengers rather than just inspecting the contents of their carry-on bags. His works prove that hacker culture is democratic and that it should exist outside computers in order to question infrastructures and to go beyond rigid regulations.