Due to the CoCom embargo, hardly any relevant computer technology found its way into socialist states during the Cold War – at least not through official channels. The Stasi persuaded the Japanese chip manufacturer Toshiba, among others, to smuggle plans and components into the GDR. In this way, the VEB Centre for Microelectronics Dresden was able to develop the 1-megabit chip in collaboration with VEB Carl Zeiss Jena. Antye Guenther takes the Toshiba scandal as the starting point for a speculative artwork.
The performance takes place in the exhibition Robotron. Code and Utopia.
Antye Guenther, aka (baby) DATA DIVA, is a glitter-loving knowledge-inventor and unreliable narrator, born in a country that no longer exists. Rumoured to have been a former child test subject in Soviet brain experiments, she now joyfully interrogates the conditions and fictionalities of Western knowledge and data regimes. With a warm fondness for troublemaking, she mischievously crosses disciplinary boundaries, often while crafting cheap-ass rhinestone jewellery as part of an ongoing collaborative glitter-as-(communal)-care-practice.