Niko Princen, Vlinder

If you download and open the app named ‹Vlinder› (Dutch for butterfly) on your smartphone, all you see at first is the message that there is nothing to be seen here. But eventually the butterfly passes through and is seen in your camera image – in other words, wherever you and your smartphone happen to be. The butterfly soon flits to the closest smartphone with Vlinder, «ad infinitum». Vlinder creates a network of unknown individuals, each of whom plays a part in keeping a delicate butterfly alive. This work makes palpable (both in a very friendly, but also a bit uncanny way) that we ourselves are always part of human-machine networks that buzz with data. But the work can also be understood as a plea for the delicate, fragile and ephemeral amidst a garish, attention-based economy.

shortlist net based 2017