Felix Gärtner is the cyber-artist represented by @wearecollectiveinterest who immerses us a new 5G universe in which he has created from own colour systems to bubbles of stranger & random people pictures. Born in the 90's Germany and based in London, he has taken photography to a new paradigm with his digital visual language where to find portraits, enigmas about data security, futuristic fashion sequences or #JWWG videos that showcase his love for everyday scenes through his exciting and surrealistic view of reality. All that remains us is waiting for his next banging projects.

What are the main influences behind your cyber-aesthetic / digital visual language?
I love glitches! While the whole tech and internet industry aims to create an ultra-slick, ultra-fast, ultra-whatever user experience, I love hunt for the little mishaps and moments in-between which are still present in our 5G world. If you pay attention to this stuff the variety of sources can be huge – for example I draw from Snapchat, Photoshop, damaged digital files, extremely slow internet connections or simply the interface of my computer. The results are often connected to portrait photography which is an important part of my work too, whereas the ’Color System’ could be seen as a graphic work which deals with photography in a broader sense.

Tell us a bit about your current exhibition 'Nothing's Lost in Numbers'. Can we really cover our tracks on the Internet or delete all data from a memory card? What role does the voyeur play in the artistic performance?
The starting point for the whole project 'Nothing's Lost in Numbers' is a very practical one: after a shooting I accidentally formatted one of the memory cards before saving the photos. I was pretty sure that either all the images were gone or I would have to pay some special firm hundreds of Pounds to restore at least parts of the data. After some research I came across all these cheap, consumer-friendly recovery software you can download everywhere – and they worked incredibly well, bringing back even long forgotten photos from two years ago. This was the eye-opening ’what-if-moment’ that made us think about all the ’sleeping’ data out there. Over the following months my project partner Romano Dudaš (@bureaumano) and I purchased 31 used memory cards on eBay from sellers all over the world and ran them through the software. What you are able to see in the exhibition at Galerie Kernweine (galerie-kernweine.com) is obviously not intended for your eyes. We use this very potent trigger to get peoples attention and to lure them into the intimate ’image bubble’ we created. This automatically makes the visitor a bit of a creepy voyeur and evokes the uncomfortable thought ’could it also be my pictures on the wall?’. The project challenges our awareness when it comes to our own data security and poses the question whether the act of deleting has any meaning in the digital realm and if it’s even possible.

How much do we care about managing our digital footprint anymore? By using a secure file erasure software we can destroy all data from a memory device, but what about the digital information of your drunk selfie you just deleted from last nights Instagram story? Are we still able to cover our tracks on the Internet, or will part of us live on forever on the servers in Silicon Valley?

Through your revolutionary 'Color System' series, how do you associate each color with a different phrase / significance? What is the overall meaning of the art-piece?
I specify certain search terms – ranging from pop culture to some of the most pressing issues of todays society – then Google Images does its magic by replacing every single picture with a color field while the page is loading. I take screenshots of this in-between moment, which leaves me with color fields accompanied by their original captions or in other words from that point on the colors on the screen have new ’names’. In the next step the screenshots get split up by rearranging single, visually similar colors into panels that look similar to a family tree or an actual color system.

The central theme of the work is the disruption of the superficial harmony that is suggested by these simple, visually satisfying arrangement of colors. As soon as the viewer starts reading the 'names' of the colors, this harmony and logic falls apart. The attention starts shifting from the bewildering color-text-combinations to the even greater, content-based text-text-contrast inside the panel. The color system can be seen as an attempt to illustrate the exhausting, frustrating task of processing todays constant stream of filtered and unfiltered information across all types of mass media.

Why that fixation in workers and unknown / random people for your portraits? What do you want to express through works like 'Pre Brexit America'?
I started taking portraits of strangers when I moved to Lisbon, Portugal in 2013 for a semester abroad. I had not been there before, did not know anybody there and I had arrived a couple weeks before classes started. What might not sound like a lot of fun, was actually an incredibly intense, inspiring and instructive time for me as a photographer. I think it was the combination of being a bit lost and the positive excitement of living in a new environment that made me observe the people around me in much greater detail. It became my goal to find a portrait style which would basically work everywhere on the globe, day and night, for the next years to build my own portrait archive. By now portraits of strangers are often the only images I bring back from abroad – to me they are a great way to remember places and stories.

The ongoing video series #JWWG showcases my obsessive love for the beauty of unspectacular, ofter overlooked, boring everyday scenes around construction sites… it could not be more random, but you have to admit there is a special charm to it?! ’Pre Brexit America’ not a specific body of work. It is just a working title, which I ended up putting under all the images I took while being in the US just a few days before the original Brexit date 29 March 2019. I like how the title describes a very specific place and at the same time a not so specific time in history.

Which project has been the most exciting of your artistic career?
’Nothing’s Lost in Numbers’ was very special. Every time a new parcel from eBay arrived we were super excited but also scared to see what the recovery software would be able to dig up. Another point was the responsibility of finding ways to work with the enormous amount of images without exposing the individual on the one hand, on the other hand not to limit the potency of the project. The extend of positive feedback from the German press was fantastic and confirmed the urgency of a discussion about the digital traces we leave especially on the internet.

What are you working on next? Where do you see or would u like to see the Felix Gartner of the future?
While developing my style of photography I did not plan to become a fashion photographer, I just worked on my personal portrait archive. I am not a fashion enthusiast, fashion expert or whatsoever but as a photographer and artist I always admired the fusion between the art of fashion and the art of photography. Then about two years ago I started to think about potentially bringing together my photo style with the fashion world. Shooting for @deadwhitemensclothes in 2018 was kind of a milestone for me – it enabled me to carefully adapt the photographic look of my portraits to the full range of campaign imagery. Repeating this process for example for Sinead Gorey a few weeks ago was just great and I definitely plan to make fashion photography an important part of my work. Since early 2019 I am represented by Collectiveinterest artist management (@wearecollectiveinterest) in Berlin, which was another big step for me regarding the orientation of my photographic work.

For the future I would love to create a balance between personal artistic work, doing long term projects like the ’Color System’ and ’Nothing’s Lost in Numbers’, and working together with inspiring, bold brands across the globe.