Freedom: Red, White and Blue (Quantified and Aggregated) is an audiovisual work released on 20 January 2017, the date of Donald Trump’s United States presidential inauguration. All proceeds from the sales of the artwork will be donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The work will be presented at the PyeongChang Biennale in South Korea in February 2017.
To develop Freedom: Red, White and Blue (Quantified and Aggregated), Matthew Biederman sampled each utterance of the word ‘freedom’ from William Klein’s 1969 film Mr Freedom. The artist layered the movie’s audio over custom processed video in which the red, white and blue colours from the samples were extracted, quantified and aggregated over time. The result is an abstract space in which to think about freedom and restriction, ideological and computational aggregation.
The piece from which the digital edition of Freedom: Red, White and Blue (Quantified and Aggregated) derived from was commissioned in 2011 as part of Artissima’s Mr Freedom Summit, a Bétonsalon project curated by Anna Colin. The artist has chosen to re-release the work and donate its proceeds in order to make the themes of freedom and net neutrality resonate within the context of 2017’s political developments.
