Performance: Antye Guenther – Operation ZWIEBELMUSTER

Photo: Antye Guenther, Operation Zwiebelmuster,2021–25, exhibitionview GfzK Leipzig, Photo: Alexandra Ivanciu

Due to the CoCom embargo, hardly any relevant computer technology made its way into socialist states during the Cold War – at least not through official channels. Among others, the Stasi persuaded Japanese chip manufacturer Toshiba to smuggle plans and components into the GDR. The VEB Forschungszentrum Mikroelektronik Dresden (Dresden Microelectronics Research Centre) finally succeeded in developing the 1-megabit chip in collaboration with VEB Carl Zeiss Jena. Antye Guenther takes the Toshiba scandal as the starting point for a speculative work in which a coffee service becomes a secret data carrier for highly sensitive information.

The performance takes place in the exhibition Robotron. Working Class and Intelligentsia.

Antye Guenther, alias (baby) DATA DIVA, is a glitter-loving knowledge inventor and unreliable narrator, born in a country that no longer exists. Rumour has it that she was once a guinea pig in Soviet brain experiments and now delightedly questions the conditions and fictionalities of Western knowledge and data regimes. With a penchant for mischief, she mischievously crosses disciplinary boundaries, often while producing cheap rhinestone jewellery as part of an ongoing collaborative ‘glitter as (communal) welfare practice’.