Research Critique: Life Sharing

For Life Sharing we turned our private lives into a public artwork – Eva and Franco Mattes

Life Sharing (2000-03) is a work by Eva and Franco Mattes where they opened the contents of their computers to the internet for people to share, look at and download anything and everything including the system itself.

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Life sharing is about exploring ideas of public vs private and also transparency and peer to peer sharing. Created before social media was a thing, Life Sharing focuses on sharing. Unlike social media where sharing reinforces a projection (honest or not) of the user’s self, life sharing is about transparency where everything on their personal computer is accessible including personal emails.

I found this disparity intriguing, how life sharing could be open despite removal of the artists themselves (names were also altered on emails). Their first space selves were private whereas their third space self was laid bare for all to see.