freebeer, projected — the label thrown large into the room at a Bring Your Own Beamer night.
2013 – 2015
A beer brand that does not exist and a product that, for a while, did — free as in freedom, not only free as in beer. Two series, one label: the found face of the internet, poured into a can.
concept
rich kids beer was always freebeer — like free in freedom. The old free-software line draws a line between two kinds of free: free as in free beer, and free as in free speech. This project drinks on both sides of it. It is a brand that does not exist and a product that, for a while, really did: labels built from the found images of the network, printed onto real cans, filled, and handed over as something you finish and throw away.
Two series run under the one name. freebeer (and one donut) puts the protagonists of internet freedom on the can — the whistleblowers, hackers and pioneers who fought over what "free" means online. rich kids beer turns the other way, to the wealth-display of the Rich Kids of Instagram, and says: drink the rich. Freedom and money, the two things the network is loudest about, each reduced to a returnable bottle.
The found image of the internet is the raw material; the brand is the form; the can is the readymade. The lineage runs from Duchamp's readymade and Warhol's brand into the everyday image-stream of the network.
the root · die neue ehrlichkeit shown at · digital3mpire the economy of the image · the gift
series one · free as in freedom
Beer cans printed with the protagonists of internet freedom — figures who were, and in part still are, relevant to the fight over what "free" means online. Whistleblowers and hackers next to the pioneers of the net: Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, Aaron Swartz, Laura Poitras, Jacob Appelbaum, the Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg — beside Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf, Linus Torvalds, and, on the other side of the glass, Mark Zuckerberg and Eric Schmidt. And, once, a donut: Assange and Snowden simply having a beer. A later release answered the 2015 Landesverrat affair with cans for the netzpolitik.org editors Markus Beckedahl and André Meister.
the video
A video work accompanying the series, streamed as part of the SPAMM — Super Modern Art Museum programme.
freebeer enlightenment — watch the video on spamm.fr ↗
series two · drink the rich
The other side of the same coin: ten labels, made between September 2014 and March 2015, each from a single Rich Kids of Instagram post — private jets, the breakfast at Dior, the Lamborghini, the yacht, the pool. The post is never retouched; the only intervention is the neon wordmark laid over it — green, cyan, red, magenta, the light of the bar sign — and that is enough to turn the boast into a brand. Eat the rich becomes an invitation to consume: drink the rich, swallow the image whole, and throw the bottle away.
The raw material is the Rich Kids of Instagram post, taken whole — the gilded frame, the caption, the share buttons and hashtags all left in place, so the operation stays legible.
the edition
The brand left the screen. The labels were printed and glued to real bottles and cans, filled with real beer, and editioned. What began as a montage ended as an object you could hold, open, and drink: the found image reduced to a returnable bottle.
in the world
First it was poured. Edition 1 was shown in 2013 at the LSDSL show — the co-curated exhibition "the worst tumblr ever" — where the bottles stood in a row on a plinth, before a wall papered with internet images, and the guests drank the rich. Then the edition was shown in the dark of a Bring Your Own Beamer night, among the projections of the digital3mpire circle — the animated label thrown large onto the wall. And finally it was carried outside and left in the street, lying on the pavement, photographed like litter. The finished commodity completing its cycle: poured, exhibited, emptied, discarded.
shown at · LSDSL / collaborations
projects — floriankuhlmann.com