Dietmar Offenhuber’s work considers city dwellers’ unscrutinized habits and behaviors. “Urban Entropy” is an effort to visually portray common, everyday urban “griping”—i.e. complaints submitted by individual citizens to the powers that be. The source of his raw material was the database of the city’s Schau auf Linz website that enables locals to call attention to deficiencies around town. Offenhuber screened the title of each original complaint accompanied by a reading of the text detailing the respective intolerable situation, and, with a visualization of the Schau auf Linz app’s binary code, the artist simultaneously evoked the interplay among the elaborate structures that make up life in the city and the incessant reconfiguration of the urban sphere. What the audience sees on screen is an interactive series of 0s and 1s that constantly undergo reordering, break down into chaos and reassemble into new formations once again.
