To celebrate the end of Lukatoyboy’s residency at the 25hours Hotel on Langstrasse, message salon embassy presents Zine #5: Lukatoyboy Hotel Confidential – A selection of the files found on a shared computer in a hotel, hot off the press!
On his many trips to music festivals, workshops and artist’s residencies, the internationally networked artist and sound craftsman Lukatoyboy finds files carelessly left behind by hotel guests on communal computers. The users leave personal and professional traces, such as boarding passes, private instructions, lists of names and numbers, invoices, blueprints, weather forecasts, family photos, deeds of sale and statistical graphics.
Lukatoyboy collects these discards and gives them new meaning by juxtaposing them. Far from being annoyed at the incautious handling of these personal documents, we are tickled by the notion of intruding on the lives of others. The abandoned documents stimulate our fantasy and become puzzle pieces in a potential narrative. The artist makes us accomplices in an act of indiscretion – and perhaps we suddenly remember, with a jolt of terror, the personal documents we ourselves once left behind.
Lukatoyboy’s zine, ironically titled Hotel Confidential, is an edited assemblage of found objects of our time and reads as a comment on the hotel as a space where strangers cross paths. These strangers are bound together by coincidence, their biographies unintentionally entwined and, finally, recorded in a folder on a computer. The hotel guests share a common space, a slice of time, a floor, an elevator ride or even a chat at the hotel bar. In some ways the artist is rifling through the trash bin in the hotel lobby. The found files provide illuminating insight into the secret lives of the hotel guests and clues about their fates, relationships and human communication on the internet.
Hotel Confidential
A selection of the files found on a shared computer in a hotel
Lukatoyboy
Resident of message salon embassy
April 25th to May 21st, 2017
Zine #5 – Edition of 100 Copies
28 p., s/w copies
message salon embassy
25hours Hotel Langstrasse Zürich
© 2017 Lukatoyboy & message salon