I am so disappointed that I didn’t know about this when we were at the Museum of Moving Image last August. It seems that Berlin artist Aram Bartholl, who combines technology and art to create participatory works, was commissioned by the museum last summer to create a permanent installation on the side of the museum. DVD Dead Drop consists of an embedded slot-loading DVD burner on an exterior wall of the building, available to the public 24 hours a day. Visitors can insert a blank DVD-R and receive a digital art exhibition, a collection of media, or other monthly curated content, burned onto their disc. DVD Dead Drop is a continuation of Bartholl’s series of offline file-sharing networks in public spaces. Other Dead Drops consisted of USB flash drives cemented into walls and curbs encouraging a ‘read-write’ information ecosystem while the DVD version is ‘read-only’. You can follow the different content offerings over here, and see the video below for a demonstration of the process by the charming Bartholl himself.

More recently, Bartholl organized an event titled Vertical Cinema in Berlin, where hilarious vertical YouTube clips were projected full screen in smartphone style, but huge. Sounds like a fun idea that I hope the Museum of Moving Image will consider screening one night here in NYC. In the meantime, I’m due for another visit to the museum in Astoria, and will be sure to come armed with a blank dvd.