Ben Rubin, Dark Source

The installation examines the difficulty in employing new technologies for the process of voting – a public act – against the proprietary interests in protecting intellectual property by a private corporation. Diebold, perhaps most known for making ATMs, was seeking to make voting machines but was unwilling to reconcile its product with the requirement for public transparency.

Installed for an exhibition at ZKM entitled “Making Things Public. Atmospheres of Democracy” in Karlsruhe, Germany from 19 March to 7 August 2005.

+

Developed for Ben Rubin’s piece, Dark Source, a display mechanism for 720 pages of redacted text from Diebold’s AccuVote-TS voting machine was designed.

+

The display mechanism was designed to present the many pages of redacted code that was used to program these machines. As such, seeing these pages was paramount without the distraction of any display hardware. A fine suspension rod that would clip to the sides of clear acrylic panels which held the pages was developed that would hang in ZKM’s exhibition space.

+