On view for the first time in Are You Online Now? will be the artists’ Ashley Madison Angels At Work in London (2017), a continuation of !Mediengruppe Bitnik’s ongoing series researching Ashley Madison, the Canadian online dating service marketed worldwide to married people seeking an affair.  In July and August 2015, an anonymous group called The Impact Team stole and released all of Ashley Madison’s internal data, including the website’s entire code and functionality, customer data, as well as the CEO’s emails.  The data breach revealed that Ashley Madison had a hugely disproportionate number of male subscribers and virtually no female subscribers to its site.  In response to the imbalance, Ashley Madison created an army of 75,000 female chatbots to draw men into (costly) conversations for the site’s profit.

In Ashley Madison Angels At Work in London (2017), !Mediengruppe Bitnik uses the localised London data from the Ashley Madison hack to give temporary physical embodiment to five of the 436 fembots that were active in London at the time of the data breach.  Each fembot has a name, age and location and uses sentences from a list of pick-up lines to contact other users.  In total, there were 436 fembots created for London providing ‘entertainment’ to around 203,581 registered London-based users.

http://www.annkakultys.com/exhibitions/are-you-online-now/ (20.07.2020)