The illuminated writing in warped, post-internet-aesthetics CAPTCHA font stretches over the wall of EIGEN + ART Lab's exhibiton space.
"Is anybody home lol" is both the title of this large site-specific neon piece and of the latest exhibition by the Swiss artist collective !Mediengruppe Bitnik introduced with the recently held Gallery Weekend Berlin. The exhibiton attempts to answer the title question through a variation of possibilities in four works.(...)

„Is anybody home lol“ is the question that echoes throughout the entire exhibition. It is the capsule that holds together all of the works on display and pinpoints the ubiquitous yet fundamentally broken relationship between human and machine in a variety of scenarios. Although produced just recently for this show and placed to communicate primarily with the artists' laest piece, it equally resonates with the ideas within the two older works where the artists attempt to verify the other end of the communication channel.     

!Mediegruppe Bitnik's works offer critical, yet humorous answers to the questions which appear from the structures and mechanisms that operate under the surface. With a tech-savvy approach they are able to demistify those systems that are normally hardly visible or available to interact with in an unconventional way. Urgent social debates and topics are openly addressed in their work without a forced attitude. What makes their pieces particularly compelling is the moment in which they step away from the work in progress, deliberately lose control over its course, and let the external factors solve the riddle. Through a distinct artistic strategy, their work gives us a different version of the familiar and allows for new readings of the established.
 

http://bpigs.com/diaries/reviews/mediengruppe-bitnik-is-anybody-home-lol (20.07.2020)