Tara Youngborg grew up on the Internet, starting in aol chatrooms where she pretended to be her brother to get an internet girlfriend (hey swimmergurl96!) before moving to a host of internet communities, where she felt more at home than in a house in a suburb of Baltimore, wishing at times she could crawl out of her skin and through her monitor, reverse “the ring” style. She has left enough of her soul embedded in the net that she feels safe enough living IRL now, but she will always store her memories on floppy disks and abandoned geocities sites, thumb drives and tumblrs, ephemera in the cloud.
Youngborg currently lives and works in the Washington, D.C region. Her installations, video works, and electronic and interactive works are rooted in questions of how our technological processes reflect human experience. By using techniques of jpeg compression (in which a jpeg image becomes recompressed each time it is re-saved as it tries to find places where it can combine colors to save file space), data sonification (where numeric data is turned into computer-generated tones), machine learning algorithims, and video and audio field recordings from specific sites, Youngborg creates experiential installations where space, time and memory are compressed, layered, and translated. Youngborg’s work asks viewers to spend time decipering and unpacking meaning to the point of discomfort in order to consider the assumptions that underlie the ways these technologies are built and discussed, and the ways they work hand in hand with systems of power. She has shown her work across the United States, internationally in Australia, and always on the web.