On the hunt for dead drops, an offline and anonymous file-sharing network

 

USB sticks protruding from exterior walls? What could possibly go wrong?

Valentina Palladino

If you saw a USB dongle sticking out of the wall of your building, what would you do? That's part of the premise of dead drops, a media arts project started by Germany's Aram Bartholl in 2010. Dead drops consist of USB sticks that people place in the world—in any public place—to encourage anonymous file sharing between strangers.
Bartholl was staying in New York as artist in residence when he began leaving dead drops in the Big Apple; they were eventually featured as part of the "Talk to Me" exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. While dead drops appear to focus on information sharing, it's not the first GPS-based discovery system of its kind. Geocaching has been around much longer than dead drops, and it even has an app that records where the hidden objects—geocaches—are located.
That said, dead drops emphasize anonymity and file sharing as well the the serendipity of finding a sort of key to unknown information in the real world. However, because they are supposed to be placed in public areas, they are subject to a lot of variables. Anyone could notice a dead drop and pick it up out of pure curiosity, or they could remove the USB stick altogether if it's seen as a prohibited object in a certain space (think storefronts or public transit entrances). There's also the weather factor: dead drops could be blown away by a wind gust in seconds or damaged by the elements in a rain or snow storm.
Even if the online database claims a dead drop is nearby, you will never really know until you look for yourself. We trekked around Brooklyn, New York to see if we could find any working dead drops. Check out the video above to see what we found.