Lucia Simon Medina, Artist in Residence
in conversation with Gerald Straub, Cultural Theorist
On Februrary 28, 2018, Lucia Simon Medina presented her project “The name on the tip of the tongue”, which highlights cryptography and numbers as basic aspects of contemporary life, remaining under the surface of the design. Through calculation and drawing, it analyses on one hand the first public key cryptographic system “RSA”, which is based on two prime numbers close to each other and randomly chosen to multiply, and on the other hand the “Goldbach Conjecture”, which proposed that any even number greater than two can be written as the sum of two prime numbers. “The name on the tip of the tongue” is also a spatial investigation into democratic structures, which makes reference to the first “list of prime numbers and factors” written by Anton Felkel in 1776 up to the number 144,000. Her presentation was followed by an artist talk moderated by Gerald Straub.