Untitled

Symposium:


Session Title:
  • Sniff, Scrape, Crawl: Part 1

Presentation Title:
  • Untitled

Presenter(s):


Venue(s):


Abstract:

  • Chair Per­son: Renée Turner
    Pre­sen­ters: Seda Gürses, Nico­las Malevé, Amy Suo Wu & Bir­git Bach­ler

    We are liv­ing in a time of un­prece­dented sur­veil­lance, but un­like the omi­nous spec­tre of Or­well’s Big Brother, where power is clearly de­fined and al­ways pal­pa­ble, today’s meth­ods of in­for­ma­tion gath­er­ing are much more sub­tle and woven into the fab­ric of our every­day life. Through the use of seem­ingly in­nocu­ous al­go­rithms Ama­zon tells us which books we might like, Google tracks our queries to per­fect more ac­cu­rate re­sults, and Last.?fm con­nects us to peo­ple with sim­i­lar music tastes. Im­mersed in so­cial media, we com­mit to legally bind­ing con­tracts by agree­ing to ‘terms of use’. Hav­ing made the pact, we Twit­ter our sub­jec­tiv­i­ties in less than 140 char­ac­ters, con­tact our long lost friends on face­book and mo­bile-up­load our ge­o­t­agged videos on youtube. Where once sur­veil­lance tech­nolo­gies be­longed to gov­ern­men­tal agen­cies and the mil­i­tary do­main, the web has fos­tered a less op­ti­cally dri­ven and par­tic­i­pa­tory means of both mon­i­tor­ing and mon­e­tiz­ing our in­ti­mately lived ex­pe­ri­ences. Bring­ing to­gether artists, pro­gram­mers and the­o­rists, these in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary pan­els will look at how sur­veil­lance and data-min­ing tech­nolo­gies shape and in­flu­ence our lives and the con­se­quences they have on our civil lib­er­ties.  The aim is to map the com­plex­i­ties of ‘shar­ing’ and ex­am­ine how our fun­da­men­tal un­der­stand­ing of pri­vate life has changed, as pub­lic dis­play has be­come more per­va­sive and nor­mal­ized through so­cial net­works. “Sniff, Scrape, Crawl…”  is an on­go­ing in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary re­search pro­ject. Through a se­ries of work­shops, de­bates, lec­tures and pre­sen­ta­tions, the the­matic pro­ject was ini­tially launched in the be­gin­ning of 2011 at the Piet Zwart In­sti­tute, Mas­ter Media De­sign and Com­mu­ni­ca­tion in the de­part­ment of Net­worked Media.  The for­ma­tion of the pan­els at ISEA is an op­por­tu­nity to show doc­u­men­ta­tion and ex­pand upon ear­lier re­search.

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