| Futura Trōpica | is an intertropical decentralized network of grass-root local networks for lateral exchange of local resources and other forms of Knowledges, Designs and Technologies. It plays with the narrative of the Wood Wide Web and the way trees are interconnected, communicate to each other and redistribute nutrients with the help of fungi as mycellium. It uses the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) protocol to connect Rhizomes in Bogotá, Kinshasa and Bengaluru. Each Rhizome is composed of a raspberry pi-based wireless access point and web server in combination with a USB based distribution system similar to ‘El Paquete Semanal’ in Cuba.
Sarah Grant is an American artist and professor of new media based in Berlin at the Weise7 studio. Her teaching and art practice engages with the electromagnetic spectrum and computer networks as artistic material, social habitat, and political landscape. She holds a Bachelors of Arts in Fine Artfrom UC Davis and a Masters in Media Arts from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. Since 2015, she has organized the Radical Networks conference in New York and Berlin, a community event and arts festival for critical investigations and creative experiments in telecommunications.
Juan Pablo García Sossa — jpgs / Futura Trōpica Netroots (*Bogotá, COL) is a Designer, Researcher and Artist fascinated by the clash between emerging technologies and grass-root popular culture in tropical territories. His practice explores the development of cultures, visions, realities and worlds through the remix and reappropriation of technologies from a Tropikós perspective (Tropics as Region and Mindset). JPGS has been part of diverse research institutions and design studios and currently is a design research member at SAVVY Contemporary The Laboratory of Form-Ideas’ Design Department in Berlin and Co-Director of Estación Terrena, a space for Arts, Research and Technologies in Bogotá.
Uploaded to the Cloud is a generative, browser-based work in which a computer imagines a sky made of data. Dynamically generated clouds gently move across the frame of the browser window, representing various types of data that can be transmitted by the internet. The clouds are an abstraction of iconography commonly used to represent data and user interactions on the web: likes, hearts, bookmarks, mail envelopes, chat bubbles, alerts, and more. The work is a playful meditation on the metaphors used to describe the transmission of data and its relation to body and place.
uploadedtothecloud.com
Kate Hollenbach is an artist, programmer, and educator based in Denver, Colorado. She creates video and interactive works examining critical issues in user interface design including data collection and surveillance. Her art practice is informed by years of professional experience and as an interface designer and product developer. Kate is an Assistant Professor of Emergent Digital Practices at University of Denver and serves on the Board of Directors for the Processing Foundation.
We live in the age of screen culture. The screen gives us a job and organizes our leisure time. The largest web services and their metaphors of the user interface are an important part of our everyday life. And our task is to make the familiar — strange.
This web application accesses the source code of the website and interferes with its logic. Each time it is implemented by a unique combination of methods. The algorithm performs about 1000 interventions per second, using 369 151 937 methods.
Dedicated to Netochka Nezvanova. In the 20th anniversary of nebula.m81.
Born in 1994 in Krasnodar, Russia, living and working in Saint Petersburg. Graduated from Krasnodar College of Electronic Device Engineering and the Academy of Marketing and Social Information Technologies with a specialty in “Computing Machines, Complexes, Systems and Networks”. Co-founder and active member of the Kiuss art-group. The main fields of activities are web development and book publishing.
We Are Here FM is a web-based audiovisual installation and transmission created by Betsey Biggs and August Black. A constantly shifting audiovisual radio station of sights and sounds, it brings together geo-tagged images and audio clips to create unnamed, imaginary, hyperreal landscapes, whose generative soundscapes are at times magically experimental and at times utterly mundane. Best experienced at life size projection, the audience must locate themselves within a realistic, yet utterly artificial landscape (both exterior and interior) and negotiate their place within it. Because We Are Here FM is a streaming experience, all listeners form a community experiencing the same landscape. The project was made using free and open-source software such as React, Node, and the Janus WebRTC server. We hope you will enjoy getting lost with us.
I’m a composer and studio artist based in Boulder, Colorado. My work connects the dots between music, sound, visual art, place, storytelling, and technology, and has been described by The New Yorker as “psychologically complex, exposing how we orient ourselves with our ears.” Over the years I’ve written a book, worked as a video editor and producer, composed string quartets and multimedia operas, created big participatory art projects, earned a Ph.D. in music composition at Princeton University, and taught music, multimedia, public art, and video at Brown University, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the University of Colorado, where I currently serve as Assistant Professor. I’ve given talks about my work at Harvard, the New Museum, and lots of other wonderful places. http://www.betseybiggs.org/
August Black is a hybrid practitioner of art, design and engineering. He makes experimental spatial and acoustic situations, often by building his own technological artifacts and instruments in hardware and software. His past work focused on live networked audio, mixing FM radio with user input through online software. His current interests span the fields of the philosophy of technology, software studies, techno-politics, peer-to-peer networking and AI/machine learning. In the past, he’s been a member of arts organizations such as the ORF Kunstradio and the Ars Electronica Futurelab, as well as a former member of the engineering team at Cycling ‘74, makers of Max/MSP. He has shown works at festivals and venues such as Ars Electronica Festival, Dutch Electronic Arts Festival, Wave Farm, Transmediale, Pixelache, LA Freewaves, Piksel Festival, Polar Circuit and the Tasmanian Museum of Art, among others.He earned a BFA at Syracuse University and was an NSF IGERT Fellow at UC Santa Barbara, where he completed an MS and PhD. He’s taught media and art classes at UC Santa Barbara, University of San Francisco and CU Boulder, where he serves as Assistant Professor of Critical Media Practices.
Coping Strategies, curated by Sarah Grant, Critical Engineering Working Group.
@KIB, Kunstskolen i Bergen 17th-27th November
We are excited to present Coping Strategies, a new exhibition curated by Sarah Grant, Radical Networks. As part of the 3 years Piksel collaboration with The Critical Engineering Working Group, Coping Strategies joins the works of Lauren McCarthy, Juan Pablo García Sossa, Isaac Kariuki, Teresa Dillon, Shortwave Collective, Joana Chicau, and Adam Harvey. Coping Strategies is part of the PIKSELXX AI AI AI program, in Bergen from 17-27 Nov.
Sarah Grant in her curatorial statement, affirms that by now we begin to understand the extent to which our personal and professional interactions are mediated by the digital, from user interfaces to data harvesting networks of surveillance. As digital captives, we have little agency over our membership and the extent of our participation within these obfuscated systems.
How can we put some space between ourselves and these dominant structures? How can we push back and reclaim agency over the narrative that is written about ourselves and our communities by these intrusive technologies? How do we mitigate digital crisis?
Coping Strategies is a program of works, including presentations, workshops, and performances, that demonstrate artist-led approaches to recasting our role in the asymmetrical relationship between ourselves and the dominant providers of information technology.
By demonstrating concrete actions that we as individuals and as communities can take in response to these domineering information systems, Coping Strategies hopes to provoke excitement and reassurance that we don’t have to passively accept the default settings of our digital lives.
PROGRAM
EXHIBITION Nov 17th -27th – opening 18-21h – rest of the days 11-18h Futura Tropica by Juan Pablo García Sossa What do you want me to say? by Lauren McCarthy
TALKS Nov 18th – 11-13h @KIB Auditorium Futura Trōpica by Juan Pablo García Sossa Coding : Braiding : Transmissions by Isaac Kariuki VFRAME by Adam Harvey
PERFORMANCE Nov 17th – 19h Tango for us Two/Too by Joana Chicau
PERFORMANCE Nov 19th – 18h MTCD – A Visual Anthology of My Machine Life, Teresa Dillon
WORKSHOPS
Nov 18th &19th – 15-18h Open Wave-Receiver by Shortwave Collective
Nov 19th – 10-13h Messaging with lights in a not internet era! by Sarah Grant
Talks
VFRAME by Adam Harvey
VFRAME.io (Visual Forensics and Metadata Extraction) is a computer vision toolkit designed for human rights researchers. It aims to bridge the gap between state-of-the-art artificial intelligence used in the commercial sector and make it accessible and tailored to the needs of human rights researchers and investigative journalists working with large video or image datasets. VFRAME is under active development and was most recently presented at the Geneva International Center for Humanitarian Demining (GICHD) Mine Action Technology Workshop in November 2021.
Adam Harvey (US/DE) is an artist and research scientist based in Berlin focused on computer vision, privacy, and surveillance. He is a graduate of the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University (2010) and is the creator of the VFRAME.io computer vision project, Exposing.ai dataset project, and CV Dazzle computer vision camouflage concept.
Futura Trōpica by Juan Pablo García Sossa
| Futura Trōpica | is an intertropical decentralized network of grass-root local networks for lateral exchange of local resources and other forms of Knowledges, Designs and Technologies. It plays with the narrative of the Wood Wide Web and the way trees are interconnected, communicate to each other and redistribute nutrients with the help of fungi as mycellium. It uses the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) protocol to connect Rhizomes in Bogotá, Kinshasa and Bengaluru. Each Rhizome is composed of a raspberry pi-based wireless access point and web server in combination with a USB based distribution system similar to ‘El Paquete Semanal’ in Cuba.
Juan Pablo García Sossa — jpgs / Futura Trōpica Netroots (*Bogotá, COL) is a Designer, Researcher and Artist fascinated by the clash between emerging technologies and grass-root popular culture in tropical territories. His practice explores the development of cultures, visions, realities and worlds through the remix and reappropriation of technologies from a Tropikós perspective (Tropics as Region and Mindset). JPGS has been part of diverse research institutions and design studios and currently is a design research member at SAVVY Contemporary The Laboratory of Form-Ideas’ Design Department in Berlin and Co-Director of Estación Terrena, a space for Arts, Research and Technologies in Bogotá.
Coding : Braiding : Transmissions by Isaac Kariuki
CBT (Coding : Braiding : Transmissions) is a collaboration with Tamar Clarke-Brown as an experiment in speculative technology, combining the DIY practices of coding and braiding. CBT explores these two practices as tools for sending encrypted messages to escape totalising surveillance of black communities globally. The performance installation comprises of women braiding each others’ hair with a GoPro camera attached to their heads. The camera and accompanying software translates their hand movements into encrypted messages that the women send to each other throughout the performance.
Isaac Kariuki is a visual artist and writer whose work centres on surveillance, borders, internet culture and the black market, in relation to the Global South. His work has taken the form of image, video, lectures, writing and performance. He has exhibited at the Tate Modern, Kadist (Paris) and the Kampala Art Biennale among others as well as holding lectures at the Tate Britain and Yale University.
Performances
Tango for us Two/Too by Joana Chicau
<– Tango for Us Two/Too — > is a live coding performance that merges web-programming with the choreographic language of Tango. The script focus on the dialogical nature of Tango, using Google Translate with fragments of texts from interviews with Tango dancers and practitioners. It invites us to a pas-de-deux performed by the online interface and JavaScript functions which randomise search queries and present a series of (mis)translations. An algorithmic dance sustaining glitches between the techniques and poetics of Tango, each breath a step towards the emergence of a new vocabulary for the moving.
Joana Chicau is a graphic designer, coder, researcher — with a background in dance. In her practice she interweaves web programming languages and environments with choreography. She researches the intersection of the body with the constructed, designed, programmed environment, aiming at widening the ways in which digital sciences is presented and made accessible to the public. She privileges the use of Free-Libre Open Source software, and collaborates with various international practitioners in the fields of art, design and technology on both commissioned and self-initiated projects. She has been actively participating and organizing events with performances involving multi-location collaborative coding, algorithmic improvisation, discussions on gender equality and activism.
MTCD – A Visual Anthology of My Machine Life, Teresa Dillon
MTCD is a monologue in which the artist and researcher Teresa Dillon takes one “machine’ from each year of her life. From radios to home recording devices to her first experiences on the Internet, reflections on techs uses and misuses, failures and breakdowns, highlight the glitchy realities and contextual relations in which the key “machines” that shaped her technological know-how and imagination, play out.
MTCD originally premiered at Berlin’s transmediale in 2018 with further presentations in 2019. This updated but stripped back version is a special edition for PIKSEL 20th birthday.
Teresa Dillon (IRL/UK/DE)
An artist and researcher Teresa’s work explores the interrelationships between humans, other species, technology, cities and our environments. This currently manifests through three evolving programmes: Repair Acts (2018-) explores restorative cultures and practices by connecting past stories of care, maintenance and healing, with what we do today and how we envision the future. Urban Hosts (2013-) a programme that plays with civic conversational, encountering and hospitality formats and Liminal Routes (2020-) a mixtape and sonic tripping series for cities. Experienced in producing software and hardware projects, Teresa has also written on subjects such as open source processes, music, technology and design, sonic materiality’s and folklores, multispecies relations, surveillance, governance and the smart city, repair economies and artisan repair professions. As a Humboldt Fellow (UdK and TU, Berlin, 2014-16) her work documented artistic approaches to making the electromagnetic spectrum in cities audible. Invited to co-curate transmediale (2016) and HACK-THE-CITY (2012) for the former, Science Gallery, Dublin, since 2016 she currently holds the post of Professor of City Futures at the School of Art and Design, UWE, Bristol.
| Futura Trōpica | is an intertropical decentralized network of grass-root local networks for lateral exchange of local resources and other forms of Knowledges, Designs and Technologies. It plays with the narrative of the Wood Wide Web and the way trees are interconnected, communicate to each other and redistribute nutrients with the help of fungi as mycellium. It uses the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) protocol to connect Rhizomes in Bogotá, Kinshasa and Bengaluru. Each Rhizome is composed of a raspberry pi-based wireless access point and web server in combination with a USB based distribution system similar to ‘El Paquete Semanal’ in Cuba.
What do you want me to say? by Lauren McCarthy
Exhausted by Zoom calls, I created a digital clone of my voice to replace me. This voice allows me to puppet myself, using it to say all the things I hadn’t previously been able to embody. I feel a sense of power owning the data of my own voice. I am taking it back from the tech companies, constantly collecting my conversations, sampling and analyzing and archiving my speech for future use yet unknown. Instead, I offer the ownership and control of my voice to others.
Upon collecting and visiting the work, you are asked by my voice, “What do you want me to say?” However you reply, my voice responds by speaking your own words back to you. Then it asks again, “What do you want me to say?”
This work considers vulnerability, ownership, and authenticity in a time of rapidly advancing virtual reality. As I open access to my voice, I reflect on the ways femme voiced virtual assistants are commanded and controlled by their users and their developers. And the ways we can feel heard and (mis)understood by those that listen.
Lauren Lee McCarthy is an artist examining social relationships in the midst of surveillance, automation, and algorithmic living. She has received grants and residencies from Creative Capital, United States Artists, LACMA, Sundance New Frontier, Eyebeam, Pioneer Works, Autodesk, and Ars Electronica. Her work SOMEONE was awarded the Ars Electronica Golden Nica and the Japan Media Arts Social Impact Award, and her work LAUREN was awarded the IDFA DocLab Award for Immersive Non-Fiction. Lauren’s work has been exhibited internationally, at places such as the Barbican Centre, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Haus der elektronischen Künste, SIGGRAPH, Onassis Cultural Center, IDFA DocLab, Science Gallery Dublin, Seoul Museum of Art, and the Japan Media Arts Festival.
Workshops
Open Wave-Receiver by Shortwave Collective
Building Open Wave-Receivers enables DIY communications reception, and allows anyone to freely listen to the broad spectrum of radio waves around us. All you need are a few easy-to-procure supplies and, if you want to try it, a neighborhood fence or other receptive antenna proxy.
Why a fence? Antennas are necessary for radios to receive signals, and many things can be antennas. Fences can make great, and very long, antennas! Other materials can work well too; even a tent peg can become a useful part of a radio. Open Wave-Receivers allow us to explore the relationship between different combinations of materials, antennas, and radio waves, creating a new technology literacy, a new medium for artistic expression, and a new way to explore the airwaves in our communities.
We have found making Open Wave-Receivers to be a fun adventure. The ability to use simple scraps to create variety and personalization in each radio makes this a great maker project for anyone wanting to play with radio.
Shortwave Collective is an international, feminist artist group established in May 2020, interested in the creative use of radio. We meet regularly to discuss feminist approaches to amatuer radio and the radio spectrum as artistic material, sharing resources, considering DIY approaches and inclusive structures. Members include Alyssa Moxley, Georgia Muenster, Brigitte Hart, Kate Donovan, Maria Papadomanolaki, Sally Applin, Lisa Hall, Sasha Engelmann, Franchesca Casauay, and Hannah Kemp-Welch
Boogaloo Bias is an interactive artwork and research project that addresses some of the known problems with the unregulated use of facial recognition technologies, including the practice of ‘brute forcing’ where, in the absence of high-quality images of a suspect, law enforcement agents have been known to substitute images of celebrities the suspect is reported to resemble. To lampoon this approach, the Boogaloo Bias facial recognition algorithm searches for members of the anti-law enforcement militia, the Boogaloo Bois, using a facial recognition algorithm trained on faces of characters from the 1984 movie Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo. The film is the namesake for the Boogaloo Bois, who emerged from 4chan meme culture and have been present at both right and left-wing protests in the US since January 2020. The system is used to search live video feeds, protest footage, and images that are uploaded to the Boogaloo Bias website. All matches made by the system are false positives. No information from the live feeds or website uploads is saved or shared. Boogaloo Bias raises questions about automated decision making, public accountability and oversight within a socio-technical system where machines are contributing to a decision-making process. Facial recognition technology allows for the quick surveillance of hundreds of people simultaneously and the ability to automate decisions using artificial intelligence, establishing a power structure controlled by a technocratic elite. Rather than providing a solution for how to improve facial recognition, the project pushes the logic behind the current forms and uses of facial recognition in law enforcement to an extreme, highlighting the absurdity of how this technology is being developed and used. Boogaloo Bias is made using only open source software, including OpenCV, Flask, dlib, Pillow, and the Python face-recognition module. https://www.boogaloo-bias.art/
Jennifer Gradecki is an artist-theorist who investigates secretive and specialized socio-technical systems. Her artistic research has focused on social science techniques, financial instruments, dataveillance technologies, intelligence analysis, and social media misinformation. Gradecki has presented and exhibited at venues including Ars Electronica (Linz), ISEA (Barcelona), National Gallery X (London), NeMe (Cypress), ADAF (Athens), International Symposium on Computational Media Art (Hong Kong), and the Centro Cultural de España (México). Her research has been published in Big Data & Society, Visual Resources, and Leuven University Press. Her artwork has been funded by Science Gallery Dublin, Science Gallery Detroit, and the NEoN Digital Arts Festival.
Derek Curry (US) is an artist-researcher whose work critiques and addresses spaces for intervention in automated decision-making systems. His work has addressed automated stock trading systems, Open-Source Intelligence gathering (OSINT), and algorithmic classification systems. His artworks have replicated aspects of social media surveillance systems and communicated with algorithmic trading bots. Derek earned his MFA in New Genres from UCLA’s Department of Art in 2010 and his PhD in Media Study from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2018. He is currently an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University in Boston. https://derekcurry.com/
Despite their lofty mission statements, today’s big social media platforms are centrally focused on one singular concept: more. These capitalistic software machines are designed to stoke a pervasive and ever-increasing cycle of production and consumption for the purposes of growth and profit. To accomplish this they leverage data and scale to produce signals and interface patterns that keep us engaged, promising connection and joy in exchange for increasing shares of our time and attention. The platforms embed within us the idea that our own sociality is best evaluated and understood through quantity. They reconfigure our sense of time in ways that can make minutes or hours ago seem old. And their personalized feeds teach our brains that the only content worth watching or reading is that which we can already imagine. In its tireless pursuit of users and data and wealth, big social media sacrifices human agency and potential on the altar of more.
But what if social media wasn’t engineered to serve capitalism’s need for growth? How might online collective communication be different if our time and attention were treated as the limited and precious resources that they are? Minus is an experiment to ask these questions, a finite social network where users get only 100 posts—for life. Rather than the algorithmic feeds, visible “like” counts, noisy notifications, and infinite scrolls employed by the platforms to induce endless user engagement, Minus limits how much one posts to the feed, and foregrounds—as its only visible and dwindling metric—how few opportunities they have left. Instead of preying on our needs for communication and connection in order to transform them into desires for speed and accumulation, Minus offers an opportunity to reimagine what it means to be connected in the contemporary age. The work facilitates conversation within a subtractive frame that eschews the noise and frenzy for a quieter and slower setting that foregrounds human voices, words, and temporalities. Though it may be disorienting at first to navigate an online social space devoid of the signals and patterns Silicon Valley uses to always push for more, Minus invites us to see what digital interaction feels like when a social media platform is designed for less.
Ben Grosser creates interactive experiences, machines, and systems that examine the cultural, social, and political effects of software. Exhibition venues include Eyebeam in New York, Somerset House and the Barbican Centre in London, Centre Pompidou in Paris, SXSW in Austin, Museum of Modern Art in Moscow, World Museum in Liverpool, Museu das Comunicações in Lisbon, Museum Kesselhaus in Berlin, Science Gallery in Dublin, Japan Media Arts Festival in Tokyo, IMPAKT Festival in Utrecht, and the Digital Arts Festival in Athens. His works have been featured in The New Yorker, Wired, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, PBS, Fast Company, Hyperallergic, BBC, The Telegraph, Le Monde, Corriere della Sera, Der Spiegel, El País, and Folha. The Guardian (UK), writing about his recent film ORDER OF MAGNITUDE, said “there will be few more telling artworks [from] the first decades of this century … a mesmerising monologue, the story of our times.” Speaking about his social media-focused projects, RTÉ (Ireland) described Grosser as an “antipreneur.” Slate referred to his work as “creative civil disobedience in the digital age.” Grosser’s artworks are regularly cited in books investigating the cultural effects of technology, including The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, The Metainterface, and Investigative Aesthetics, as well as volumes centered on computational art practices such as Electronic Literature, The New Aesthetic and Art, and Digital Art. Grosser is an associate professor of new media in the School of Art + Design and co-founder of the Critical Technology Studies Lab at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, both at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. https://bengrosser.com
How can we characterize the cinematic narrative, which is in a netbased environement no longer tied to chronological sequences? How does actual information deform under the manipulating influence of the viewer? The webproject JOURNEY TO THE PLANET OF NUCLEAR CHEWING GUM is formally based on experimental film, poetry texts and interactive netart, arranged in several layers. Digital images of different objects are assembled in the picture’s foreground and overlapping found and newly assorted footage. They can be rearranged randomly by drag and drop. Each movement of an object is linked to one individual sound snippet and a random subtitle. By interacting viewers create a strong varying narrative form which manifests in the space between text, image and film.
Vera Sebert, *1987 (DE), Media Artist 2007- 2015 Fine Arts at University of Fine Arts Braunschweig and Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. 2015 – 2019 Language Arts at University of Applied Arts Vienna. Artistic works in the border areas of visual media, language, film, computer programs: Computer code allows the adaptation of all other media whose properties are imitated, fragmented and reassembled in virtual space. The hybrid exposes the categorical separation between artistic image and text production and creates a space for experiments that explore the mesh of code, image, sound and language in a digital environment. Most recent international exhibitions and screenings: Hamburg International Film Festival (DE), Vector Festival Toronto (CA), House of Electronic Arts Basel (CH), Eclat Festival Stuttgart (DE), Cairotronica (EGY). 2017 Artist in Residency at Künstlerdorf Schöppingen (DE). 2018 Hannsmann-Poethen Grant for Literature (DE), Styria Artist-in-Residency (AT). 2019 Subnet Artist-in-Residence, Salzburg (AT), 2020 https://verasebert.com
Privacy is intimacy is an artwork composed of two silver chains on each of which are engraved the halves of two PGP key pairs. On each chain is written a public key and the private key associated with the other chain’s public key. Thus, it is possible to establish a secure and encrypted connection between two people, allowing them to communicate without their privacy being compromised, making Privacy is intimacy the ultimate jewel for lovers !
Born in 1994, Louis Frehring is a French contemporary artist working in the transdisciplinary field of new media art, sculpture and visual arts. His work is mainly composed by heteroclite installations and crafted devices that deal with technology both as material and subject. Frehring’s work is focused on getting the viewer more knowledgeable of what technology is, how it works and what it changes in nature, in society and in our proper selves.
Going Viral is an interactive artwork that invites people to intervene in the spreading of misinformation by sharing informational videos about COVID-19 that feature algorithmically generated celebrities, social media influencers, and politicians that have made or shared claims about the coronavirus that are counter to the official consensus of healthcare professionals and were categorized as misinformation. In the videos, algorithmically-generated speakers deliver public service announcements or present news stories that counter the misinformation they had previously promoted on social media. The sharable YouTube videos are made using a conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN) that is trained on sets of two images where one image becomes a map to produce a second image, resulting in a glitchy reconstruction of the speaker. The recognizable, but clearly digitally-produced aesthetic prevents the videos from being classified as “deepfakes” and removed by online platforms, while inviting viewers to reflect on the constructed nature of celebrity, and question the authority of celebrities on issues of public health and the validity of information shared on social media. Celebrities and social media influencers are now entangled in the discourse on public health, and are sometimes given more authority than scientists or public health officials. Like the rumors they spread, the online popularity of social media influencers and celebrities is amplified through neural network-based content recommendation algorithms used by online platforms. https://goingviral.art/
ennifer Gradecki is an artist-theorist who investigates secretive and specialized socio-technical systems. Her artistic research has focused on social science techniques, financial instruments, dataveillance technologies, intelligence analysis, and social media misinformation. Gradecki has presented and exhibited at venues including Ars Electronica (Linz), ISEA (Barcelona), National Gallery X (London), NeMe (Cypress), ADAF (Athens), International Symposium on Computational Media Art (Hong Kong), and the Centro Cultural de España (México). Her research has been published in Big Data & Society, Visual Resources, and Leuven University Press. Her artwork has been funded by Science Gallery Dublin, Science Gallery Detroit, and the NEoN Digital Arts Festival.
Derek Curry (US) is an artist-researcher whose work critiques and addresses spaces for intervention in automated decision-making systems. His work has addressed automated stock trading systems, Open-Source Intelligence gathering (OSINT), and algorithmic classification systems. His artworks have replicated aspects of social media surveillance systems and communicated with algorithmic trading bots. Derek earned his MFA in New Genres from UCLA’s Department of Art in 2010 and his PhD in Media Study from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2018. He is currently an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University in Boston. https://derekcurry.com/
