Cyberpunk 2022
Trust in digital communication
How We Founded a Citizen Television StationUnser Weg zum portablen DNA-Synthesizer
US government demands direct police access to European biometric data
Kunst im UmbauK – Kulturarbeit Solidarisch essen, ackern, imkern und wohnenRaum für die schöne Welt Das Fediverse steht für Vielfalt nicht für Einfalt Das Mietshäuser Syndikat und das Neubauprojekt Görzer128Kunst und Kommerz, ein problematisches VerhältnisGeschlechtergerechtigkeit und MakingGit: Let’s f*ck up history, and then restore it«Thank you for your data» oder weshalb uns das Thema Data Analytics interessieren sollteReal citizens of Rheinfelden living in an AI painted model of Jakob Strassers hometownMetaverse und NFT
David Claerboutin conversation with Sara Dolfi Agostini
David Claerbout participated in The Eye of The Storm – Blitz’s first online exhibition, part of the new online initiative OPEN – with Oil workers (from the Shell company of Nigeria) returning home from work, caught in torrential rain (2013). In this artwork, Claerbout deployed 3D and new media technology in order to turn a photographic instant into endless repetition and confront visual perceptions, yearning for change and hope. As the act of waiting unfolds into an existential, cyclical condition rather than a one-time event, the artwork becomes the perspective from which to examine productivity and capitalism in relation to the workers and ourselves, even more now that the Covid-19 pandemic has altered our sense of the passage of time.David Claerbout focuses primarily on photography, video, sound, drawing, and digital arts, as well as large-scale video installation. In his works, the reconfiguration of images bestows a socio-political weight while questioning at the same time sensory authenticity and the now-disappearing system of trust between reality and its representation. The conversation will focus on Oil workers (from the Shell company of Nigeria) returning home from work, caught in torrential rain (2013), the evolution of Claerbout’s practice since, and his seminal text The Silence of the Lens (e-flux journal, 2016).******David Claerbout (Belgium, 1969) studied at the Nationaal Hoger Instituut voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp from 1992 to 1995 and participated in the DAAD: Berlin Artists-in-Residence program from 2002 to 2003. Claerbout’s work is included in major public collections worldwide, including: Centre Georges Pompidou Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, France; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, USA.; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C, USA; S.M.A.K, Ghent, Belgium; The Margulies Collection, Miami, Florida, USA; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA; Collection François Pinault, Italy; FRAC Nord Pas de Calais, France; Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden, Germany; GAM Galleria D’Arte Moderna et Contemporanea, Turin, Italy and many others. He has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions internationally, including: MAST Foundation, Palazzo Zambeccari, Bologna, Italy (2019); Les Abattoirs, Toulouse, France (2018); Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh, Scotland (2018); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2018); Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rennes, France (2017); Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain (2017); Schaulager, Basel, Switzerland (2017); BOZAR, Brussels, Belgium (2017); Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, Florida, USA (2016); De Pont Museum of Art, Tilburg, Netherlands (2016); Städelmuseum, Frankfurt, Germany (2016); MAMCO, Geneva, Switzerland (2015); Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Germany (2015); 19th Biennale of Sydney, Australia (2014); 8th Busan Biennale, South Korea (2014); Kunsthalle Mainz, Mainz, Germany (2013); Secession, Vienna, Austria (2012); Tel Aviv Museum, Tel Aviv, Israel (2012); SFMOMA, San Francisco (2011); WIELS, Brussels, Belgium (2011); De Pont museum of contemporary art, Tilburg, The Netherlands (2009); Pompidou Center, Paris, France (2007); Kunstmuseum, St. Gallen, Switzerland (2008); and Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands (2005).
What do algorithms see when they look at your social media profile? Are you a good provider of content? And what exactly is good? What does the algorithmic view on your social media profiles say about you?
Analyses of social media profiles are employed in an increasing number of real-world transactions. From border control to job applications, social media profiles are used to assess the threat-levels of a candidate and verify their suitability to enter a country or organisaton.
Many of these social media checks are done automatically by algorithmic entities. How and what do these algorithms assess exactly? And what do their assessments look like?
To find out, !Mediengruppe Bitnik used Ferretly, an automated online service used by Human Resources Professionals to evaluate candidates’ social media profiles. Ferretly uses algorithms trained on keywords and image recognition to sift through 7 years of social media history. The service evaluates candidates publically available social media posts on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, analyzing original posts, reposts, replies, and likes. Additionally, Ferretly will assess any news items they can find.
With their service, Ferretly promises to reduce the risk of letting a person displaying toxic behaviour into your organisation or country. Toxic behaviour is defined in 11 risk categories, from hate speech, political extremism, drug-related content to explicit images and toxic language. The publicly available posts are also used to look at the sub-text of each post: the candidate’s attitude towards the event or situation they are posting about is rated as positive, negative or neutral. Each candidate is judged according to these per-defined flags and sentiment points and given a social media score which rates them as fit or unfit for entry.
!Mediengruppe Bitnik ran the social media profiles of the leaders of each of the 27 EU member states through the service. Bitnik then interpreted the results of the analysis and used this as the basis to devise a customized sweatshirt for each of the 27 profiles.
Each shirt shows Bitnik’s interpretation and visualization of the Ferretly ratings. Besides their social media scores for different parameters, each of the shirts publicly displays a number of flagged posts which were rated by Ferretly as toxic and the reason for this rating. Depending on the report, the shirts contain more or less data. Usually more posts and data meant a worse social media rating by Ferretly.
Like the clothes we wear, our social media profiles have become the carrier of our identities. These online identities are used more and more by the gatekeepers of institutions, countries and organisations to verify that we are worthy of access.
We took part in the YAWYB workshops. Excerpt from Times of Maltaabout YAWYB: An artistic research project held between 2016 and 2017 questioned the effects of consumption on buyers. This year, a second edition is delving deeper into the subject and is particularly looking at the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our production, shopping and consumption habits.
You Are What You Buy (YAWYB) reacts to current issues on consumption and consumerism, offering an alternative artistic experience. The first edition was a year-long transdisciplinary project that departed from a reflection on our need to affirm ourselves as consumers. The research process and final presentation were set in a supermarket in Malta, offering a different possibility of where and how to experience art − away from the art institution.
Since then, the team continued thinking on how they could develop the project further.
“In the wake of the pandemic, it felt like a natural progression to revisit the project − it almost felt like a responsibility not to ignore all the changes in our production, shopping and consumption habits resulting from the impact of the pandemic. This is how YAWYB ‒ A Remote ReVisit came about,” artist Kristina Borg says.
“Also, YAWYB has always anticipated to catalyse change in our production, shopping and consumption habits, specifically inviting us producers and consumers to engage in more intelligent thinking processes while we produce and shop, with the aim of contributing to a new normal that guarantees responsible production and consumption for sustainable cities and communities. And what better time, when we’re affected by the pandemic, to reflect on this?” she continues.
In answering the research question (see box on right) and more, YAWYB – A Remote ReVisit moves outside and beyond the supermarket space to incorporate other spaces and places of production and consumption in our neighbourhoods. These include, but are not limited to, the local grocery store or the mini-market, the open markets, the supermarket, the household store, the clothes store, the coffee place, the restaurant and online platforms.
This second edition focuses mainly on research; however, the outcomes are presented through artistic and creative means.
Similar to the first edition, this second edition also collaborates with a group of community co-creators as well as with service providers. This was done remotely due to the pandemic, hence the ‘remote’ in the title. In the wake of the pandemic, it felt like a natural progression to revisit the project
“With this in mind, it is important to mention that such remote means allowed the project to widen its audience to a European-based one, attracting survey respondents and community co-creators based in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, The Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey and the UK,” Borg enthuses.
“This has also provided a wider spectrum of shared experiences as affected by different degrees and levels of the pandemic in different countries.”
The human sensorium (or the world of sensory stimuli) has always been mediated. But over the past few decades that condition has greatly intensified. The microspeaker in the ear, the drug in the blood, the nanosurgical implant, the simulated taste in the mouth – these “enhancements” no longer provoke the apocalyptic excitement… The relative calm this situation provides, gives us time for reflection: a propitious moment for artists and other culture workers to interpret, think, and reckon with the sense of our mediated sensorium.” (Carolin Jones, “Sensorium”, MIT 2006).
The RIXC symposium offers a vision by artists and theorists on the world of the aesthetics of augmented senses and experience, stretching from the earliest beginnings of sensory data research to the interaction of immersive and sensory technologies between various perception sensors of the human body.
With many decision systems within our societies moving towards automation they are becoming increasingly data-driven. Algorithms are assigned a central role within these systems to make the decisions based on numbers. This evolving landscape of decision-making is hard to disentangle because many parts – the data sources, the algorithms, the processes – are deliberately kept secret and opaque. How can aesthetic practices help gain insights into these systems? And what could we do with this insight?
The upcoming streaming event entitled #ALGOREGIMES is an informal conversation between !Mediengruppe Bitnik and Felix Stalder on topics such as the invisibility of institutional processes, the functioning of infrastructures and logistics, and freedom and control in the data economy.
The work DECISIONS DECISIONS DECISIONS seeks out the imperfections in the logistic systems in which nowadays computers calculate nearly all necessary decisions. To do so, 27 packages were shipped out from Berlin via the logistics services provider DHL. Each package was, however, given two delivery addresses: one for Aksioma in Ljubljana and one for Drugo More in Rijeka. One address on each side of the parcel.
The resulting installation at the two exhibition spaces is formed from the letters that randomly arrive at each location, leaving the authorship of work as much to the artists as the postal machines.
Before reaching their final destinations, many of the parcels travel back and forth between different postal facilities. Depending on which side is scanned, they change directions multiple times. A TV screen in the gallery shows the recordings of the movements for each parcel, documenting the surrealist journey of the piece.
The now-empty boxes are presented in the gallery as the remaining envelope of the work and skeletons of the process. The work experiments with forcing a decision-making process on the postal system which does not usually decide – only routes. The work reinterprets The Postman’s Choice by Ben Vautier from the year 1965 in which a postal worker decides where a postcard that has two delivery addresses is finally to be sent. As it was back then, the standard rule in digital shipping operations is that for every shipping unit there must be one sender and one clear recipient. In today’s fully automated logistics systems, it is no longer the postman’s choice, but rather a question of which side of a parcel is “up” for the automated scanning process to read. The logistics system works mechanically by means of barcodes, scanners and programmed directives. Until the human supervisor spots and corrects the anomaly of the undecided recipient.
A 1500-page ‘Black Book’ that documents the horrific violence suffered by over 12,000 people at the hands of authorities on the EU’s external borders has been released today – International Migrants Day – by The Left in the European Parliament. Compiled by BVMN and printed over two volumes, the ‘Black Book of Pushbacks’ is a collection of hundreds of testimonies of migrants and asylum seekers who have experienced human rights violations at external borders.
