Athens Digital Arts Festival 2016

You like my like of your like of my status, my new sound/video installation for generative text and speech synthesis, just premiered at the Athens Digital Arts Festival in Greece. The festival is directed by Katerina Gkoutziouli.

Facebook Demetricator at Unlike in Poitiers, France

Facebook Demetricator will be part of Unlike, an exhibition of Facebook-related art curated by Thomas Cheneseau opening Feb 2 at Chapelle des Augustins in Poitiers, France. According to Cheneseau, “the exhibition gathers and explores, for the first time, works of international artists that appropriate Facebook by diverting, confusing, playing, and/or trivializing the initial tool through various creations.” I appreciate Thomas’ work putting this exhibition together, and am happy to be showing along with many friends/colleagues who treat Facebook as a site of intervention.

Systems Under Liberty at Galerie Charlot in Paris, France

I’m excited to share that opening this Friday, 27 Nov is my solo exhibition Systems Under Liberty at Galerie Charlot in Paris, France. I will exhibit a number of works: net art, installation, video, and more. As part of the show I am also launching a brand new work (stay tuned). You can see the catalog here.

While curator Valentina Peri and I were always framing the exhibition within ongoing debates of increased surveillance by the French government, we had no idea of the climate we’d find ourselves in as the opening nears. France (and the US) are using the latest terrorist attacks to argue for new expansions of state surveillance; I’ll be in Paris midway through the show to talk about my work within this rapidly shifting context.

A bit from Valentina Peri’s curator’s statement:

… Grosser approaches his subject matter through the lens of an artistic practice of «culture jamming», or cultural sabotage. [He] sets out to hijack software platforms that have become part and parcel of our everyday life through a tactic of «poaching». By imagining unintended applications and designing new extensions for Facebook, Gmail, Artificial Intelligence Systems, IP Localisators etc., the artist subverts the mechanics of IT services that are in the same time surveillance systems and data collectors. His ironic approach elicits an effect of detachment, which alerts users to some of their automatisms and to their place in the dominant cultural order. In so doing, Grosser lays the groundwork for an anti-discipline that enables us to assert ourselves as active historical subjects from within the current regime of technological power. A healthy antidote to passive victimhood and an instrument of peaceful resistance, his «digital disobedience» points towards chances of escape.

My thanks to Premio Arte Laguna and the University of Illinois College of Fine and Applied Arts for their partial financial support of this project.

The Music Obfuscator will alter music in order to evade Content ID systems

At this year’s PIKSEL festival in Bergen, Norway, I’m showing a preview of my in-progress work Music Obfuscator. The preview includes an eight track playlist demonstrating the current state of my obfuscation algorithms. Music Obfuscator has grown larger than I originally intended (which is why I’m showing a preview), but I expect to release it this spring (including all the research and code I’ve been doing as part of the project). I’m happy to once again be a part of PIKSEL, which is directed by Gisle Frøysland and curated by Maite Cajaraville. PIKSEL is spread across many venues in Bergen; my work will be up from 19-22 Nov at Ungdomshuset 1880.

Computers Watching Movies at DATA DRIFT in Riga, Latvia

My work Computers Watching Movies is part of the exhibition DATA DRIFT at the kim? Contemporary Art Center in Riga, Latvia. Curated by Lev Manovich, DATA DRIFT is part of the RIXC Art Science Festival. DATA DRIFT “showcases works by some of the most influential data designers of our time, as well as by artists who use data as their artistic medium. How can we use the data medium to represent our complex societies, going beyond “most popular,” and “most liked”? How can we organize the data drifts that structure our lives to reveal meaning and beauty? How to use big data to “make strange,” so we can see past and present as unfamiliar and new?” The exhibition is on view from 10 October to 22 November.