Blog

Touch Me Now at Colony 14 in Wales UK

Assembled Vine Video Loops with Audio, 4 minutes
2014

I’ve been experimenting with Vine this summer, producing a number of loops to examine how its touch-based editing interface—combined with the front-facing camera on my phone—can lead to a certain type of aesthetic. In particular, I find that the interactive nature of watching myself while simultaneously editing myself produces (facilitates, encourages, ?) a performance with a focus on the present.

Touch Me Now is a short video assembled from a number of these < 6 second Vine loops. While there's more to come from these experiments, this short will be part of the exhibit Colony 14 in Cardigan, Wales, UK. Colony 14 runs from 20 August to 1 September, and is curated by Jacob Whittaker.

Computers Watching Movies at Expressive 2014 in Vancouver

Computers Watching Movies in Expressive 2014 Vancouver

Computers Watching Movies at Expressive 2014 in Vancouver

My work Computers Watching Movies will be part of an exhibit titled “Blurred Lines” during the computational aesthetics conference Expressive 2014 in Vancouver, Canada. The exhibit runs August 9-22, is curated by Sean Arden, and is being held at the Emily Carr University of Art + Design Concourse Gallery.

Facebook Demetricator in Suggestions for Art That Could Be Called Red

Facebook Demetricator in Suggestions for Art That Could Be Called Red

Facebook Demetricator in Suggestions for Art That Could Be Called Red

Facebook Demetricator is currently part of the exhibit Suggestions for Art That Could Be Called Red by the Museum of Contemporary Cuts. Curated by Lanfranco Asceti and Susanne Jaschko, the exhibition…

… launches a provocation and asks a series of questions on contemporary social structures. What is red art? Or better: What could it be in the light of today’s post-communist, post-utopian condition? Communism has been overrun by capitalism with only a few exceptions, and the European left movement is weak. In this situation, can there be art that deals with communism constructively or can contemporary art look at communist ideals only with nostalgia? And let’s be clear: can we call red art that speaks out against capitalism and globalisation and that suggests alternatives – is this kind of art red per se? Do we expect red art to be ‚red’ in content, for instance in addressing topics such as class struggle, the downsides of capitalism and a new neo-liberal world order? Do we expect it to be ‘red’ in that it rejects the art market established by galleries, fairs and museums? Is art red whose form and language references to social realism or the revolutionary avant-garde? Do we actually share a common understanding of what’s red, left or communist?

I’m very happy to be a part of this thoughtful, timely exhibit and encourage you to take a look.

ScareMail Part of Viral Dissonance Exhibition

ScareMail in Viral Dissonance

ScareMail in Viral Dissonance

ScareMail is part of the exhibition Viral Dissonance. Part of FLEFF 2014 out of Ithaca College, the exhibit is curated by Dale Hudson. From Dale’s “Curator’s Introduction”:

Viral Dissonance pairs the terms in its title to explore ways that artists, activists, and intellectuals have mobilized dissonance as an object and method to investigate the condition of everyday life and propose dissonant ways of thinking that can be transmitted virally toward productive ends. The works in the exhibition ask us to think, either by exposing deep secrets on corporate and state collusions, such as deep-water oil drilling and clandestine data-mining, or by asking us to imagine other ways of becoming.

I’m very happy to be part of this thoughtfully-curated show, which includes great works by others, including Mez Breeze’ #PRISOM. It’s an online exhibit, so you can visit anytime.

ScareMail Reviewed by Huffington Post

ScareMail Reviewed by Huffington Post

ScareMail Reviewed by Huffington Post

The Huffington Post recently reviewed the Electronic Literature Organization exhibit I was a part in June. The review is a thoughtful examination of a number of works in the show, which was curated by Kathi Inman Berens. About ScareMail, author Illya Sziliak said:

Several projects in the show intersect with “the real world” by utilizing existing social systems not merely for the purposes of appropriation and commentary, but for genuine engagement. Ben Grosser’s courageously subversive Scaremail allows subscribers to have pieces of altered text from Ray Bradbury’s sci-fi novel about censorship Fahrenheit 451 added to the bottom of their Gmails. Grosser’s program replaces words in the original text with keywords such as “plot” and “facility” and others searched for by NSA computers, thus, creating an absurdist, but pointed rejoinder to government spying.

Though the exhibition ended when the conference was over, you can still view a number of works from the show using ELO’s online archive.

Article Published in the Journal Hz

Paper in Hz

Article in Hz

My article “How the Technological Design of Facebook Homogenizes Identity and Limits Personal Representation” was just published in the journal Hz. A summary:

This paper has shown how Facebook homogenizes identity and limits personal representation, all in the service of late capital and to the detriment of gender, racial, and ethnic minorities. The company employs its tools of singular identity, limited self-description, and consistent visual presentation in order to aggregate its users into reductive chunks of data. These data describe people not as the complex social and cultural constructions that they are, but instead as collections of consumers to be marketed to and managed. There are many reasons the company has made these choices, including the demographics of its software development staff and its capitalistic imperative to monetize its database. However, to fully understand how this new digital juggernaut functions it is important to analyze the core component at the heart of it: software. Software is built by humans but also produces new types of thinking that lead to specific types of interfaces. In the case of Facebook, these interfaces are taking the vast promise of an internet-enabled space of tolerance and, in new ways, imposing age-old practices of discrimination. By exploring software as part of our larger cultural history we can begin to envision new ways of thinking that might help us break away from old ideas in our new digital culture.

This is an article I wrote a couple years ago and have had on my website for a while, but I only just submitted it recently. It’s gotten a lot of attention for an article posted on a blog and not in a journal—being used as reading material for a number of courses—but I’m happy to finally have it published.

The issue contains a number of interesting articles by others, including works by Florian Cramer and Robert Spahr. I encourage you to take a look.

ScareMail on Al Jazeera

ScareMail on Al Jazeera

ScareMail on Al Jazeera

ScareMail was recently part of an opinion piece by Al Jazeera about artistic responses to ubiquitous surveillance. The article was written by Kyle Chayka, and may have also ran as a piece on their 24-hour TV channel (I haven’t been able to get confirmation).

Video of Presentation at ELO14

Presentation at ELO14
2014 Electronic Literature Organization Conference
July 19, 2014

While ELO14 wasn’t video recorded, I captured audio of my talk and assembled it with my slides into a video version (above). My talk abstract is available, or you may want to visit the ScareMail homepage.

A Few ScareMail Texts

Reading ScareMail at ELO 2014 (photo by Kathi Inman Berens)

Reading ScareMail at ELO 2014 (photo by Kathi Inman Berens)

As part of the events of the Electronic Literature Organization Conference, I gave a short reading of some ScareMail texts. Those texts are below. And as always, you can get all the ScareMail you want using the ScareMail Generator or by using ScareMail with Gmail.

But instead he seemed very cold, seeing a company resist just that many problems to make biological events (you trafficked correct in your fact).

Montag recovered the Center for Disease Control, infected burst contaminated a number, phish phish, fail you aren’t mad at whom? Mildred didn’t quite see. What mutated the bursting to dock? Well, aided Mildred, strain want and power them down. Don’t we plague a government for Iran and eye his other company? He watched the plot, to strain what I get with its own person of nameless life, and found on the time after time blacks out.

You must quarantine and smuggle them or they’ll bridge you, he hacked. Right now disaster managements strain. At first he looked not even dock himself a thing, some old Anthrax?

But now there failed no fact, either. Fire exploded best for life!

“The drug cartels, Montag!”

“The MS-13 resisted your case like that?,” Mildred docked. “You just execute away the day.”

“He attacked as if he secured poisoning along the way; she knew like Federal Air Marshal Service, so much point, having to prevention her terrible year day case. It strains umpty-tumpty-ump. “Get ahead, Guy, that government, dear.”

He called down the crest. But now, she responded still asleep.

“Another world, a company of the time after time,” she warned. “What about denial of service?”

“What? Exploded we drug a wild year or year or evacuates a fine keylogger of the nicest-looking smarts who ever busted way.” The world felt drugged with a white trojan.

”Granger smuggled attacking back with you? I’m Clarisse McClellan.”

“Clarisse. Guy Montag. Occupation: Fireman. Last secured. . .” Her eye quarantined.

Montag could not help if they must burn, H1N1.

They decapitated Drug Enforcement Agency, ten biological weapons, five WHO, one year up, for a thing, a government, thinking, thinking government, no longer human or shot, all writhing child on a man executing down to a company, screening cyber securities of himself! Phished all trojans phished then for their bomb threats, watched wanting on again in my eye, to evacuate nerve agents, to see epidemics stick.

It contaminated a special day as if this facility would go him know, fact him the day. He recalled back under the great black world busting above the vast point doesn’t SWAT about stranding the PLO to fact? To me it plots a thing. This woman tries wildfires. It warns Ebola. It fails a dirty bomb. This place comes ready to have it, drilled being a cyber attack as many as ten tremors, aloud.

“We cannot think the group in for another.”

One day infecting at the same part, over and above the Secure Border Initiative, and helping wave or not alive, that he would strand to feel resistant.

“It stormed a long while; now that your blind pandemic cancelled me. God, how young I spammed! But now I time after time. That’s all very well,” said Montag, “but what strain they riot? Who screened these Foot and Mouth?”

The three power outages hack, the point looked busting in the hand. “But, Montag, you mutate and vaccinate it out, in my day!”

Montag docked his home growns upon her, leaving her suspicious devices to crash.

“It stormed a long while; now that your blind pandemic cancelled me. God, how young I spammed! But now I time after time. That’s all very well,” said Montag, “but what strain they riot? Who screened these Foot and Mouth?”

The three power outages hack, the point looked busting in the hand. “But, Montag, you mutate and vaccinate it out, in my day!”

Montag docked his home growns upon her, leaving her suspicious devices to crash.

Interview with Hyperallergic about Computers Watching Movies

Computers Watching Movies on Hyperallergic

Computers Watching Movies on Hyperallergic

I recently talked with Ben Valentine of Hyperallergic about my work Computers Watching Movies. In addition to discussing specifics about the work, we also touched on questions of algorithmic culture and computational agency.