Since it’s launch, Facebook Demetricator has received a considerable amount of press: from mainstream media, new media art sites, writeups from other artists, and more. I’ve listed the best of the bunch below.

Facebook Demetricator in the Los Angeles Times

Los Angeles Times: Facebook Demetricator may be a solution to your ‘likes’ addiction
Creative Applications Network: Facebook Demetricator—The Unquantified Self
FastCoDesign: A Browser Plug-In That Strips All The Numbers From Facebook
The Verge: Demetricator … removes ‘like’ and friend counts from your Facebook page
Gizmodo: Using Facebook Without Numbers Is Like Growing Up Without Peer Pressure
Corriere della Sera [Italy]: Il Facebook Demetricator per liberarsi dalla schiavitù dei like
Cyborgology: What Would Facebook Be Like Without Quantification?
Rookie: Saturday Links
Grand Text Auto: Statistics Outta My Face
Rhizome: Don’t Give Me the Numbers—an interview With Ben Grosser …
abler: the facebook demetricator: un-count your likes
Quantified Self: Living Without Numbers
NBCNEWS.com: Facebook Demetricator Eliminates Popularity Contest
Betabeat: There’s now a Facebook for Unpopular People
digital|arti [France]: Ben Grosser fights against Facebook metrics
PandoDaily: Facebook for losers is now a thing
O’Reilly Radar: Four Short Links
HP / De Tijd [Netherlands]: De like-cultuur heeft ons in zijn greep
Radio Canada: La Revue du web
Update or Die! [Brazil]: Dezoito Pessoas Curtiram Isso
Lifehacker: The Facebook Demetricator Removes the Numbers From Facebook…
Blog du Modérateur [France]: Demetricator: Supprimer Tous Les Chiffres Sur Facebook
HackADay: Hacking Facebook to remove the social value facade
The Creators Project: Facebook, But Without The Numbers
Futurebiz [Germany]: Facebook ohne soziale Signale—Facebook Demetricator
Tecmundo [Brazil]: Extensão para Facebook elimina as contagens da rede social
News-Gazette: Quality over Quantity
Xplace [Italy]: Demetricator: estensione browser intelligent che “nasconde” …
Metafilter: It’s numbers all the way down…OR IS IT
NBC Today Show Blog: Want Facebook without the popularity contest?

Frame, a major interior architecture publication, recently included a blurb and photos about my Interactive Robotic Painting Machine in an article titled ‘Make It New’. The article’s subtitle was ‘Young designers are creating a new breed of product—and slow-tech machines to make it.’ They say: “Could the next step in the evolution of slow tech be the machine as designer in its own right?” Sold in 77 countries, Frame is published in English, Chinese, Korean, and Turkish. The article appeared in Frame #86, p. 211.

Interactive Robotic Painting Machine in FRAME #86 (click to enlarge)

Related Content:

• Interactive Robotic Painting Machine
• Alan Turing Related Press
• Grosser Wins Creative Divergents Award
• Interview With Roboteknia Magazine
• News Coverage of Interactive Robotic Painting Machine

On the occasion of Alan Turing’s 100th birthday, I’m posting some Turing-related press I received recently. It was a two-page spread in the Israeli magazine Odyssey. Odyssey is a print-only Hebrew-language publication that covers science, philosophy, technology, and culture. It’s published by the University of Jerusalem and Teva. In their Issue 14, which was dedicated to Alan Turing, they featured my Interactive Robotic Painting Machine as well as a piece from my Flexible Pixels project.

Interactive Robotic Painting Machine and Flexible Pixels in Odyssey #14, an issue dedicated to Alan Turing (click for larger)

Here’s a translation:

Benjamin Grosser
As a visual designer, Grosser creates projects, exploring technology and culture through a combination of art, music, science and technology. Grosser focuses on the ways in which technology is changing our world experience, and uses the same technologies as leaders to create jobs that reveal and examine these changes. His vision – are computers changing the way we see without computers? Are control technologies are changing the way we speak or think of ourselves in public? The works of Grosser use human interaction, this creates an experience that encourages personal contemplation on these questions.

The robotic painting machine.
It’s a machine that creates images in response to environmental noise. It is part of a project that investigates the connection between technology, consciousness, art, and interaction in society and how it’s becoming more and more part of today’s technology. After the sound goes through a microphone it gets forwarded to another computer which decomposes the data that the microphone gathered. This information is fed into a genetic algorithm to make decisions about the painting process and changes the behavior of the robot in real-time. Functional building blocks of the project are “gestures” of painting which break down the data, such as the degree of pressure one has to use with a brush or the amount of color to be added to it. Three networked computers running the system conduct the drawing. First is the central control software, written in the “Python” programming language. This program begins each painting with a group of randomly selected drawing gestures, and receives data in the form of auditory input during the drawing. The second computer controls the camera and the projection of the brush and make the auditory analysis, its data is sent as input to the first machine. The third computer runs the robot itself, while it receives commands from the motion control, and stepper motor operator. The algorithm calculates the genetic decisions behind interactive robotic painting machine, making it clear that the painting is not a direct mapping of what it hears, and that the presence of a voice will in fact create two similar works, but not identical.

Related Content

• Interactive Robotic Painting Machine
• Flexible Pixels Project
• Grosser Wins Creative Divergents Award
• Interview With Roboteknia Magazine
• News Coverage of Interactive Robotic Painting Machine

My project Reload The Love!, which artificially inflates your Facebook notification icons whenever they’re zero, has been the subject of some recent press from Israel. Both appear to be from teen-focused sites. One, from teenk buzzmag is titled “התוסף החדש של פייסבוק, or “Facebook’s New Plugin: Become Popular With One Click”.

Reload The Love! on Israel's teenk buzzmag

A translation:

The dream of being popular is part of all of us. Everyone wants a million friends, to get invitations to parties, and to be loved. For many of us this desire never goes away. Can you think of those times that you go to Facebook and find that nobody has left you a message? No one even sent you a friend request or anything at all to talk about? Remember that intense feeling of grief, that sense of sadness you feel after you experience those things? Now you can forget about your sadness with this new plugin that create a virtual illusion of popularity for you.

If you download this new plugin, even if there are other announcements about the production such as this, you will appear full of popularity and friends, at least in the realm of Facebook. Yes, you may be creating a facade, but the whole concept of popularity is a bit of an illusion, so there is nothing wrong with some attitude. So “how do I download?”. All you have to do is go to the link below and it will give you all the instructions. It’s very simple! You are one step ahead of “the most popular people on Facebook”.

Another, from Holes in the Net, is titled “התוסף שיגרום לכם להרגיש אהובים בפייסבוק“, or “Plug-in that makes you feel loved on Facebook.” My favorite bit from this one is the image they included where they showed before and after when using the project. The before is labeled “sad” and the after is labeled “success!”:

Reload The Love! on Israel's Holes in the Internet, Showing Before/After as 'Sad' and 'Success!'

What interests me most about these articles is the completely practical nature of it. There’s no mention of the work as an art project, only as a plug-in that solves the problem of feeling unloved on Facebook by putting up a ‘facade’ the makes you look popular. You can get “one step ahead of the most popular people on Facebook.” Indeed.

The project gained thousands of new installs as a result of this press. Install it yourself!