Posters for Upcoming Invited Talks at Beloit College and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Next week I’ll head north to give a couple invited artist talks and workshops. First is Beloit College, where I’m speaking as part of the Liability Labs Incorporated (LLI) experimental residency program run by Nicki Werner. The second is a talk and workshop at Digital Humanities Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. This invitation comes from Marc Tasman and is sponsored by the Digital Arts and Culture Program. Here’s the abstract for my talk/workshop at UWM:

Hide the Metrics and Scare the NSA! Net Art as Artistic Research

When using Facebook, why do we want more “likes” and not less, and how does this “desire for more” change what we post for our friends? How does ubiquitous NSA surveillance affect what we write in an email and to whom we send it? Artist Ben Grosser will present two recent net art works that investigate these questions. The first, Facebook Demetricator, is a web browser extension that removes all quantifications from the Facebook interface, inviting the site’s users to try the system without the numbers and to see how that removal changes their experience. The second is ScareMail, a modification of Gmail that makes all email “scary” in order to disrupt NSA surveillance. Grosser will discuss how these works function as artistic research in order to investigate the social, cultural, and political effects of software. This talk will be followed by a workshop focused on the ways net art practices can reveal new information about the user/site relationship, and how a website’s design constructs user (inter)action. Participants will be guided to brainstorm specific website manipulations, and Grosser will prototype participant ideas in order to visualize and theorize their effects.

The talk at Beloit College is at 7pm on 1 Apr, and the talk/workshop at UWM is at 4pm on 2 Apr.