<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=windows-1252"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;"><p class="MsoNormal">We continue with the third week with an emphasis on projects that scrape data from databases, social media accounts, or live media feeds in order to help us understand the significance of context and the ease with which decontextualization can occur.</p><div>Michael Takeo Magruder’s <i>{transcription} </i>takes video for a live BBC news feed and layers it with digital “noise” that interrupts our assumptions about the impartiality, objectivity, or any of the underlying assumptions about ways that news is produced. When Patty and I were writing, the project draw images of the brutal siege on Gaza by Israel; today, it draws from images of massacres in Paris (and perhaps even the occasional western coverage of the massacre in Beirut). <i>[FALLUJAH. IRAQ 31/03/2004]</i> remixes footage that was censored from media in places that typically promote themselves as having a relatively open press.</div><div><br></div><div>Robert Spahr’s <i>Cruft</i> series are automated performances that scrape data and render it into new forms of information. Although some of the images produced resemble glitch art, they are more significantly performances of counter-surveillance. One of our favorites, is <i>Distress Cruft (my fellow americans),</i> which scrapes the security photographs for tourists to the Empire State Building in New York — the very photos that tourist can purchase as souvenirs. The program composites the image with a U.S. flag hung to signal distress, thus visualizing the content state of distress in post-9/11 NYC. It asks us to question the erosion of privacy in the name of security.</div><div><br></div><div>Paolo Cirio’s <i>Face to Facebook</i> (with Alessandro Ludovico) also look at a form of “gifting” of our personal data. Rather than to the security firm hired to protect landmark buildings, the project looks at the marketing and adverting firms that purchase our personal data from social media platforms, visualizing our often unwitting (or naive) complicity in the form of sorting, labels, and uploading profile photos in a fake online dating service. Moreover, the project asks us to think about the various improvements to Facebook like facial recognition software for identifying “friends” in photographs as a window into the larger realm of “big data” and the surveillance of everyday life.</div><div><br></div><div>Patty and I are looking forward to learning more about these projects and current ones.</div><div><br></div><div>Best,</div><div>Dale</div><p class="MsoNormal"><br></p><p class="MsoNormal"><b>WEEK 3—LOCATIVE SCRAPING AS COUNTER-SURVEILLANCE</b></p><p class="MsoNormal"><b>Michael Takeo Magruder ([transcription] and others), United Kingdom/United States<o:p></o:p></b></p><p class="MsoNormal">Michael Takeo Magruder (b.1974, US/UK, <a href="http://www.takeo.org/"><span style="color: windowtext; text-decoration: none;">www.takeo.org</span></a>) is a visual artist and researcher who works with digital and new media including real-time data, digital archives, immersive environments, mobile devices and virtual worlds. His practice explores concepts ranging from media criticism and aesthetic journalism to digital formalism and computational aesthetics, deploying Information Age technologies and systems to examine our networked, media-rich world. In the last 15 years, Michael’s projects have been showcased in over 250 exhibitions in 34 countries, and his art has been supported by numerous funding bodies and public galleries within the UK, US and EU. In 2010, Michael was selected to represent the UK at <i>Manifesta 8: the European Biennial of Contemporary Art</i> and several of his most well-known digital artworks were added to the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art at Cornell University. More recently, he was a Leverhulme Trust artist-in-residence (2013-14) collaborating with Professor Ben Quash (Theology, King’s College London) and Alfredo Cramerotti (Director, Mostyn) to research and develop a new solo exhibition - entitled <i>De/coding the Apocalypse </i>- exploring contemporary creative visions inspired by and based on the Book of Revelation. In 2014, Michael was commissioned by the UK-based theatre company Headlong to create two new artworks - <i>PRISM</i> (a new media installation reflecting on Headlong’s production of George Orwell’s <i>1984</i>) and <i>The Nether Realm</i> (a living virtual world inspired by Jennifer Haley’s play <i>The Nether</i>). This year he was awarded the 2015 Immersive Environments Lumen Prize for his virtual reality installation <i>A New Jerusalem</i>.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><b>Robert Spahr (Crufts), United States<o:p></o:p></b></p><p class="MsoNormal">I make art from the digital leftovers produced by the mainstream media as well as what we as individuals leave behind on social networking sites. I write automated computer programs that collect digital leftovers by scraping them from the web, and remixing them into either an image, video, or text-based collage. I call this work 'Cruft', which is a computer hacker term defined as an unpleasant substance; excess; superfluous junk; and redundant or superseded computer code. My work spans computational art, performance, installation, painting and object-making, using collage, remix, automation, indeterminacy, and randomness to bear upon the computer and the Internet as machines that regulate and restrict just as much as they can be used to disrupt and resist dominant codes of seeing and being. I am currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema and Photography at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><b>Paolo Cirio (Face to Facebook), Italy<o:p></o:p></b></p><p class="MsoNormal">Paolo Cirio works with information systems that impact the dynamics of social structures. Cirio's artworks investigate fields such as privacy, copyright, economy and democracy affected by communication networks. He shows his conceptual works through prints, installations, videos, online performances and interventions in public spaces. Cirio has exhibited in international museums and institutions and has won numerous prestigious art awards. His artworks have been covered by hundreds of media outlets and he regularly gives public lectures and workshops at leading art festivals and universities. He has won a number of awards, including Golden Nica at Ars Electronica, Transmediale and the Eyebeam fellowship, among others.</p></body></html>