Video series: Welcome to the Future of the Past

Two years ago I spoke at the IMPAKT Festival 2015 with the theme “The Future of the Past.” Together with my colleague Fernando van der Vlist and Transmediale artistic director Kristoffer Gansing we discussed different Big Data practices in our panel ‘Colossal Data X The Present.’ Afterwards we contributed to The Future of the Past, an interactive… Read more Video series: Welcome to the Future of the Past

Notes from #MIT8: ‘The Work of Algorithms’ – Knowing Algorithms

On Saturday, May 4th I attended the ‘The Work of Algorithms’ panel where Nick Seaver talked about Knowing Algorithms. In his talk Seaver discusses the issue of dealing with proprietary algorithms within research and how a focus on this proprietary or ‘black box’ aspect has skewed our criticisms of algorithms. Strands of research dealing with proprietary algorithms, such as… Read more Notes from #MIT8: ‘The Work of Algorithms’ – Knowing Algorithms

Notes from #MIT8: ‘Labor and Technologies of Surveillance’ – The Aesthetics of Objectivity and Computational Objectivity

On Saturday, May 4th I attended the ‘Labor and Technologies of Surveillance’ panel where Kelly Gates talked about ‘Professionalizing Police Media Work: Surveillance Video & the Forensic Sensibility.’ Gates, who has gone through an extensive training program in the field of video forensics as part of her research, discussed how raw video is not evidence despite video’s aesthetics of… Read more Notes from #MIT8: ‘Labor and Technologies of Surveillance’ – The Aesthetics of Objectivity and Computational Objectivity

Notes from #MIT8: ‘Art that Remembers and Forgets’ – Artistic Interventions

On Saturday, May 4th I attended the ‘Art that Remembers and Forgets’ panel where Raivo Kelomees talked about Privacy Experiments in Public and Artistic Space. Kelomees discussed two projects by Estonian artist Timo Toots: “Hall of Fame” (2009) and “Memopol” (2011). Both projects are a critique on how much information is publicly available from the Estonian chip-enabled identity card and publicly accessible databases… Read more Notes from #MIT8: ‘Art that Remembers and Forgets’ – Artistic Interventions

Notes from #MIT8: ‘Social Media Platforms between Private, Public and Commercial Space’ – Curation by Algorithm

On Friday, May 3rd I attended the ‘Social Media Platforms between Private, Public and Commercial Space’ panel where Tarleton Gillespie talked about Curation by Algorithm. Based on his chapter ‘The Relevance of Algorithms’ [pdf] in the forthcoming book Media Technologies Gillespie posed a few questions: 1. What do these algorithms do? Algorithms are part of the broader ‘content moderation’ picture… Read more Notes from #MIT8: ‘Social Media Platforms between Private, Public and Commercial Space’ – Curation by Algorithm

Notes from #MIT8: ‘The Internet as Archive’ panel – Censorship by Algorithm

On Friday, May 3, I presented my paper Exploring the Boundaries of a Website: Using the Internet Archive to Study Historical Web Ecologies in ‘The Internet as Archive’ panel at MIT8. Co-panelist Chris Peterson talked about user-generated censorship as a form of censorship by algorithm. He gave a few examples of this type of censorship:… Read more Notes from #MIT8: ‘The Internet as Archive’ panel – Censorship by Algorithm