October 19-22, 2017
Brooklyn, NY
Derek Curry and Jennifer Gradecki
Website | Jennifer's Twitter | Derek's Twitter
Jennifer Gradecki is an artist-theorist who aims to facilitate a practice-based understanding of socio-technical systems that typically evade public scrutiny. Using methods from institutional critique, tactical media, and information activism, she investigates information as a source of power and resistance. She holds an MFA from UCLA and is a PhD candidate in Visual Studies at SUNY Buffalo. She is currently a visiting professor at Northeastern University in Boston. Her exhibitions and conferences include New Media Gallery (Zadar), AC Institute (New York), Science Gallery Dublin, The New Gallery (Calgary), Critical Finance Studies (Amsterdam), ISEA (Vancouver), ADAF (Athens), and Ars Electronica (Linz).
Derek Curry is an artist-researcher whose work addresses questions of agency in automated decision making systems. His artworks have replicated social media surveillance systems and communicated with algorithmic trading bots. He received his MFA from UCLA and is completing his PhD in Media Study at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is currently an assistant professor at Northeastern University in Boston. He has exhibited his work at various venues including: Ars Electronica, Science Gallery Dublin, ADAF (Athens), and the AC Institute (New York).
Exhibiting
Crowd-Sourced Intelligence Agency
The Crowd-Sourced Intelligence Agency (CSIA) is a creative research project that partially replicates an Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) system, including an interface that allows users to experience how intelligence agents surveil social media networks and two machine-learning classifiers for predictive policing. Like OSINT interfaces used by intelligence agencies and government contractors, the CSIA recontextualizes social media posts by removing them from their original context and reframing them as a potential threat to national security. The app was created using technical manuals, research reports, academic papers, leaked documents, and Freedom of Information Act files. By providing first-hand experience with social media monitoring systems, the CSIA exposes potential problems with current dataveillance processes in order to help users understand the effectiveness of OSINT processing and make informed decisions when navigating social media surveillance.
For the installation at Radical Networks, we would like to create a watchlist comprised of the Twitter handles for the participants of Radical Networks 2017. Tweets from these handles will be surveilled using a keyword search and the CSIA’s two Naïve Bayes classifiers. Onsite will be a way for visitors to interact with the online CSIA application and review twitter posts. The installation for the CSIA has been reconfigured to fit different venue types and spatial restrictions, and we are happy to work with the spatial constraints, resources and needs of Radical Networks.
