Evil Media by Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey, MIT Press:

Evil Media develops a philosophy of media power that extends the concept of media beyond its tried and trusted use in the games of meaning, symbolism, and truth. It addresses the gray zones in which media exist as corporate work systems, algorithms and data structures, twenty-first century self-improvement manuals, and pharmaceutical techniques. Evil Media invites the reader to explore and understand the abstract infrastructure of the present day. From search engines to flirting strategies, from the value of institutional stupidity to the malicious minutiae of databases, this book shows how the devil is in the details.

The title takes the imperative “Don’t be evil” and asks, what would be done any differently in contemporary computational and networked media were that maxim reversed. Continue reading

The Unconscious Performance of Identity: A Review of Johannes P. Osterhoff’s “Google” by Owen Mundy, Rhizome.org:

As part of this year’s Transmediale festival in Berlin, media artist Johannes P. Osterhoff organized an online collaborative performance of search engine queries, simply titled, “Google.” For one week, Osterhof convinced myself and 36 other participants to add a unique search method to our default web browsers so that everything we “googled” — from the personal to the mundane — became instantly visible online at google-performance.org. Continue reading

The Hybrid City II: Subtle rEvolutions — Conference, workshops, exhibition and parallel events :: May 23-25, 2013 :: University of Athens, Athens, Greece :: Call for Papers — Deadline: October 20, 2012.

Hybrid City is an international biennial event dedicated to exploring the emergent character of the city and the potential transformative shift of the urban condition, as a result of ongoing developments in information and communication technologies (ICTs) and of their integration in the urban physical context. After the successful homonymous symposium in 2011, the second edition of Hybrid City has grown into a peer reviewed conference, aiming to promote dialogue and knowledge exchange among experts drawn from academia, as well as artists, designers, researchers, advocates, stakeholders and decision makers, actively involved in addressing questions on the nature of the technologically mediated urban activity and experience. Continue reading

Carbon 13 presented in conjunction with The Marfa Dialogues: Politics and Culture of Climate & Sustainability :: August 31, 2012 - February 17, 2013 :: Opening: August 31; 6:00 - 8:00 pm :: Ballroom Marfa, 108 East San Antonio Street, Marfa, TX.

“I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.” –Marshall McLuhan

Carbon 13 presents newly commissioned work by eight international artists who have focused the lens of their creativity to interrogate the reality of climate change. These new and daring works demonstrate that one salient image can speak louder than volumes of scientific data and capture the public’s imagination with an immediate and resonate voice. Continue reading

Remitting Default: Sonic Diagrams – Kenya (Robinson) :: July 6, 2012; 6:00 - 8:00 pm :: Recess, 41 Grand Street, New York City.

On July 6, 2012, Kenya (Robinson) will report back from the midway point of her time spent as the inaugural artist in Recess’s online residency program, Analog. Over the past year, the artist developed Remitting Default: A Psycho-economic Performance of Getting Skooled. This project records her experience as a black MFA student at Yale University while struggling to maintain her personal finances and secure fiscal support. Rendering her private education public, (Robinson) posted a daily record of the available balance in her personal checking account. This information is fully accessible at recessanalog.org. Continue reading

Carrie Bodle: Wavelines :: May 18 - July 14, 2012 :: Artist Reception: May 18; 6:00 pm - 9:00 pm :: CoCA Georgetown Gallery, Seattle Design Center, 5701 6th Ave S., Seattle, WA (Facebook event page).

Bodle creates a new video and sound installation for CoCA based on two previous works, Sewing Sonification (2009) and Waveforms (2010). Both projects use data from ecosystem models along the Washington Coast to create a multimodal experience of art through scientific research. In CoCA’s 4,600 sq. ft. space, a six-channel video installation layers five dimensions of oceanographic data on large semi-transparent textile screens, while a five-channel sonification engages viewers/ listeners with references to underlying systems of data. Continue reading

Situated Technologies: Beneath and Beyond Big Data — A symposium with Philip Beesley, David Benjamin, Laura Forlano, Usman Haque, Natalie Jeremijenko, Omar Khan, Laura Kurgan, Helen Nissenbaum, Trebor Scholz, Mark Shepard, and Kazys Varnelis :: April 28, 2012; 2:00-5:00 pm :: Rose Auditorium, The Cooper Union, 41 Cooper Square, 3 AIA and New York State CEUs. Continue reading

Jer Thorp’s work focuses on adding meaning and narrative to huge amounts of data as a way to help people take control of the information that surrounds them. Continue reading

Data Is Political: A Symposium on Art, Design and Information Politics :: March 15, 2012; 10:00 am - 6:00 pm :: Bergen National Academy of Art & Design, Strømgaten 1, 5015 Bergen, Norway.

Data Is Political brings together artists, designers and scientists to discuss such questions as: What are the aesthetic, ethical and spatial dimensions of information and its relation to power, the production of knowledge, and the construction of urban spaces? Speakers include Philippe Rekacewicz, Peter Sunde, Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas, Max Van Kleek, and Daniel van der Velden with contributions from Steve Dixon, Michelle Teran, and Jill Walker Rettberg. The event is organized by Amber Frid-Jimenez and Ben Dalton. Continue reading

(Read a review here) Good Listeners is a browser plugin that exposes the secret ways in which our browsing habits are shared with and mined by 3rd party web trackers (like Google Analytics and Facebook “Like”) without our consent or knowledge. Whenever a site exposes the visitor’s data to a third party service a confessional booth window is opened and the priest in the window offers words of invisible wisdom, divine providence and spiritual guidance pertaining to matters of web browsing, social networking, e-commerce and digital identity.

Good Listeners in a critical/ amusing/ awkward visualization and sonification of the vast data dimension passively generated by us and aggressively collected and mined by these mysterious omnipresent all-seeing tracking forces of the web. Continue reading