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

[Earth_To_Disk (aka Flat Earth Society), 2008-2011] Art of Failure :: until March 16, 2012 :: Devotion Gallery, 54 Maujer Street, Brooklyn, NY. Continue reading

Data Deluge :: March 2 –July 8, 2012 :: Ballroom Marfa, 108 East San Antonio Street, Marfa, Texas :: Continue reading

The lack of Corporate and Governmental transparency has been a topic of much controversy in recent years, yet our only tool for encouraging greater openness is the slow, tedious process of policy reform.

Presented in the form of a Soviet F1 Hand Grenade, the Transparency Grenade is an iconic cure for these frustrations, making the process of leaking information from closed meetings as easy as pulling a pin.

Equipped with a tiny computer, microphone and powerful wireless antenna, the Transparency Grenade captures network traffic and audio at the site and securely and anonymously streams it to a dedicated server where it is mined for information. Continue reading

Mengele’s Skull: The Rise of Forensic Aesthetics :: February 4 – May 6, 2012 :: Portikus, Alte Brücke 2 / Maininsel, 60594 Frankfurt am Main. Continue reading

David Weinberger on Too Big To Know:

We used to know how to know. Get some experts, maybe a methodology, add some criteria and credentials, publish the results, and you get knowledge we can all rely on. But as knowledge is absorbed by our new digital medium, it’s becoming clear that the fundamentals of knowledge are not properties of knowledge but of its old paper medium. Skulls don’t scale. But the Net does. Now networked knowledge is taking on the properties of its new medium: never being settled, including disagreement within itself, and becoming not a set of stopping points but a web of temptations. Networked knowledge, for all its strengths, has its own set of problems. But, in knowledge’s new nature there is perhaps a hint about why the Net has such surprising transformative power. Continue reading