activist

Przemówienia (Speeches is a program written in Amiga Basic which procedurally generates Communist propaganda. The rote repetitions and word salad satirize political speechmaking by pushing language to its automated extreme. First published in 1993, Przemówienia appeared in a special issue of Magazyn Amiga dedicated to "grafomania" – the compulsive impulse to endlessly write. Marek Pampuch, who was also the magazine’s editor-in-chief, presents a satirical method for winning the Nobel Prize with the help of an Amiga computer. Pampuch writes: "We know that the level of intelligence of our leading politicians only allows them to read out something already written by someone else".

With Przemówienia, Pampuch succeeds in effectively imitating the empty political rhetoric (or what translates from Polish as “grass talk”) by not only producing text which is pre-written and plentiful, but also devoid of any meaning or message beyond its performative utterance.

This bot draws snippets of positive reviews from Rotten Tomatoes (a film and TV review aggregator), changes the director or producer’s name to a Fox News anchor or personality, and tweets it every two minutes. This Twitter account and bot were produced by The Colbert Report as a response to the news that Fox News publicists had thousands of fake social media accounts to try to spin any postings or comments against their news channel. By recontextualizing praise for film and television performances, narrative, and directorial style, as well as adding the #PraiseFOX hashtag, this overwhelmingly frequent, positive praise comes across as ironic and absurd. Its output also serves as a kind of subtweet because whenever anyone searches for one of the Fox News personalities on Twitter they’re likely to get many “Real Human Praise.” Following this bot may prove to be too much for readers because its frequent endless tweeting will certainly accelerate the current in your Twitter stream.

The Kimchi Poetry Machine is powered by open-source tangible computing. When the jar is opened, poetry audibly flows from it, and readers and listeners are immersed in the meditative experience of poetry. Small “kimchi twitter” paper poems are housed inside the jar, with each poem is printed an invitation to tweet a poem to the machine handle. Eight original feminist “kimchi twitter” poems were written for the machine by invited women and transgender poets. The Kimchi Poetry Machine prototype was created through my 2014 summer fellowship from the CITRIS (Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society) Invention Lab at the University of California, Berkeley. As a response to “bookless” libraries, The Kimchi Poetry Machine reimagines how tangible computing can be utilized for a feminist participatory engagement with poetry. (Source: ELC 3)

In Eugenio Tisselli's own words, "[t]he global financial dictatorship presents us with a paradox: while the economic transactions capable of shifting the destinies of entire countries are the result of performative language, it is language itself that, in turn, is transformed and subjected to the flows of financial markets." In 1917, Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution declared all land to be property of the people. This law protecting indigenous territories and communal modes of living was altered in 1992 as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed into existence. El 27 || The 27th procedurally allegorizes the slow encroachment of finance capitalism and linguistic colonialism in to Mexican political life. Ever day that the New York Stock Exchange closes with a positive percent, a section of Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution is translated from Spanish into a highly distorted computer-generated English. The work is a simply yet scathing expression of the loss of Mexican culture and political autonomy in the wake of NAFTA under the excesses of computational capitalism. The erosion of Mexican soil and culture at the hands of ultrafast algorithmic trading and linguistic robots will eventually terminate in a nonhuman textual landscape of speculative nonsense. (Source: ELC 3's Editorial Statement)

Wandering Meimei / Meimei Liu Lang Ji is a bilingual interactive fiction app designed for mobile interfaces for the Chinese market. This story is an intertext to the traditional Chinese comic strip, Sanmao Liu Lang Ji (Wandering Sanmao), a homeless boy. Meimei, meaning little sister, is an allegorical character and contemporary representation of the largest migrant population the world has ever seen: the migrant female factory worker. Through the app, you can make contact with the character Meimei who works in a smartphone factory in the Pearl River Delta city Guangzhou. Meimei's only technology and access point to the outside world is through her own phone. The social media hub and interface enable you to enter and become a part of Meimei's story.

(Source: ELO Conference 2014)

AdLiPo is a browser plugin that replaces advertisements with generated language art. Leveraging the ad-detection techniques of popular ad-blockers, AdLiPo not only blocks ads, but replaces them with calls to a JavaScript language library (the RiTa library, in this case), filling the advertising regions of pages with static or kinetic text created for the specific context (the containing page, advertising-content, and dimensions of the ad-frame). (Source: http://rednoise.org/adlipo/)

ScareMail is a web browser extension that makes email "scary" in order to disrupt NSA surveillance. Extending Google's Gmail, the work adds to every new email's signature an algorithmically generated narrative containing a collection of probable NSA search terms. This "story" acts as a trap for NSA programs like PRISM and XKeyscore, forcing them to look at nonsense. Each email's story is unique in an attempt to avoid automated filtering by NSA search systems. One of the strategies used by the US National Security Agency's (NSA) email surveillance programs is the detection of predetermined keywords. Large collections of words have thus become codified as something to fear, as an indicator of intent. The result is a governmental surveillance machine run amok, algorithmically collecting and searching our digital communications in a futile effort to predict behaviors based on words in emails. ScareMail proposes to disrupt the NSA's surveillance efforts by making NSA search results useless. Searching is about finding the needles in haystacks. By filling all email with "scary" words, ScareMail thwarts NSA search algorithms by overwhelming them with too many results. If every email contains the word "plot," or "facility," for example, then searching for those words becomes a fruitless exercise. A search that returns everything is a search that returns nothing of use. The ability to use whatever words we want is one of our most basic freedoms, yet the NSA's growing surveillance of electronic speech threatens our first amendment rights. All ScareMail does is add words from the English language to emails written by users of the software. By doing so, ScareMail reveals one of the primary flaws of the NSA's surveillance efforts: words do not equal intent.

(Source: ELO Conference 2014)