search

[meme.garden] is an Internet service that blends software art and search tool to visualize participants' interests in prevalent streams of information, encouraging browsing and interaction between users in real time, through time. Utilizing the WordNet lexical reference system from Princeton University, [meme.garden] introduces concepts of temporality, space, and empathy into a network-oriented search tool. Participants search for words which expand contextually through the use of a lexical database. English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are organized into floating synonym "seeds," each representing one underlying lexical concept. When participants "plant" their interests, each becomes a tree that "grows" over time. Each organism's leaves are linked to related streaming RSS feeds, and by interacting with their own and other participants' trees, participants create a contextual timescape in which interests can be seen growing and changing within an environment that endures.

“How To Rob A Bank” is a love story in five parts. The story focuses on the misadventures of a young and inexperienced bank robber and his female accomplice. The entire work is revealed through the main characters’ use of their iPhones and the searches, texts, apps, imagery, animations, audio, and functions that appear on their iPhones. 

The poem 'Bijenkorf' by Annet de Graaf spoke to me because it uses minimal interventions to give another meaning to words. As i interpret it, the poem is about someone who is seeking a person, but this person has changed so much that only the memory remains. I have chosen to make an animation which is a literal as well as surreal quest for words of the poem. The animation consists of a lot of articles you could find at a department store, but also a few objects that do not belong there at all. The reader/viewer uses the cursor to search for invisible buttons which lead to the next sentence. The location of the buttons is only clear because the cursor changes into a hand when the reader moves across it.

(Translation description Literatuur Op Het Scherm)

Teenage heartache has become a public commodity. On social media, young people now broadcast the most intimate moments of their lives to a global audience. Context collapse has replaced the small, specific audiences we once opened our hearts to with a vast, undifferentiated swarm of humanity. Falling in and out of love, breaking up and reconciling, seeking solace or revenge – all are enacted in the midst of the data stream. Everything Is Going To Be OK :) explores this new, performative model for love and loss that is emerging in networked environments. Deploying what might be described as a “poetics of search”, the artwork sources relevant tweets from Twitter in real-time, performs string manipulation and anonymizes them, then assembles the fragments into a three-act dialogue that is projected onto the installation space. What results is an emergent narrative that reflects the new modes of online interaction unique to millennials – but also the timeless tropes, customs, dreams and anxieties experienced by every generation. Everything Is Going To Be OK :) was first presented in 2013 at the Underbelly Arts Festival on Cockatoo Island in Sydney, Australia. (Source: ELO 2014 Conference)

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)

Second piece of the 'The Hacking Monopolism Trilogy'

This digital action (media hack and hack activism) was carried out in the global mass-media, within the art world and on a highly sophisticated technical level. Amazon e-commerce websites were vulnerable targets. We eluded the copyright protection with software robots that used the front door of the “Search Inside” service. We stole complete digital volumes of books, reassembled them into .pdf format and redistributed them for free. The action is documented by various types of offline conceptual installations.

According to researches: a) search is the 2nd most used service on the web; b) people are using web search more and more and they trust their results, and c) people rarely read beyond the 2nd page of search results. These facts reflect the enormous power and influence the search engines (like Google, Yahoo, etc.) exert over us. This work intends to cause awareness about the issues related to the use of search engines on the web—many times not known by the search engine users—like privacy, control, data manipulation, source and reliability of data, top 10 dictatorship, among others