Application

AdNauseam is a free browser extension designed to obfuscate browsing data and protect users from tracking by advertising networks. At the same time, AdNauseam serves as a means of amplifying users' discontent with advertising networks that disregard privacy and facilitate bulk surveillance agendas.

(Source: Website)

TrackMeNot blends software tool and artware intervention in a browser extension to protect users from data profiling and intervene in the power dynamic between searchers and the corporations controlling our data. Unlike most privacy tools, TMN works not by means of concealment or encryption, but via noise and obfuscation, periodically issuing algorithmically-generated decoy queries to search engines so that users' real searches, lost in a cloud of false data, are hidden in plain view.

(Source: Helen Nissenbaum)

Circa 1948 is a photorealistic 3D storyworld that transports users to postwar Vancouver, a city caught between the ruins of an old order and the shape of things to come. Co-created by the National Film Board’s Digital Studio in Vancouver and world-renowned artist Stan Douglas, the universe of Circa 1948 revolves around an immersive, interactive “art app” for iPad and iPhone that uses touch and gyroscopic navigation. It also includes a website that frames the project’s story and characters and an interactive projection-mapped installation that premiered at the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival’s Storyscapes program.

NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism is an ambitious and richly imagined project by Hyphen-Labs, a global team of women of color who are doing pioneering work at the intersection of art, technology, and science. The project consists of three components. The first is an installation that transports visitors to a futuristic and stylish beauty salon. Speculative products designed for women of color are displayed around the space, including a scarf whose pattern overwhelms facial recognition software, and earrings that can record video and audio in hostile situations.

The second part of NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism is a VR experience that takes place at a “neurocosmetology lab” in the future. Participants see themselves in the mirror as a young black girl, as the lab owner explains that they are about to experience cutting edge technology involving both hair extensions and brain-stimulating electrical currents. In the VR narrative, the electrodes then prompt a hallucination that carries viewers through a psychedelic Afrofuturist space landscape.

The final component of the project is Hyphen-Labs’ ongoing research about how VR can affect viewers, potentially reducing bias and fear by immersing participants in positive, engaging portrayals of black women.

(Source: MIT Docubase description)

Her Story is the award winning video game from Sam Barlow, creator of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories and Aisle. A crime fiction game with non-linear storytelling, Her Story revolves around a police database full of live action video footage. It stars Viva Seifert, actress and one half of the band Joe Gideon and the Shark.

Her Story sits you in front of a mothballed desktop computer that’s logged into a police database of video footage. The footage covers seven interviews from 1994 in which a British woman is interviewed about her missing husband. Explore the database by typing search terms, watch the clips where she speaks those words and piece together her story.

(Source: Steam's description)

Penelope is a combinatory sonnet generator film based on the Odyssey, addressing themes of longing, mass extinction, and migration. Recombinations of lines of the poem, video clips, and musical arrangements produce a different version of the project on each run. Penelope was co-produced by Alejandro Albornoz (Sound), Roderick Coover (Video), and Scott Rettberg (Text and Code). Using a similar combinatory structure to that of Raymond Queneau's Cent mille milliards de poèmes, the computer-code-driven combinatory film can produce millions of variations of a sonnet that weaves and then unweaves itself. The program writes 13 lines of a sonnet and then reverses the rhyme scheme at the center couplet. Each 26 line poem is produced as an audiovisual composition, with lines spoken by voice actress Heather Morgan. The system determines their composition, produces and plays the video and musical composition, and then displays the text of the generated poem before composing a new sonnet pair. The videos by Roderick Coover and the sound compositions by Alejandro Albornoz also recombine in an algorithmic structure. Albornoz remixed oboe solos by Kristiansand Symphony Orchestra musician Marion Walker in developing the aleatory soundtrack. The video and the text were developed by Coover and Rettberg during 2017 residencies at the Ionian Center for Arts and Culture. Actors in non-speaking roles in the film include Kefalonian residents Helen Amourgi, Kostas Annikas Deftereos, and Sophia Kagadis.

(Description: Author's description)

„Street Flower” is application designed by Jan K. Argasiński and Piotr Marecki. The technical side of the project is based on the creation of a mobile application that runs in conjunction with iBeacon devices (Estimote Beacons). This technology includes a text generator in a spatial context and action based on the position relative to specified, "electronically tagged" objects. With this combination, dynamically created texts will operate in the context of a specially prepared micro version of the Internet of Things. In our project, we focus on the work of the Polish poet Tadeusz Peiper (1881–1969), sometimes referred to as the Pope of the Avant-garde, an artist and theoretician of the socalled Kraków Avant-garde. His greatest achievement was a poetic form he called a “blossoming arrangement”, in which the constraint stems from the fact that the poem gradually unfolds from smaller units of the poem. We adapt Peiper’s classic „Kwiat ulicy” („Street Flower”), a blossoming poem from 1924, for Estimote Beacons. Thanks to the spatial possibilities of the iBeacon device, Peiper's work gains the spatial shape of a blossom, which was limited by the page. The reader navigates the space with his mobile device in hand and by using the specially designed app, he/she discovers the 4 layers of the work. Operation of the proposed mobile application is based on three contextual aspects: the action of the paired smartphone and beacon working in tandem, the tracking capability of the beacon’s distance from the smartphone and recording the current direction of smartphone’s movement in relation to the beacon. The actors in the created application include: users (operator with respect to whom and in response to whose actions that text will be generated), application (as the recipient of user actions; works in real time and reacts to those actions), smartphone (on which the application is running; the operating system [Android in this case] allows for use of built-in device sensors and transmitters/receivers that enable proper operation of an application and communication with the beacon), and the beacon (passive sender of the radio signal; its task is to broadcast continuous information about itself; in the project we assume that the beacons are fixed in one position). The system consists of three main components and communication between them. The first component are passive signal senders, the Estimote Beacons. They broadcast information about themselves via Bluetooth Low Energy. Another component is the user application installed on the mobile device, smartphone. The application begins to listen for beacon signals in the vicinity. The last component is the Internet with freely realized connection between it and the application.