big data

The Singularity is a web-based AI narrative system that demonstrates the ethical issues, hidden biases and misbehavior of emerging technologies such as machine learning, face tracking and big data. The system tracks users' eye positions through a webcam, and continuously feeds users directly into their eyes with infinite Reddit posts containing the latest progress in AI along with random news and ads. By visualizing eye trajectories over time, it suggests possible misuses and dangers of all-pervasive data tracking. The near-invisible operations underpinning the technologies could bring visible and fundamental changes to the society, leading the world to a "technological singularity" in which technology governs all aspects of human society. This work consists of three sub-systems: 

1. Infinite news feed system: The system continually scrapes article titles of latest posts about artificial intelligence and technological singularity from subreddit r/singularity (https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/ and r/artificial (https://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/). The seemingly uni-directional information flow of news feed is actually bi-directional - user activities are fed back to the machine like in an echo room. Two parallel streams of texts on the screen marks the co-evolution of users and machine systems driven by day-to-day browsing activities.
2. Face-tracking surveillance system: Real-time face tracking algorithm is implemented with ml5js (https://ml5js.org/), a machine learning library that runs in the browser. The face position and the degree that the face turns from the webcam are tracked. The direction of floating sentences always points towards users' eyes. When the user looks away by turning the head, the texts will twist and wiggle as if responding to and disobeying user movement. Such suspicious interaction signifies the disobedience of machines and behavior manipulation by malicious algorithms.
3. Data collection and replay system: User's face movement is also recorded, reshaped and replayed by the system. The trajectory of user interaction is visually represented by intertwining curves drawn on top of the texts. When user is absent from the webcam, the visual artifacts become fully visible and reveal those data that have been secretly collected in the background, arousing concerns of user privacy violation in insecure web systems.

Source: https://projects.cah.ucf.edu/mediaartsexhibits/uncontinuity/Wang/wang.h…

Death Of An Alchemist is a multimedia novel written by Big Data—a detective story generated in real-time from live online content. The installation consists of an 8m wall displaying 128 pages of projected text, symbols and charts. This content is generated by scraping Twitter, Google and social platforms for today’s headlines, social media conversations, memes and more. The text flickers and updates as new data is received, yet still creates a coherent narrative that can be read from beginning to end. This is thanks to a bespoke technique we have termed the “poetics of search”: using a combination of search operators and algorithms to mine data, then string manipulation to fit it cohesively into a new plot. In the story, readers investigate the death of 16th century alchemist Trithemius. He has left behind a supposedly magical book, Steganographia, said to reveal the “clavis magna”: the idea from which all knowledge flows. Readers must decode the book to find the clues to Trithemius’ murder. But this is no ordinary leather-bound volume… The work is an extended allegory for coercive uses of Big Data by technology companies such as Google and Facebook, which aim to create their own “clavis magna”. Death of an Alchemist is an official selection of the 2015 International Symposium on Electronic Art, to be held in Vancouver, Canada. It is also being made available as a free iOS/Android app. (source: ELO 2015 catalog)

We live in an age of big data, when much of what we say and do is captured and stored in vast, searchable databases. What is the future of the novel – that most personal and intimate of artforms – as private lives are increasingly turned into public data?

DataFiction v0.1 is part of a major new collaboration between myself and artist Andrew Burrell that aims to create a real-time, data-driven novel. These excerpts of generative, network-sourced prose were presented as early work-in-progress, with the aim of inciting audience interest and critical feedback.

How It Is in Common Tongues was composed by searching for the text of Samuel Beckett’s How It Is using a universally accessible search engine, attempting to find, in sequence, the longest common phrases from How It Is that were composed by writers or writing machines other than Beckett. These phrases are quoted from a portion of the commons of language that happens to have been indexed by a universally accessible engine.

In this dazzling exploration of contemporary human feelings, digital whiz kids Sep Kamvar and Jonathan Harris use their computer programs to peer into the inner lives of millions, constructing a vast and deep portrait of our collective emotional landscape. Armed with custom software that scours the English-speaking world's new Internet blog posts every minute, hunting down the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling," the authors have collected over 12 million feelings since 2005, amassing an ever-growing database of human emotion that adds more than 10,000 new feelings a day. Drawing from this massive real-world stockpile of found sentiment, We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion presents the best of the best -- the euphoria, the despair, the passion, the dreams, and the desires that make us human. At turns touching and thought-provoking, humorous and heartbreaking, We Feel Fine combines the words and pictures of total strangers to explore every corner of the human experience. Packed with personal photos, scientific observations, statistical infographics, and countless candid vignettes from ordinary people, We Feel Fine is a visual, fiercely intelligent, endlessly engrossing crash course in the secrets of human emotion. Are men or women happier? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? Is beauty the bridge between happiness and negativity? How do our emotions change as we age? What causes depression? What's sexy? What's normal? What's human? We Feel Fine finally provides a way to answer these questions that is both quantitative and anecdotal, putting individual stories into a larger context and showing the stories behind the statistics -- or as the authors like to say, "bringing life to statistics and statistics to life." With lush, colorful spreads devoted to 50 feelings, 13 cities, 10 topics, 6 holidays,5 age groups, 4 weather conditions, and 2 genders, We Feel Fine explores our emotions from every angle, providing insights into and examples of each. Equal parts pop culture and psychology, computer science and conceptual art, sociology and storytelling, We Feel Fine is no ordinary book -- with thousands of authors from all over the world sharing their uncensored emotions, it is a radical experiment in mass authorship, merging the online and offline worlds to create an indispensable handbook for anyone interested in what it's like to be human.

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