Ear For The Surge is designed to be heard. A work about rage, inspired by Homeric hexameter and coronavirus. Spoken word, stitched together, woven into layers of pain, inequality and sadness.
Text from internet search terms developed after hearing constant news, constant cries for help, and raging people.
Found text became the basis for an ongoing hexameter, sound, and video.
(Source: Author's description)
This digital artwork by Amira Hanafi was commissioned by the Centre for Applied Human Rights at the University of York, as part of the Navigating Risk, Managing Security, and Receiving Support research project.
It was made in response to research conducted in five countries (Colombia, Egypt, Indonesia, Kenya, and Mexico), where researchers spoke with human rights defenders around issues of security, wellbeing, and perceptions of ‘human rights defenders’ in their countries.
Reading through these transcribed and anonymized interviews, I was struck by the range and depth of emotions expressed. The speakers’ experiences resonated with me in their resemblance to the emotions I feel as a practicing artist in Egypt. This website translates my reading of these interviews into visual patterns, through a system of classifying sentences by emotions expressed and evoked.
The title of this work (we are fragmented) is taken from the words of one of the human rights defenders who participated in the research.
After reading through the interviews that were shared with me, I created a classification system to coincide with the range of emotions I read in the text. I based my classification system on a few popular classification systems. It contains a set of 6 parent emotions, each with 6 subcategories, for a total of 36 classifications.
Reading the interviews again, I recorded my emotional experience by classifying sentences to which I had an emotional reaction, or in which the speaker explicitly expressed an emotion. It was a highly subjective exercise. Ultimately, this website offers personal maps of my reading of the research material, processed through language and emotion.
Alongside my visual interpretation of the research, you can directly access the source material for each classification on this site. Click on any colored circle, and you will see the direct quote from the individual defender on which that classification is based. I hope for this work to give an alternate way of reading through the research shared with me by Juliana Mensah and Alice Nah.
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)
The Living Liberia Fabric, initiated in affiliation with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Liberia, is an interactive, web-based narrative supporting the goal of lasting peace after years of civil war (1979-2003). It links concerns for liberation, dignity, and the future with needs for cultural foundations, human rights, truth, and reconciliation. Our system is based in Liberia's culture and the specifics of the conflicts, hence representing our cultural computing perspective. (source: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/icelab/content/living-liberia-fabric)
