netart

Not For You is an “automated confusion system” designed to mislead TikTok’s video recommendation algorithm, making it possible to see how TikTok feels when it’s no longer made “For You.” The system navigates the site without intervention, clicking on videos and hashtags and users to find the nooks and crannies TikTok’s algorithm doesn’t show us, to reveal those videos its content moderators suppress, and to surface speech the company hopes to hide. Through its alternative personality-agnostic choices of what to like, who to follow, and which posts to share, Not For You should make the For You page less addictive, and hopefully steer users away from feeling like the best path to platform success is through mimicry and conformity. Perhaps most importantly, Not For You aims to defuse the filter bubbles produced by algorithmic feeds and the risks such feeds pose for targeted disinformation and citizen manipulation. Finally, the work stands in opposition to letting corporations opaquely decide what we see and when we see it, to their intentional crafting of addictive user interfaces, and to the extraction of profit from the residual data left behind by users. Ultimately, Not For You asks us to think about who most benefits from social media’s algorithmic feeds, and who is made most vulnerable.

The Required Field is an expansive interactive digital poem exploring the impact of policy documents, bureaucratic forms and the river of applications on our lives and our daily culture. Using twenty found and remixed government and corporate documents, the work poetically translates those overly complex and confusing forms. For example, a Tax Form for farmers will be recontextualized through an interactive image-­‐map tour, transforming specific sections of the forms into poetic text and animated elements. Or a page from a Work Visa application will be created into a platform game, where the reader/player triggers poetry blasting bureaucracies through their game play. And in the end, The Required Field, builds from and then poetically destroys the bureaucratic cultures and their fields of red-­‐tape, laws and policies for the sake of policies, the sub-­‐section to a sub-­‐section, part B stroke 9 for breathing.

I Love Yr GIF is a project based on the culture of the first wave of net art, produced entirely with animated gifs taken from personal collections such as of Jimpunk, Marisa Olson and Superbad. Inspired by the iPad zooming features, here the low tech rhyme with Wi-Fi and mobility, remixing the past and the future of the Internet in an optical black and white delirium. Browse the desktop version or access the webapp from your iPad or iPhone at: http://desvirtual.com/ilvyrgif/ (Source: author)

First produced in 1998, Bas Böttcher’s looppool marks a specific generational moment in the history of online poetry and netart. Simple yet delightful, its palindrome title playfully describes the Sisyphean loop of wandering red billiard balls through a textual maze composed of scattered objects, thoughts, and actions. The reader can either passively watch as these spherical flaneurs wander along the pre-selected path or click to alter their course. Rather than convey the sense of an infinite possibility space, the paths of these poems are highly constrained. Like a Möbius strip, there is no outside to this looppool and regardless of the direction taken, the leisurely poem will wander forever along an unbroken loop.

(Source: editorial statement, Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Three)

Predictor is a web browser based online predictive text artwork. The user or inter-actor is able to enter, via the keyboard, text into a browser window. A statistical algorithm then analyses the probability of all the words that might follow the word just typed, based on the frequency of terms in a reference corpus text. This reference text can be arbitrary. In the case of this instance of the work the corpus is Kafka's Great Wall of China.