DANM MFA Thesis Proposal - Digital Arts and New Media

DANM MFA Thesis Proposal
Jesse Fulton
2012
Abstract
The Internet is largely viewed as embodying and supporting democratic ideals. In fact, the UN has dubbed it “one of the most powerful instruments of
the 21st century for... building democratic societies.”[5] However, the majority of the most heavily-trafficked web sites are developed and maintained by
private companies running closed-source software systems. The monopolization
and privatization of the Internet experience counteracts many of the goals and
values of the idealized democratic Internet, specifically “the freedom to hold
opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and
ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”[2] This freedom is fundamental in ensuring the diversity of global cultures.
Proposal
1
Overview
Like the library before it, the Internet is becoming one of the largest sources of
information and culture for networked societies. In fact, it is such a vital source
of information that the UN recently declared Internet access to be a basic human
right[5]. However, the term access encompasses more than reasonable physical
access to a computer with a broadband connection. Building off of the idea
of the Internet as a library of documents and artifacts, access to information
includes the ability to find information from a plurality of sources, as well as
the ability to discover information.
The role of “information curator” has traditionally been filled by the librarian, who not only facilitates information retrieval, but also enables information
revelation, potentially providing and exposing new sources of information and
ideas. Given that librarians generally adhere to a strong code of ethics enabling
access to a plurality of sources, it is fair to say that libraries support the development of individual autonomy. In comparison, the “information curators”
of the Internet are software algorithms developed by private companies such as
Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Given their overwhelming presence and near
monoply-status, it is fair to say that these companies control online access to
information, social interaction, and products - or to put it more succinctly, they
control online access to culture. This control comes in the form of software
algorithms1 which make political decisions during the process of archiving and
presenting these digital cultural artifacts2 . In the process displaying information to Internet users, these web sites are also creating new culture through
selective, algorithmic re-presentation.
As Lev Manovich explained, software controls our experience of all digital
media by explicitly defining every possible interaction with digital objects[4].
In this sense, an image viewed in PhotoShop is quite different from that same
image viewed in Preview due to the PhotoShop software allowing far greater
image manipulation possibilities than those present in Preview. But software is
not limited to the applications one runs on their own computer - the Internet
is software. Everything - from the web servers, to the web sites they host, to
1 Google has PageRank, Facebook has EdgeRank, and Amazon has their product suggestions.
2 There are also political decisions clearly made by humans. For example, does Google uses
reCAPTCHA to digitally archive old editions of the New York Times as opposed to documents
with a different political or cultural perspectives..
2
the algorithms and backend processes those sites implement - is all software.
And it is this software which we use to experience the “digital life-world.” Digital and networked technologies are becoming significant resources for personal
autonomy, but when important realms of the Internet are monopolized and
commoditized, the potential for content manipulation on a massive scale is omnipresent. These online empires have recently come under fire for a few such
unjust practices3 . The potential for such powerful companies to engage in this
type of electronic colonialism is real and demands further investigation.
3 Facebook has deleted “inappropriate” photos of same-sex couples kissing; Google is currently under investigation by the US Senate for “cooking” it’s search results
3
MFA Exhibition Projects
Description
Below are the descriptions of the proposed projects. All software developed as
part of this thesis will be FLOSS. In addition, the paper itself is written in
LATEX (a fairly human-readable syntax) and will make user of a public version
control system to track changes throughout its evolution.
Google Views
Google Views is a web browser extension that provides an easily accessible interface for globally modifying Google Search results by configuring advanced
search options (“freshness”, “reading level”, and language), spoofing personalization parameters (bypass all, switch location), and applying post-search filters
(including a number of customizable sorting and grouping algorithms.) It will
also provide a prominent visual alert to users detailing any “customization details4 ” used to generate the personalized search results. This will constitute the
functionality of the initial release.
The second release of the Google Views extension will have options to send
anonymized search results and “click” data to the Everybody’s Google web application. After “opting in” to Everybody’s Google integration, the application
will supplement live search results with other extension users’ archived search
results for similar search queries.
Everybody’s Google
Everybody’s Google is a web application which integrates with the Google Views
extension to mine anonymized56 , personalized7 Google Search data. Mined
search results are grouped together based upon similarity of query terms. The
individual items in each result set are analyzed and scored for “different-ness”
4 information
provided by Google regarding rough data used to personalize of search results
no personally identifiable information
6 given the debacle of the “AOL search data leak” it is still undecided as to whether users
will be given anonymous IDs in order to provide the ability to analyze and to track one’s own
histories
7 filtered by Google’s personalization algorithms
5 containing
4
from other result sets within the same query group. For example, ten sets of
nearly identical search results will receive a fairly low score, whereas ten sets of
highly different search results will receive a relatively high score. The score will
be calculated using an extension of Spearman’s footrule8 .
The Google Views extension will also send Everybody’s Google details of
links clicked from the Google Search results page (also grouped by search query
terms.) This information will be used to build the primary interface of the
website, which will tell the “story” of search terms through the web pages visited.
This information will be used to generate Search Stories for Humans. The
website will also have various views to browse the various resultset data (sans
clicks) such as: “most recent”, “most different”, and “by query terms.”
Web Pages for Humans/Search Stories for Humans
Web Pages for Humans is a web application which creates a version of the
Internet which is only readable by humans. Screen-scraping technology will be
used to generate images of web pages which are then processed by OCR software
to find machine-readable text on the page. This text is then manipulated and
distorted using CAPTCHA algorithms to create a machine-unreadable version
of that web page. Search Stories for Humans is a series of prints depicting a
selection of “stories” from Everybody’s Google modified by this software.
Rationale
I’m interested in exploring issues of transparency, autonomy, and agency with
regards to technology, specifically the Internet or networked devices. As the
power, affordability, and ubiquity of digital technologies exponentially increases,
so does the necessity to study the cultural impact of these systems. While most
think of these technologies as things, I view them primarily as software and
software systems. Without hardware to run on, software as we know it would
not exist; yet without software, hardware (and the infrastructures required to
build and run them) would be useless. We only experience the digital through
software. While there are systems of policies, guidelines, and reviews of hardware technologies and infrastructures, only recently have software algorithms
been seriously called into question, primarily due to monopolistic practices and
unfair market influence[6].
The work for my MFA project largely focuses around Google, primarily
because it is such a large part of my own personal Internet experience. I’m
constantly connected to my Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Search not just
on my computer, but also on my Android phone. I also route all of my phone
calls through Google voice. I love the services Google provides, but sometimes
it feels like Google knows me better than does my own mother.
For a while now, Google has been a target of privacy advocate, scholars, and
artists. At Transmediale 2010, F.A.T. lab initiated FuckGoogle, “a collection of
8 http://www.jasonmorrison.net/iakm/cited/Bar-Ilan_Judit_comparing_rankings.pdf
5
browser add-ons, open source software, theoretical musings and direct actions
aimed at creating an awareness of the role Google plays in our daily lives.” 9 .
One of the notable projects to come out of this effort was Jamie Wilkinson’s
Google Alarm extension for Firefox10 . Whenever personal information is sent
to Google servers through tracking cookies, an alarm horn sound clip is played
over the user’s computer speakers, transforming a normally silent intrusion of
privacy into an extremely visceral and prominent event. The project also elucidates the omni-presence of Google - Google is constantly tracking individual
behavior in order to personalize the web (and to serve hyper-targeted advertisements.) Google Views & Everybody’s Google attempt give power of personalization back to the user, and to create a story of the various life-worlds Google
presents through its personalization algorithms. Personalization algorithms are
important not just because of the curated information they present, but also
because of the information which they omit.
Another related project is Newstweek11 by Julian Oliver and Danja Vasiliev.
Newstweek is a device which hijacks “Free WiFi” Hotspots by posing as the
Hotspot’s router. It then allows the Newstweek administrator to transparently
manipulate web page content from news sites before they reach a user’s web
browser. While the target of these subversive attacks is news media rather
than software algorithms, the project clearly demonstrates the necessity to just
question the content itself or its sources, but also how it gets to your screen.
With regards to the “performance” aspect of Everybody’s Google (users becoming actors in the story), there are two online pieces which I am reminded
of: I’m Here and There12 by Jonas Lund and KeyTweeter13 by Kyle McDonald.
Both of these break down the barrier between the private space of one’s home or
office and the public space of the Internet by posting personal user interactions
or activities directly to the web in real time. This creates a transparency of
computer use, but also blurs the lines between public/private and real/virtual.
Web Pages for Humans addresses the codification of culture. reCAPTCHA
is a project (now run by Google) used to help “digitize” books, newspapers,
and documents by exploiting human labour to decipher words which OCR algorithms are unable of “understanding.” These cultural artifacts are thus transformed into machine-readable files. Web Pages for Humans flips this model
around, taking machine-generated, machine-readable documents and manipulating them with the CAPTCHA distortion algorithms to ensure that computers
can no longer read their own content. Taken a step further, the physical prints of
Search Stories for Humans remove the digital representation, creating a format
that can truly only be read by humans.
Aram Barthol did something related with his project Are you Human?14 In
essence, CAPTCHAs demonstrate the human intervention and cultural knowl9 http://fffff.at/fuck-google/
10 http://jamiedubs.com/googlealarm/
11 http://newstweek.com/overview
12 http://imhereandthere.com/
13 http://kylemcdonald.net/
14 http://datenform.de/areyouhumaneng.html
6
edge required to decipher signs of written language. By placing physical CAPTCHAs
on walls heavily covered by graffiti tags, Barthol is making a connection from
the process of deciphering and interpretation of digital signs to the signs used
in graffiti culture. A graffiti tag is a sign for tagger as well a a representation
of the tagging process itself. Similarly, CAPTCHAs signify not so much the
underlying meaning of the word depicted, but rather the processes of scanning,
distorting, and deciphering.
Finally, Bicycle Built for Two Thousand15 by Aaron Koblin and Daniel
Massey is a great example of reintroducing the human element back into a computer’s representation culture. Users of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk recorded
their interpretations sound clips from computer singing “Daisy Bell” (the first
song ever sung by a computer.) These samples were then combined together
to reproduce the original track using human voices as opposed to computersynthesized sounds creating a human-ized version of a digital artifact.
15 http://www.bicyclebuiltfortwothousand.com/info.html
7
Bibliography
[1] Richard M. Stallman, Free Software, Free Society, 2nd Edition (Boston, MA:
Free Software Foundation, 2010).
[2] UN
Universal
Declaration
on
Human
http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml#a19
Rights
[3] Rieder, Bernhard. “Democratizing Search?” Deep Search: The Politics of
Search beyond Google. Ed. Konrad Becker & Felix Stalder. Piscataway, NJ:
Transaction Publishers, 2009. 133-151. Print
[4] Manovich, Lev. “There is Only Software.”
[5] The United Nations Human Rights Council, "Report of the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion
and expression," (2011). http://documents.latimes.com/un-report-internetrights/ (accessed 11 November 2011)
[6] Mike Zapler, Mike Lee calls for closer look at Google, 3 11, 2011,
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0311/51152.html (accessed 11 1,
2011).
8