Please join us for the opening night party for Goldsmiths’ BSc Digital Arts Computing exhibition 2016.
Featuring work by 22 artists, the exhibition explores the symbiotic (and sometimes dysfunctional) relationship between technology and art.
The artworks – interactive installations, photography, painting and sculpture – investigate surveillance, antisocial networks, tattoos, cyber feminism, big data and the intimacy of human eye contact.
The exhibition is free and open to the public.
Opening night party: 5.30pm – 9.30pm Thursday 28 April 2016 Where:Hatcham St James (The Church), St James, London SE14 6AD Exhibition continues: 10am – 7pm Friday 29 April 2016
A downloadable plugin that mines your browser for data – then builds a profile of your personality and lifestyle – has been created by Goldsmiths Digital Arts Computing student Joe McAlister.
Joe’s project, entitled You Probably Live in Horsham, asks: If the government’s ‘Snooper’s Charter’ legitimises mass surveillance, can we use the same technology to study ourselves?
An art piece with a strong political theme, Joe has combined a visual spy-like aesthetic with the programme’s ability to generate eye-opening reports on the user’s mind-set, creating a feeling of shock, awe, and a slight sense of unease.
Designed to promote discussion around the paper trail we leave on the internet, and how safe that data is online, You Probably Live in Horsham also asks the user to compare their online identity with how they see themselves in real life.
“In our materialistic society many people’s lives have become intertwined with the internet to such a degree it’s become hard to imagine the boundaries between virtual and real,” says Joe – a first-year Digital Arts Computing undergraduate who’s set to graduate in 2018.
“I want to prompt people to look at their lives from a new perspective. When important elements of your identity appear in a list in front of you, it becomes de-humanising. You become just another person on a piece of paper, or in this case, a computer screen.
“I want people to see it, step back a second, and consider a completely different side to their identity which they might not have previously seen.”
“The Home Secretary’s Investigatory Powers Bill demands web and phone companies log the IP addresses, URLS and connection times for every citizen for a year. Theresa May has emphasised how ‘terrorists’ are using the internet to evade detection and by using blanket surveillance they can help prevent this. But at what point does this ‘harmless’ state surveillance become the precursor to something resembling a totalitarian state?”
Behind the scenes of You Probably Live in Horsham it’s a complex system: after the user installs a plugin, it injects a Javascript file into every website that’s visited. This script will then use JQuery, Javascript and Ajax to collect the IP address, URL and timestamp of every web address.
The data is then formatted into a storable format, and individual parts of it analysed. Given the project’s purpose in raising awareness of data security, all data is stored locally in the user’s browser, with only small elements sent temporarily via encrypted ‘https’ to remote servers run and secured by reputable companies.
Install the plugin Click here to download the plugin. Once loaded simply press ‘add to chrome’. The extension should now be installed and the eye icon should be visible in the top right hand side. The eye will move when it analyses a page. You don’t need to do anything to prompt the analysing of a page just browse like normal. To view your paragraph as it generates click the eye icon. The longer you use the plugin the more accurate the data will be. I suggest using it for a few days before taking what it says seriously.
After running the program for a short time on his own computer, Joe’s report proved remarkably accurate, guessing among other facts that he went to Goldsmiths, travelled from Horsham in around 72 minutes, worked a lot late at night and was probably thinking mostly about “Southern Rail or big data”.
Joe McAlister caught on camera
The gathering of data then allows further assumptions to be made manually, even by people who don’t know you. For example, the programme shows that Joe owns a Mac and travels a lot so it’s likely a lightweight version like a MacBook; he likes the artist Yayoi Kusama so it’s likely he also likes other installation art; he’s a computer programmer, appreciates art and goes to Goldsmiths, so he’s likely to be studying Digital Arts Computing.
“The personas we display to people across our idealistic online lives and our more realistic lives can be very different,” adds Joe. “This programme might generate a report for you that reflects your online escapism, or you’ll find more of your real personality comes out.
“From just a few dozen URLS, You Probably Live in Horsham can generate huge amounts of data, and the longer you use the plug-in, the more accurate that data will be,” adds Joe. “And unlike your inclusion in the government’s data retention scheme, it’s entirely optional and easy to stop.”
On 22 January 2016, Digital Arts Computing recently had the pleasure of meeting Belgian visual artist, self-taught software programmer and data activist Nicolas Malevé. Undergraduate student Isabella Maund reports on what happened.
Based in Barcelona, internationally active Malevé is a core member of Constant for Arts and Media, an artist run non-profit organization that explores an interdisciplinary approach to art, media and technology. Technical curiosity is what led to Malevé’s interest in data and the creative analysis of data.
Active Archives, a research project led by Malevé and Michael Murtaugh, investigates the mutation of an archive in a digital context. With his peers he is redefining our understanding of archives and focusing on original ways to classify, annotate and disseminate archives of images, with a strong focus on photography.
This masterclass was particularly relevant and fascinating, as data has become a large and ever growing part of our everyday lives. We are constantly creating and interacting with data through everyday searches, selfies, public transport, etc. Huge amounts of data are constantly being collected, becoming a resource that is transforming society.
Data collection has become a growing topic of conversation in the art world. Current exhibition Big Bang Data at the Somerset House has brought together artists, journalists and designers to further discuss data and its huge presence in our everyday lives, and what this may mean for our future.
“It was interesting to see how Nicolas’s own passion for archiving lead him to discover new and interesting ways to computationally categorise images. Analysing data in a way that is so notoriously difficult to do. His additional insight – that redacted documents reveal almost a core template – was also inspiring, leading me to think of several ideas for my own upcoming projects.” Joe McAlister, BSc Digital Arts Computing
“I enjoyed hearing Nicolas talk to us about his work, and the way that he approaches the subject matter as a computational artist. Getting feedback from him was really valuable in helping me develop my ideas about the place of computers in my work, and the discussions about our subject area were extremely interesting.” Rebecca Dunn, BSc Digital Arts Computing
We are one of the top interdisciplinary computing departments in the country – working across art, music, journalism, gaming, and many other subject areas. This video features students and staff from our creative undergraduate and postgraduate programmes talking about how the culture of Goldsmiths makes us unique.
Please see the Goldsmiths website for further details about the courses that we offer: http://www.gold.ac.uk/computing/studywithus/
If you wish to pursue undergraduate study, please note that the UCAS deadline for application for September 2015 entry is 15th January 2015.
‘There aren’t enough messages to young women that technology is a fascinating area to work in, a fast-moving field, one that rewards hard work, an area where you really can change the world’(Naomi Alderman, The Guardian,
The media has been rife with stories lately about women in technology, or rather the lack of them. According e-skills, the number of women working in the tech sector has fallen from 17% to 16% in 2014.
There are numerous initiatives to increase the number of women in the sector from the classroom to big business, yet in the last ten years the number of women in key roles in the technology industry has remained roughly unchanged.
Yet despite the statistics there are causes for celebration. We have very recently celebrated Ada Lovelace Day, who at the start of it all – working in the 1800’s – produced the first algorithm intended to be carried out by a machine. Because of this, she is often described as the world’s first computer programmer…a woman!
In April this year, the US appointed a female chief technology officer which is inspiring women across the country to break the gender bias in the tech industry. Megan Smith was previously a vice president of Google[x] at Google. Smith has been one of the country’s leading advocates in the movement to get more women into tech jobs*.
(*http://www.wired.com/2014/09/megan-smith-cto/?mbid=social_twitter )
Closer to home, the BSc in Digital Arts Computing course at Goldsmiths has defied the odds and attracted a 65% female cohort this year. A key element of this programme is that it integrates technical programming skills, theoretical and historical conceptions of art into a distinctively computational arts practice. The programme is taught in an integrated way, with a mix of critical studies and computational arts practice elements across both the Art and Computing departments.
We still have a long way to go, but rather than looking at cold statistics, lets focus on the positive stories and inspire the next generation of women programmers.
