As part of the Articulating Data symposium, there are a number of live creative engagements for you to explore…
Live Sketching and Word Wrangling | Elspeth Murray
Read the Room | Ray Interactive
Read the Room by Ray Interactive is an ambient generative work featuring snippets of conversation (mis)heard by a live mic connected to a local, low-quality speech recognition model. What to expect: cut-up accidental poetry overlaid on a roiling grid of QR-like patterns. What not to expect: recording data, uploading it to the cloud, accurate transcription. Even the most sophisticated algorithms will, when forced to interpret what they cannot distinguish from noise, simply invent.
Repurposing Surveillance | Ahnjili Zhuparris
Data extracted from surveillance technologies enables the digital archiving of persons of interests. These data are often framed as objective, neutral, and material. However, through the spectacle of political rhetoric, an asymmetric narrative can shape the public perception of these digital archives, which may further oppress or harm oppressed individuals or populations. To identify or challenge the material effects of these narratives, repurposing surveillance technologies or creating counter-surveillance data may invert or disrupt the gaze of surveillance, and by extension disrupt an unilateral authoritative gaze. By repurposing surveillance technology through surveillance art, surveillance technology and data can be made visible and tangible to the public. Engaging the public with surveillance art facilitates the reevaluation of the design, deployment, and validity of surveillance technology and its data.
In this interactive exhibit, Ahnjili will discuss the rise of AI-enabled surveillance technologies, introduce the contemporary work of surveillance artists, as well as some of her own surveillance projects that address predictive policing, voice obfuscation, and fear recognition. Ahnjili’s academic work focuses on the clinical surveillance of patients to identify novel biomarkers that can be monitored in naturalistic settings. Ahnjili’s artwork focuses on repurposing general surveillance technologies to reexamine the design and application of these tools.