Warning: this online exhibition catalogue exploits the vulnerabilities of your browser to track your profile and monitor your activity. Your metadata is stored and published after being sucked through a super-cookie that is injected in your system without your consent. No matter if you are on VPN, Anonymizer or TOR, in Incognito, Private or Do Not Track modes; in fact this website uses common attacks that make most of the privacy tools ineffective.
Data as Culture
Exhibition catalogue of works for the
Open Data Institute
This online catalogue makes uses of
sophisticated tracking technology to monitor and store so-called individual "
fingerprints". Here your data is vulnerable and your privacy is at risk while you are involuntarily contributing to an experimental artwork, informed and created by your participation in it.
Metadata about you and your activity is stored and exposed on this page in its raw form as logs, which are then published in datasets for public distribution and uncontrollable uses.
The online visitors of this exhibition continually generate data through logs of their viewings of the artworks. Thus this catalogue generates its own data that informs itself, the artworks, the audience and ultimately creates new derivatives artworks made with the data it produces.
In fact, the fingerprints left on this catalogue and its artworks are collected for composing the display of the featured artworks and generating meta-artworks created through your data and subverting images of the original works in the show. It's a participatory and interactive catalogue that always changes and expands upon its use.
This is an
Anti-Social Sculpture piece through a coercive form of participation in an art show and in the creation of artworks marks innovative opportunities in art practices for commenting on contemporary reality and address unutterable truths of impudent tracking strategies and techniques that are almost completely overlooked by the public and ignored by legislators.
Little public knowledge of the tracking of individuals by marketers and authorities, as well as poorly developed technology, keep in place a condition that will change only through radical social change, reinvention of infrastructures and openly questioning ethical values.
Data as Raw Art
This catalogue generates artistic derivatives by breaking down data about the audience. It melts the readers fingerprints into raw materials and transmutes it into new artworks.
These meta artworks created are visual datasets, post ascii art made with big data. In the visual datasets data is used to compose pictures rendered through cells of columns and rows of database sheets.
The final derivative artworks created through this catalogue are re-distributed as open datasets available for others to use, feeding the endless loop of recursive data creation and processing, influence and self-reflection, which themselves, like in every cultural field, result in new material and new creations.
This artistic experiment looks at the natural materials, at the magma underneath the surface. Flow of data can be forged into any other new work. New disposable datasets are generated and ready to be used for other means of signification.
Data is the raw material of a new industrial, cultural and artistic revolution. It is a powerful substance, yet when displayed as a raw stream of digital material, represented and organised for computational interpretation only, it is mostly inaccessible and incomprehensible.
In fact, there isn't any meaning or value in data per se. It is human activity that gives sense to it. It can be useful, aesthetic or informative, yet it will always be subject to our perception, interpretation and use. It is the duty of the contemporary artist to explore what it really looks like and how it can be altered beyond the common conception.
Ultimately, raw art is created from transforming raw material. The essence is corrupted by the attempt to mold it into a form discernible by humans. Raw art for other uses and distribution, which when in circulation will evaporate again, disappearing and reappearing, is a stream of liquid, nourishing the universal need for art.
Therefore, this artwork also questions what data is from a metaphysical point of view, whilst keeping it pure, open and visible.
Text and webscripts by Paolo Cirio. 2014.
- Download the Open Source code of this website & hack.
Notes:
Project: Pixel Privacy Browser Fingerprinting
Paper: "Cookieless Monster: Exploring the Ecosystem of Web-based Device Fingerprinting", IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2013, U.S.
Paper: "How Unique Is Your Web Browser?", Peter Eckersley, Electronic Frontier Foundation, 2010, U.S.
Wikipedia: Fingerprints Device definition
Google's iPhone Tracking - Wall Street Journal: Web Giant, Others Bypassed Apple Browser Settings for Guarding Privacy
Surveillance is the Business Model of the Internet: Bruce Schneier
This work is an Anti-Social Sculpture piece by Paolo Cirio
