"description": "I am data! This website's graph structure is inspired by schema.org - an effort to structure all content on the www. Scaling and ordering is based on the PageRank algorithm: items wich are linked more are ordered on top. Good luck finding your way in this hyper structure.",
"description": "A research into <em>Data Dramatisation</em> as a tactic to make data visualisations more transparent in their underlying procedures of data collection. We advocate a form of data literacy that is not so much focussed on programming skill, but rather one that brings an understanding of data infrastructures: allowing for restistance against data driven governance.\n\nWith support of the Creative Industries Fund NL.",
"description": "Datasets form the basis on which computer models that are often tasked with automatic decision making, function. But these datasets are not a distilled version of reality: in their creation, conflict and ambiguity are neglected in favour of making reality computable. In this workshop we will explore tactics of instilling affective relations back into datasets. We will collaboratively delve into the vast Enron corpus through script writing."
"name": "Workshop: Best wishes from the Enron corpus",
"startDate": "2021-03-08 9:00",
"endDate": "2021-03-08 12:00",
"organizer": "Critical Data Studies - Alternative Data Futures",
"description": "Datasets form the basis on which computer models that are often tasked with automatic decision making, function. But these datasets are not a distilled version of reality: in their creation, conflict and ambiguity are neglected in favour of making reality computable. In this workshop we will explore tactics of instilling affective relations back into datasets. We will collaboratively delve into the vast Enron corpus through script writing.",
"organizer": "Centre for Digital Cultures & Institute for Culture and Society",
"description": "The event will host three rounds of conversations that will introduce various datasets and artistic ways of interfacing them.\n\nAlgorithmic models learn to distinguish patterns and make predictions by attempting to imitate existing structures in vast collections of data. In the process of creating these datasets, conflict and ambiguity are omitted in favour of turning the world into its computable double. How do we bring forth narratives that make other interpretations possible?\n\nPlotting Data was a series of workshops held by Cristina Cochior & Ruben van de Ven in 2019, which explored the biases and tensions within datasets that underlie systems for automated decision making. Discussions, presentations and performances fed into the creation of digital interfaces that emphasise the inherently performative characteristics of datasets.\n\nThis final event marks the end of this project and the release of the Acts of Collection and Omission digital publication. Two tables will be hosted by invited artists Julie Boschat Thorez & Sami Hammana and Nicolas Malevé, while the third table will give an overview of the publication.",
"description": "Inspired by Alison Powell’s ‘data walk’, the <em>Flaneur</em> twists her concept by not only making participants aware of data collection within the city, but also by making them experiment with data collection for their own purposes. By zooming in on the procedures of selection, classification and digitisation, participants experience the intricacies of data collection.",
"description": "Datasets form a basis on which a city is made readable and interpretable foralgorithms, such as the those that process the endless streams of information coming from the cameras and sensors that stand scattered throughoutEindhoven. In this workshop, we will get acquainted with various ways in which data is collected and imagined. Who is being collected and what are the (dis)advantages of being represented? After an introduction into the types of biases that are inherent to their creation, we will combine hands-on work with pre-made scripts and discuss ways in which fiction and performance play a role in seeing like a dataset."
}
]
}
}
],
"organiser": [
{
"@type": "EducationEvent",
"name": "Workshop - API: Artistic Point Of Interferance",
"alternateName": "API-art & situated fictions",
"location": "AKV St. Joost, Breda",
"description": "A presentation & workshop about working with APIs as an artist. In collaboration with Manetta Berends & Max Dovey",
"description": "Nowadays, we are not only increasingly delegating and automating tasks and processes, there also new forms of work that are being created for people. With the emergence of services such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk, specific parts of automatic processes are being outsourced to human workers. These Human Intelligence Tasks are tasks that a machine cannot execute, for example retyping a scanned receipt or entering a Captcha code. In this way machines selectively delegate tasks to humans, creating a human working class that remains largely invisible.Merijn van Moll and Ruben van de Ven want to make this feedback loop between man and machine visible. This creates a new ritual in which the spirit of the worker is invoked again and again.\n\nThis project was developed in light of <em>Future scenarios for AI and the job market</em> by Setup and the NSvP (Dutch Foundation for Psycho technology)",
"description": " What is the impact of Artificial Intelligence on the labour market what does it mean for diversity and inclusion? That is de question that the art installation Guest Worker addresses. The artwork, made by Merijn van Moll and Ruben van de Ven, results from a collaboration between NSvP and SETUP.\nDuring both days of Brave New World, through a live twitch stream on the BNW-site, you can see and chat with Merijn and Ruben while they work as Mechanical Turkers - human digital workers who carry out repetitive micro-tasks that AI cannot do.",
"workFeatured": []
},
{
"@type": "ExhibitionEvent",
"name": "Ars Electronica Garden Utrecht",
"organizer": [
{
"@id": "r:/organisation/setup"
},
{
"@id": "r:/organisation/hku"
},
{
"@id": "r:/organisation/ccu"
}
],
"superEvent": {
"@id": "r:/arselectronica"
},
"url": "https://arselectronica.hku.nl/",
"startDate": "2020-09-10",
"endDate": "2020-09-12",
"location": "Kapitaal, Utrecht",
"description": "Ars Electronica is a cultural, educational and scientific institute that deals with media art. It was founded in 1979 and that year was also the first edition of the annual Ars Electronica Festival. The festival has been a frontrunner for 40 years when it comes to presenting work at the intersection of art, technology and society.\n\nThis year the festival will take place online with 120 participants around the world who all locally and online organise a program part for the festival. These program parts are called “gardens”. The Ars Electronica Garden Utrecht is hosted by HKU and is a showcase of upcoming talents from the HKU University of the Arts Utrecht. This showcase is called “new connections”. All works presented take on the notion of a world in transition and the need for humans to change their attitude towards this world. This can be for example towards humanity technology, tradition, nature and/or spirituality. Visiting the showcase you are invited to explore ways in making new connections with everything around you. For Ars Electronica 2020 the Ars Electronica Garden Utrecht was curated and produced by HKU Expertise Center for Creative Technology.",
"description": "SETUP x NSVP: future scenarios for AI and the job market\nAlgorithms that assess application letters. Voice assistants who take over the job interview. Predicting the perfect candidate for a vacancy. The possibilities of AI for recruitment and selection of employees seem endless. What does the future of this development look like? And how does AI facilitate - or frustrate - diversity in the labor market? Eight selected makers worked on this theme in four teams. From programmer to writer of historical novels, and from costume designer to cultural anthropologist.\nWith installations, performances and other works they make the social consequences of AI in the HR sector tangible. Because reading about it is one thing, but the consequences can only be felt if you yourself undergo an algorithmic interview. Would you still be hired for your own job if you had to apply with these systems?",
"name": "Privacyrede 2020: the internet is broken",
"description": "(NL) Het internet is stuk. Hoe kunnen we het weer repareren? Daarover vertelt Marleen Stikker, auteur van Het internet is stuk, op 23 januari tijdens de Privacyrede 2020. Met de 50e verjaardag van het internet is dit hét moment om terug te blikken en vooruit te kijken.",
"description": "I taught a computer how to write the name of my son. The progression of this machine learning processes is materialised with a pen plotter.",
"description": "Why buy live access to heartbeats? <ul><li>Insurance companies give you discounts for monitoring a healthy lifestyle.</li><li>Because you can re-sell it to data hoarding companies.</li><li>To chill out with the soothing sound on your headphones.</li><li>Use it as input data for your amazing new media art installation.</li><li>Because it's cheap!</li></ul>",
"description": "In analytics and statistics, data visualisations, such as the heatmap, are used as tools bring forward patterns in data. These data visualisations, are often presented as objective tools of knowledge: data supposedly do not lie. What is often neglected however, are the subjective and political intricacies embedded within the datasets, and its method of visualisation. In collaboration with Cristina Cochior I am exploring the concept of data dramatisations, as an opposite to data visualisations. Rather than aiming for the objective, we explore the affective & performative aspects of data gathering and processing.\n\nSustaining Gazes is a data dramatisation which looks at the role between the visualisation and its subject. A heatmap is generated by looking at it, which directly influences the looking. Areas which are looked at turn into interesting shapes, inviting even more observation. The pattern of looking is reinforced though its visualisation. This cycle reveals both a hierarchy of power between algorithm and subject, as well as a point for intervention.",
"about": "November 2017 In4Art approached me to be part of their KickstART project. They commissioned three works to be part of their auction. The goal was to explicitly develop works that fitted the commercial art scene.\n\nRather than creating 'sellable' works myself, I took the start-up culture that forms the foundation of In4Art, as my object of my series. I augmented the works of three other participants with business models taken from the online/digital realm. This resulted in three <em>Minimum Viable Products</em>. Recontextualising these business models towards an arts context, results in new perspectives on both the arts as well as start-up culture.",
"dateCreated": "2018",
"hasPart": [
{
"@id": "r:/mvp1",
"@type": "MediaObject",
"name": "MVP#1 Gathering viewing statistics for Donald Schenkel",
"dateCreated": "2018",
"description": "The work of Donald Schenkel is augmented with a camera which keeps track of how long people look at the work. Like an electricity meter, the value increases the more the work is <em>used</em>. This data is then sent to a server, and provides the artist —in this case Donald Schenkel— with live statistics. But who owns this data generated by the work? The buyer, the artist, or the mediator — which is me?\n\nThis is the first augmentation that is part of the MVP series created for KickstART.",
"width": "45cm + 15cm",
"height": "55cm + 8cm",
"artworkSurface": "Oilpaint on wood + WiFi-connected RaspberryPi in ABS enclosure",
"description": "In September 2017, huricane Irma was racing towards Florida. Everybody tried to get away from there as quick as possible. Stuck were those with the electric Tesla Model S with the cheaper battery option (60kWh). Then, all of a sudden, Tesla send a software update to these cars. The cars could drive futher then ever before. Until 72 hours later, Tesla reversed the software update. Exactly the same car could drive shorter distances.\n\nThis is the business of software companies: just like Apple limits performance on old iPhones, Tesla used softare to limit the reach of its cars in order to make more money. While physically the exact same product, it can do less.\n\n<em>Minimum Viable Product #2</em> brings this business model to the art world. It provides a <em>limited</em> edition of a drawing by Joseph Huot.",
"width": "32.5cm",
"height": "50cm",
"artworkSurface": "Pencil drawing in metal LCD enclosure",
"name": "MVP#3 Customiseyour.art - Mikel Folgerts 1/3",
"dateCreated": "2018",
"description": "On YouTube, Instagram, and many other online platforms, celebrities get paid to place consumer products in their videos. Not prominently, but hidden in plain sight. Can precarious artists finance their work by employing this product placement?\n\n<em>Minimum Viable Product</em> #3 allows buyers to customise the work they bought —Rotterdam, by Mikel Folgerts—, linking the status of the artist to their product.",
"width": "40cm",
"height": "40cm",
"artworkSurface": "Personalised print on perspex",
"description": "Commisioned by V2_ for Evening of the Black Box Concern. Researchers of digital culture often regard artificial intelligence as <em>black boxes</em>. However, developers of these systems often regard the humans that are analysed as black boxes.\n\nWhat happens when we use black boxes (AI) to analyse black boxes (humans) and present these back to black boxes (humans)?\n\nThis prototype used emotion recognition software by Affectiva to analyse the audience of the talks. It then highlighted the moments in the talks for which outliers in the data were found. Can we use this data to analyse either of the black boxes?",
"description": "Emotion recognition software is being used both as a tool for ‘objective’ measurements as well as a tool for training one’s facial expressions, eg. for job interviews. Emotion Hero is a literal translation of the paradoxical relation between these applications of the technology.\n\nEmotion Hero is a two-part artwork. On the one hand is a video-game that is freely downloadable for everybody with an Android device (see <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rubenvandeven.emotion_hero\">Google Play</a>). Inspired by Guitar Hero, the user scores points by following given cues. It provides detailed feedback on the mechanics of the face (eg. “You showed on 10% Joy when you had to show 100%, smile 99.32% more.”), revealing that rather than being a window into the brain, the face is a controllable surface.\n\nThe second part is a projection that shows the aggregated scores of the game. In order to substantiate their discourse, companies in facial expression measurement employ a huge amount of data collection and processing. The results are displayed in a fixed grid, recalling historical practices that, trough extensive measurement and administration, also aimed to delineate something which is conceptually undelineated: think of Duchenne de Boulogne, Lombroso, and Charcot.\n\nEmotion Hero is a playful invitation to open up the box of expression analysis to reveal the assumptions that underlie this technology.\nThe game's emotional intelligence is powered by Affectiva (I was also <a href=\"http://blog.affectiva.com/sdk-on-the-spot-emotion-hero-app-encourages-play-with-facial-expressions\">interviewed</a> by them).",
"description": "I organised this exhibition as part of my Summer Sessions residency at Arquivo237. It was a modest exhibition covering my research on emotion recognition software.",
"name": "Choose How You Feel; You Have Seven Options",
"dateCreated": "2016",
"duration": "9M9S (∞ loop)",
"artworkSurface": "3 projections",
"description": "What does it mean to feel 47% happy and 21% surprised? <em>Choose how you feel; you have seven options</em> is a video work that revolves around this question as it looks at software that derives emotional parameters from facial expressions. It combines human accounts and algorithmic processing to examine the intersection of highly cognitive procedures and ambiguous experiences. Born from a fascination with the technological achievements, the work interrogates the discursive apparatus the software is embedded in.\n\nThis work builds on my research into the workings of expression analysis technologies and the assumptions that underlie it, scrutinising the claims that are made by the companies developing the software.",
"description": "Whether the video frames are ordered by time or by emotion will not make a difference to a computer. For it, both orderings are just as logical. However, for the human spectator the reordered display of frames becomes a disruptive process. The human is positioned as a required agent for meaning making in an algorithmic procedure.\n\nIn collaboration with Cristina Cochior I went manually through the Eye's public collection, and catalogued faces by surrendering them to an emotion detection algorithm. Cutting from one face to another,its uncritical selection produced a new portrait of emotional gradients moving in-between anger and happiness.",
"description": "The Piet Zwart Institute at the Eye Film Museum in Amsterdam as part of its ResearchLab series. The exhibition focussed on the boundaries of the archive. Studying the structures and cultural impacts of our media technologies, it concentrated on the intricate and usually hidden aspects of EYE's extensive archive",
"C&C '17 Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Creativity and Cognition",
{
"@id": "r:/event/creativity-and-cognition"
}
],
"description": "What does it mean to feel 62% joy, and 15% surprised? Over the past years the digitization of emotions is booming business: multimillion dollar investments are made in technologies of which is claimed that they give companies an objective view in their consumers' feelings. The video-game-artwork Emotion Hero challenges the user to investigate this claim and question the premise of the technology. Emotion Hero is a two-part artwork. On the one hand is a video-game that is freely downloadable for everybody with an Android device. Inspired by Guitar Hero, the user scores points by following given cues. It provides detailed feedback on the mechanics of the face. The second part is a projection that shows a grid with aggregated scores of the game, that updates live. In its design, the grid refers to 19th century positivist practices.",
"name": "Longform - Choose How You Feel; You Have Seven Options",
"description": "What does it mean to feel 82% surprised or 93% joy? As part of their Longform series, the Institute of Network Cultures published my research into software that derives emotional scores from facial expressions.",
"description": "A two-part artwork and my first work on software that derives emotional parameters from facial expressions. The first part displays the <em>Mind Reading Emotions Library</em>, an interactive collection of videos, audio fragments and scenes depicting 412 distinct emotions —ranging from `angry' to `unsure'— grouped in 24 categories. The second part of the project is a tablet with a modified demo app by Affectiva, a major player in the field of emotion analysis software. This app acts as an interactive mirror which displays the various parameters that the Affectiva software derives from someone's facial expression, while a voice over reads a text extracted from the Dutch classic <em>Beyond Sleep</em> by W.F. Hermans (1966), concerning the impact of the mirror, photography and video on the human self-image.",
"description": "What is an encyclopedia? What are media? What is an object? Students of the Piet Zwart Institute Media Design Masters programme invite you to look at these issues. Twelve installations and one choreography present a taxonomy of disappearing, human and non-human, introvert and collected media objects.\n\nThis exhibition was developed in a 'Thematic Seminar' run in the summer trimester 2015 taught by Florian Cramer.\n\nArtists: Lucas Battich [IT], Manetta Berends [NL], Julie Boschat Thorez [FR], Cihad Caner [TR], Joana Chicau [PT], Cristina Cochior [RO], Solange Frankort [NL], Arantxa Gonlag [NL], Anne Lamb [US], Benjamin Li [NL], Yuzhen Tang [CN], Ruben van de Ven [NL] & Thomas Walskaar [NO]",
"location": {
"@id": "r:/organisation/v2_"
}
}
]
}
},
{
"@type": "MediaObject",
"name": "Fragments of reality",
"dateCreated": "2015-01-01",
"description": "In western society, images are generally perceived as objective traces of events. As evidence that things happened as how they are captured in the frame.\n\nAs Susan Sontag elaborates, this counts for photographic images in particular. They are seen, not as subjective statements about the world, but rather as pieces of it —as fragments of a reality. Photographic images are often seen as unbiased; they carry in them the \"burden of truth\". We use them to give meaning, to asses and to judge. It exactly is in this passivity of the image, that its aggression lurks.\nFragments of Reality is a newspaper that assembles descriptions of five images of one event: a press conference with Jeroen Dijsselbloem and Yanis Varoufakis. Each interviewee was shown one of the images, in an attempt to highlight how we read events trough photographs.\n\nIt considers an event not as a single factual moment, but as the cumulative of subjective experiences, inherently proposing that an image is always lacking in its representation of that which it presents.",
"description": "Adam is security guard at a nursing home with comatose patients. During his night shifts he has unsettling visions of someone drowning. He seeks his comfort in the company of his pregnant girlfriend. Days of Water is a story on guilt and shame; and on a longing for hope.\nI wrote and directed this film for my graduation as film director for fiction at the Utrecht School of the Arts.\nIt was accompanied by my MA research on spectatorial emotion and the influence emotions on the spectator's sympathy for the protagonist.",
"description": "For the visitors of the Crossing Border festival in The Hague we desgined an installation to collaboratively contribute to a poem.\nBased on the input of the user, a sentence is added to the poem, originating from digitalised texts of artists participating in the festival.\nThe text was combined with an audiovisual presentation that changed depending on the user's input.",
"image": [
{
"@type": "ImageObject",
"contentUrl": "/assets/image/copoet1.jpg",
"thumbnailUrl": "/assets/thumb/copoet1.jpg"
}
],
"@reverse": {
"workFeatured": [
{
"@type": "ExhibitionEvent",
"name": "Crossing Border",
"location": {
"@type": "PerformingArtsTheater",
"name": "Leidse Schouwburg",
"address": "Leiden"
},
"startDate": "2012-11-14",
"endDate": "2012-11-17",
"workFeatured": []
}
]
}
},
{
"@type": "MediaObject",
"name": "Rangi Ya Samawati",
"dateCreated": "2012",
"description": "The Colour of Blue. A diptych about two Tanzanians: a miner and a lobster fisher. How do they live, work and survive; and how do they see their own future? Each of the two men is in his own way depending on nature, everyday gambling for a good catch.\nThis documentary was shot complementary to our work at the Kilimanjaro Film Institute in Arusha.\nDocumentary, 14′42″. The full film is available on Youtube.",
"description": "A short HKU project on the future of social media, when it was still an upcomming phenomenon. It is made in two weeks for a series of shorts with a given start and ending image.\nWe asked ourselves: what happens if our online identity lives on after we die? Do we still live on if a part of our online identity does? How can this virtual identity be shaped?\n2′10″",
"description": "The voice is surely an uncanny phenomenon. In the digital age it leaves us constantly in doubt, if a person or a non-person is speaking. In this immersive performance, doubt and conviction change roles in the blink of an eye. Spread out on a hilly landscape, audience engages in a conversation with something that is there and not there at the same time. An artificial voice functions as a mediator, a partner and a mirror to one's own.\n\nWhile conversations are constructed word-by-word, impressions are shared, naps are taken, and time is passed, Pillow Talk is an invitation to suspend eye-to-eye relations and to reposition yourself in direct relation to the non-human.\n\nI developed the interface for the participants, as well as a custom story flow editor for the director/writer Begüm Erciyas.",
"description": "Originally initiated as a graduation project (cum laude) by Ward Goes, <a href=\"http://spectacularspectacular.news\">The Spectacular Times</a> is an ongoing visual inquiry into the presentation of news. It investigates how news, rather than being subjective, is representational of its social, cultural, (geo)political and ideological contexts. The project sets out to lay bare these representations in currently circulating news.\n\nBy layering and contrasting different news elements The Spectacular Times re-contextualises news and makes explicit the intangible notions that lie beyond an increasingly universal guise of news reporting. Not in an effort to tell apart true from false, left from right, or right from wrong, but in order to accentuate a variety of articulations of news.\n\nThis web based project uses user defined variables to animate news headers, texts and images, which are directly sourced from different news websites world wide. By adjusting these parameters (among which region, scope and speed) the spectator actively perceives how news content is de- and reformed through its aesthetics.",
"description": "I was part of the Summer Sessions Network for Talent Development in a co-production of Arquivo 237 and V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media, with support of the Creative Industries Fund NL.",
