The Tools Series is a series of Baltan Sessions that examines the complex and changing relationships artists and designers have with the technologies and tools they develop, modify or use to create, with an aim to explore social awareness around the tool choices they make as well as the (aesthetic) influences of these choices on the work they create.

During the Naked on Pluto project one of the key ways to confront the problems of centralised social networks turned out to be to encourage a deeper understanding of the processes and protocols of these sites.

So, like the previous workshop at CCCB, we centred this around a web application called FaceSponge, which we developed as a social programming interface giving quick access to the Facebook API and allowing participants to try out each other’s scripts. The other key issue was to find out people’s opinions, and so we collected answers on post-it’s to three questions for each area, which the participants later sorted for presentation to the public.

Social advertising

This workshop was perfectly timed with Facebook’s IPO, and as 82% of it’s revenue comes from advertising we started off by working on a simple spoof advert. We took one friend, and picked something they have ‘liked’ and wrote some code to promote it. This is what happens on social networks where a brand gets advertised to you because one of your friends follows or likes it. Being able to put a friend’s name in an advert is seen as an exciting future of advertising (or perhaps less so as the share price continues to drop).

function runme() {
    FB.api("/me/friends", function(friends) {
        var friend=friends.data[0];
        FB.api("/"+friend.id+"/likes", function(likes) {
            var like=likes.data[0];
            display(friend.name+" endorses "+like.name+" BUY SEVERAL TODAY!");
            FB.api("/"+like.id+"/picture?type=large", function(picture) {
                display_image(picture);
            });
        });
    });
}

Privacy

There are vast amounts of pictures available on facebook, and it was fun to write a script that presented them all back at in a chaotic manner without any other information. This also gave us a chance to show how the privacy on Facebook is imaginary, as the URL’s FB gives you for your friend’s pictures are public – regardless of anyone’s privacy settings.

// showing the holes in the walls                                               
// you think your photos are private?                                           
// these images are accessible without a login                                  
function runme() {
    FB.api('/me/friends', function(friends) {
        friends.data.forEach(function(friend) {
            FB.api('/'+friend.id+'/photos', function(f) {
                 if (f.data.length>0) {
                     var gallery=f.data[0];
                     // show the public url                                     
                     display(gallery.images[0].source);
                     // show the image                                          
                     display_image(gallery.images[0].source);
                 }
            });
        });
    });
}

Social pressures

The third area we were interested in exploring was the more subtle ways that social media are affecting communication methods. We came up with this strange script that collects the last things posted by your friends and puts them together without information on who posted them, or who they are for:

function runme() {
    FB.api('/me/friends', function(friends) {
        friends.data.forEach(function(friend) {
            FB.api('/'+friend.id+'/feed', function(feed) {
                if (feed.data && feed.data.length>0
                    && feed.data[0].message) {
                    display(feed.data[0].message);
                }
            });
        });
    });
}

We continued to play with and adapt these scripts in order to show more information. The mood was interesting as it flipped from serious to hilarity and then slight awkwardness at what we were dredging up. We followed each of these practical sessions by collecting feedback on thoughts and emotions for each section. Although this was a very demanding workshop (changing between coding, politics, funny juxtapositions of friend’s personal data and having to think about how it felt) we recorded a wide range of thoughts – from the dismissive, “doesn’t matter” to the outright enraged. Perhaps one of the most important aspects of this workshop was being able to expose these mechanisms to groups of people normally considered ‘users’.

Via neural.it

Neural #42 extra, VIDA Awards 13.2 DVD, an introduction and contextualization about VIDA Awards 13.2 edition and its winners, made by Artistic Director Monica Bello (only for subscribers)

artists: Marloes de Valk, Aymeric Mansoux and Dave Griffiths (Holland, France, UK), Paul Vanouse (USA), Cesar Harada (Japan-France), Verena Friedrich (Germany)
This DVD contains an introduction and contextualization about VIDA Awards 13.2 edition and its winners, made by Artistic Director Monica Bello, plus every winner presenting his own work. In fact, the first prize was awarded to Naked on Pluto, by Marloes de Valk, Aymeric Mansoux, and Dave Griffiths, all from the Netherlands, an online game that mocks the deceitfully invasive nature of most “social software” platforms. Ocular Revision, the Second Prize, by Paul Vanouse, from the US, is the third one in a series of Biological/Genomic works that use DNA and a gel-based electrophoresis system as medium and subject. With this live installation, Vanouse addresses the idea of a “genetic mapping” and reflects on the ever changing focus/object in “life” studies within scientific disciplines. Protei by César Harada, from France, took the Third Prize. Protei is a self-governing unmanned wind-powered sail-robot, which drags a long petrol-sucking boom, using the power of nature to solve a problem caused by man. Furthermore there’s also the Honorary Mention Transducers – 2010-2012 by Verena Friedrich from Germany which is an installation consisting of a number of laboratory glassware vessels containing just one biological element: a single human hair. Every one of the glass vessels also contains a set of mechanical devices and electronic components with theresources required to produce an audible vibrating response based on the reading of the DNA in the hair. In this way, the biological samples generate a soundscape in which we hear exclusive and personal vibrations, combining to create of polyphony of human hair.

With Jussi Parikka, Pau Waelder, Aymeric Mansoux and Mónica Bello. Recorded (VO EN/ES) in Barcelona the 24th of February 2012 as part of the I+C+i Our Life Online session at CCCB.

Internet is changing our way of understanding the public space. The Web has become a dominant structure that covers all aspects of contemporary society. The proliferation of virtual agents, designed to stimulate non-fortuitous reactions and meetings, reconfigures the profile of individuals in dynamics that are innovative but also invasive, and generates new forms of control. In this brand new context, identity and simulation become decisive themes of behaviour on the Web.

For this installation we wanted to create a highly formalised room, all right angles, straight lines and consistent colours of blue, dark grey and white. VIDA’s crew of architects and builders put in a lot of effort for us to achieve this, and were also very helpful tweaking it according to our strange requests.

During the opening event and later on, it was interesting to see different types of visitor. The older, perhaps more contemporary art focused groups had an extremely short attention span and so were not really engaging with the work much. The younger visitors however were tending to stay longer, even logging in to Facebook in order to try the game (and alarmingly, sometimes leaving themselves logged in). I think the initial hook for this engagement were the slogans on the edges of the bookshelves – for future installations we need to consider different strategies for setting the scene, as it will need to change with different locations and contexts.

One of the great things about these events is meeting the other artists (and VIDA award winners) who were setting up and exhibiting their work – Paul Vanouse with Ocular Revision, Sebastian Muellauer and Toni Nottebohm with Protei and Verena Friedrich with Transducers. These projects are an interesting combination, with more finished and specifically designed for installation work (Ocular Revision, Transducers) mixing with the more in progress, or conceptual things like Naked on Pluto as software art, or Protei, which is a large collaborative project still very much in active development.

Session organised in collaboration with Fundación Telefónica.

WORKSHOP: Facesponge with Aymeric Mansoux and Gerald Kogler. 10h-14h

Have you ever wondered what is going on “behind the scenes” on social networks like Facebook? In this workshop we will explore our so-called social data and get a glimpse at how it is viewed by the company and third parties who access it. In order to break several myths about Facebook applications, you will be invited to take part in designing small programs that extracts and manipulate you and your friend’s online information. Nothing will be written back to Facebook at any time, we will only be reading existing data. No data will be collected or viewable by anyone else.

No programming experience is required. Basic knowledge of javascript can be useful to explore more advanced possibilities of the Facesponge sandbox.

This workshop is part of the Naked on Pluto project, a critical text adventure Facebook game concerned with issues of online privacy and control within centralized commercial social networks, designed and written by Marloes de Valk, Aymeric Mansoux and Dave Griffiths.

Facesponge is developed in collaboration with Baltan Laboratories.
All Naked on Pluto software is released under free culture licenses.

Schedule:

* Naked on Pluto presentation
* Gameplay session
* Anatomy of an FB app
* Introduction to Facesponge
* Breaking FB apps myths
* Group discussion

Practical information:

* The workshop will be taught in English.
* You will need to bring your own laptop.
* Places are limited.

DEBATE: Identity and simulation. Artificial life on the networks. With Jussi Parikka, Pau Waelder, Aymeric Mansoux and Mónica Bello. 19h-21h

Internet is changing our way of understanding the public space. The Web has become a dominant structure that covers all aspects of contemporary society. The proliferation of virtual agents, designed to stimulate non-fortuitous reactions and meetings, reconfigures the profile of individuals in dynamics that are innovative but also invasive, and generates new forms of control. In this brand new context, identity and simulation become decisive themes of behaviour on the Web.

REGISTRATION:

Workshop + Debate: 6€
Please send an email explaining the reasons for your interest to cursos@cccb.org
Limited capacity!

Debate: 3€
Tel-entrada (tel. 902 101 212 / www.telentrada.com)
CCCB page for the event

Dave will be presenting the story of Naked on Pluto on Wednesday the 9th November at Pixelache Helsinki. From it’s original inspirations, how we present issues of privacy via a game and some of the technical details behind it’s implementation. This talk will begin Pixelversity’s theme of ‘Social Identity, Augmented Reality & Virtuality’ initiated by Owen Kelly, which will explore digital tools, interfaces between public / private, personal / social & real / virtual. Pixelversity is the outreach & education programme of Pixelache Helsinki. Location: Cable Factory, Tallberginkatu 1 C 15 (Ruoholahti Metro) . More info here.

The VIDA Awards were created by Fundación Telefónica in 1999 to promote artistic creation based on new technologies and artificial life. A total of 198 projects from 36 countries entered into contest in this edition

The works will be showcased at Fundación Telefónica’s stand in ARCO 2012

Madrid 24th October 2011.– Fundación Telefónica announced the winners of the international contest VIDA 13.2, which has become a worldwide reference for artistic research on artificial life. The contest is a reflection of Fundación Telefónica’s commitment to the promotion of research in the field of art and new technologies.

The world-class jury, which consisted of Mónica Bello Bugallo, Director of VIDA
(Spain), Jens Hauser ( Germany/France), Karla Jasso (Mexico), Sally-Jane Norman (England), Simon Penny (USA/Australia), Neil Tenhaff (Canada) and Francisco Serrano Martínez (General Director of Fundación Telefónica), selected the winners of this edition among the 198 projects submitted by artists from 36 countries.

In this edition of the VIDA Awards, 51 of the entries were submitted from Spain (representing the highest number of Spanish projects submitted in relation to other editions), 18 were from Mexico, 17 from Argentina and Brazil, and 16 from the USA. For the first time, artists from Cyprus, Croatia, Estonia, and Tajikistan also entered the contest.

The projects awarded in this edition blend some of the classic formulations of the discipline, with the most revolutionary developments in biology and environmental sciences. The awarded proposals stand out for their eclecticism, the interest of the distributed and open creative processes, the experimentation with complex simulations in virtual and networked environments, the possibilities of experimenting with live dynamic systems, the application of new formal strategies by means of performance and the development through the prototype.

Aymeric Mansoux, Marloes de Valk and Dave Griffiths (Netherlands/England), were awarded with the VIDA 13.2 award for their Naked on Pluto project, an on line videogame that reflects on the invasive means used in the development of “social software”. The game starts when the user subscribes to the webpage of the project and accesses a city called “Elastic Versailles”, where a community of 57 animated bots interact with the player capturing the data of his/her Facebook account.

The game starts with a prolific textual exchange between the player and the computer, during which bots mix and muddle up data, faces, profiles, generating a framework of strangely familiar relationships. The complexity of the exchange increases as the game progresses. The player can only free him/herself from the “harassment” of the bots by resisting and waiting until their resources run out, or the logic of the plot loses all sense.

Naked on Pluto exposes the mechanisms that lead us to become the stars in a simulated and deceitful reality, not unusual in social networks, and which is becoming increasingly important in contemporary social habits.

Ocular Revision by Paul Vanouse (USA) obtained the second prize in VIDA 13.2. This installation comprises two symmetric circular images of the Earth, similar to satellite views that serve the purpose of examining the notion of “genetic maps”. The DNA of the E. Coli bacteria is inserted in these images, by means of an electrophoresis system prepared specifically for the work, which is located at the centre of the installation.

Two twin images show the movement of the gel along the perimeter of the circular maps, in such a way that the DNA segments arranged in images simulate the shape of the continents in the representation of the planet.

The project reflects on the variations that take place within the core of life sciences between the so-called biological and post-biological periods, being the former the one during which the cell is defined as the basic unit of life, and the latter when the attention focuses on a non-living component, the DNA, which is considered to be a code instead of a material substance. The artist considers that this is not an appreciation of scale, but a substantial change in the way we look at organic life, and therefore a cultural shift, a subject that he had already addressed in Relative Velocity Inscription Device, also showcased in VIDA in 2002.

Protei took third prize at VIDA 13.2. It is the work by artist and project promoter, Cesar Harada (Japan/France), who has launched a collective initiative to design an “open code navigation drone”.

The objective of Protei is the global, distributed, and interdisciplinary development and production of a series of self-governing ships equipped with a structure that acts in environmental disasters, especially in the case of oil spills. Launched after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the Protei team seeks to spread these mechanisms in all the Earth’s seas, as a way of raising awareness and establishing a global alliance that promotes their regeneration and the removal of polluting materials and human waste.

This project illustrates the global concern about impending environmental disasters caused by humans, showing the confluence of science, design, art, environmental activism, and an open code ethic that believes that an interdisciplinary alliance is the way to improve our environment.

The prizes were shortlisted along with seven Honorary Mentions, which this year corresponded to the works That Which Lives in Me by Bulatov and Chebykin (Russia); Zoanthroid –a Hybrid Entity, a Technile Organism by Hardmood Beck (Germany); Oh!m1gas: biomimetric stridulation environment, by Shen (Ecuador); Intelligent Bacteria: Saccharomyces Cerevisiae by Togar Abraham, Nur Akbar Arofatullah, Agus Tri Budiarto and Vincensius Christiawan (Indonesia); Back, here, below, formidable [the rebirth of prehistoric creatures] by Humeau (France); Growth Pattern by Kudla (USA); and Transducers by Verena Friedrich (Germany).

In the category of Incentives to Production, which sponsors projects pending development by artists working in Spain, Portugal and Latin America, the awarded proposals were Concerto fotosintético (Photosynthetic Concert) by Pin Lage (Spain); Faith (Molding Faith – The Shape of the Signifier) by Czibulka and Ivor Diosi (Spain/Slovenia); Institute for the Studies of Biological Enigmas-Mar Menor Research by Clara Boj Tovar and Diego Diaz García (Spain); Territorio Exquisito (Exquisite Territory) by Pía Vásquez Cepeda (Chile/Mexico); Pixel Bite by Suárez Bárcena (Spain) and SPEAK by the artistic couple Rejane Cantoni and Leonardo Crescenti (Brazil).

In search of inspiration Elastic Versailles’ News Agency has been looking at other independent, state controlled newspapers and broadcasters. Is there a common style?

The Voice of Korea sports a blue-skies-all-is-well design and writing style, as demonstrated in the article “Pigeon-Raisers Family” enjoys an optimistic life”

Various entertainments and optimistic life of Kim Yong Gun’s family were an epitome of the rich feelings of the Korean people who always live an optimistic life with confidence in their future.

The People’s Republic of China’s newspapers have a more dry design but this doesn’t stop their adoration for the CPC’s way of life shining through in the articles, such as in “CPC phenomenon” enriches human history” from Xinhua News.

A host of international observers are of the view that in terms of the development of humanity, the practice of the CPC leading the Chinese people toward a just, democratic, prosperous and happy society offers a more convincing choice.

Kayhan News is a newspaper from Iran, directly under the supervision of the Office of the Supreme Leader. It has made the news internationally calling France’s first lady Carla Bruni an “Italian prostitute” and “the singer and decadent actress who managed to break [up] the Sarkozy family” who “deserves to die” for her “perverted lifestyle”, after she wrote an open letter to Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, who is facing death by hanging for alleged adultery.

More research needs to be done in order to find the appropriate style and design for our Plutonian news.

Art Meets Radical Openness: Liwoli 2011

Guests Friday 13 May

Marloes de Valk – http://naked-on-pluto.net and http://pluto.kuri.mu
Owen Mundy – http://givememydata.com/
Dusan Barok – http://www.faceleaks.info/

Guests Saturday 14 May

Nicolas Malevé – http://yoogle.be/spip.php?page=start_yoogle
Margaritha Köhl – http://www.univie.ac.at/publizistik/Koehl.htm
Pippa Buchanan (Mozilla Webcraft) – http://p2pu.org/webcraft
Birgit Bachler – http://www.birgitbachler.com

‘Plutonian Striptease’ is a 2 evening lecture series, filled with short 30 minute lectures on social media, online privacy, the data market and the economy of open systems.

We all share a lot of information with others online. Not only voluntarily and consciously via public parts of social media, but also unknowingly, by searching, purchasing, browsing… And on top of that, non-public parts of the web are being scraped to complete the already very detailed profiles data brokers and listening companies have on us.

“You have zero privacy anyway, get over it.” (Scott McNealy, as chief executive of Sun Microsystems , 1999)

The open web, heralded for it’s transparency, interoperability and decentralized nature, is not just about being open and accessible for the benefit of us all, it also happens to greatly facilitate data harvesting, tracking, scraping, data mining, profiling and behavioural advertisement. This facilitation is fuelled by, and fuels a booming industry. There is no single and clear definition of what the open web really is, and maybe that is because of it’s paradoxical nature. On the one hand, there is a strive for openness driven by an ideology for the public good, on the other it’s driven by commercial goals.

Compared to the speed with which the data market is growing, legislation to protect users from invasion of privacy is light-years behind. Making an ‘opt-out’ or ‘do-not-track’ option mandatory would be a good start. But even if the law were up to speed, is it possible to properly enforce such laws? It would require a close look into the code of every application and online service accessing a users personal data; a police raid of App Store, Android Market, and the like. A 2010 study by Pennsylvania State University, Duke University, and Intel Labs showed that out of 30 randomly selected popular Android apps that access personal information, fifteen of the apps reported users’ locations to remote advertising servers and seven applications broadcast the handset’s device number or phone number to outside servers (Eck W., et al, 2010).

To some, the trade-off between personal data and free services paid for through advertisement is more than fair. You get as much back as you give, convenience comes at a price. The problem is that it has become almost impossible to make those trade-offs consciously and with a good idea of what the consequences will be. Online, it’s hard to tell when you’re leaving private space and entering a public one. The ‘I’ve got nothing to hide’ argument proposed by those involved in the ‘privacy versus security’ debate, is not easily matched with a one-liner explaining the value of privacy, this is a more complex and abstract story, and as pointed out by Bruce Schneier, the real choice is liberty versus control (B. Schneier, 2006). He points to two proverbs that say it best: Quis custodiet custodes ipsos? (“Who watches the watchers?”) and “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

This lecture series investigates these issues and showcases art projects making the hidden world of data harvesting tangible.

Enck W. et al., 2010, TaintDroid: An Information-Flow Tracking System for Realtime Privacy Monitoring on Smartphones , [online] Available at: [accessed 14 April 2011]

Schneier B., 2006, The Eternal Value of Privacy. [online] Available
at: .[Accessed 14 April 2011].

Plutonian Striptease has been organised by Marloes de Valk, and is the follow-up of a series of interviews published on http://pluto.kuri.mu, asking experts, owners, users, fans and haters of social media about their views on this topic.

http://naked-on-pluto.net