YCAM + Kyle McDonald Workshop Am I nothing but net?
About
A workshop about how personal information and privacy are handled online (for age 16+). Participants reflected on their daily lives supported by the Internet through "game" activities.
The workshop's content included an icebreaker for participants to reflect on how conscious they are of their personal information when using the Internet. By answering various Internet-related questionnaires with "Yes," "No," or "..." and other activities run on apps and web services that YCAM has developed with collaborators, participants think about the personal information that companies collect and the neutrality/objectivity of information circulating on the Internet. Participants deepened their discussions about the future of technology and communication.
Collaborator
Kyle McDonald
An artist working with code. He is a contributor to open-source arts-engineering toolkits like openFrameworks and builds tools that allow the artist to use new algorithms creatively. McDonald likes sharing ideas and projects in public before they're completed. He creatively subverts network communication and computation explores glitches and systemic bias and extends these concepts to the reversal of everything from identity to relationship. He frequently leads workshops exploring computing vision and interaction.
Advisor
Surya Mattu
Surya Mattu is a Brooklyn-based investigative journalist, artist, and engineer who looks at how algorithmic systems perpetuate systemic biases and inequalities in society.
Currently, he works as an investigative data journalist at The Markup. Previously, he was a contributing researcher at ProPublica, where he worked on Machine Bias, a series that aims to highlight how algorithmic systems can be biased and discriminate against people. Machine Bias was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for Explanatory Journalism. He has also worked at Gizmodos' Special Projects Desk and been a visiting scholar at the MIT Media Lab. He has shown work at The Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Museum of Art & Design, The Whitney Museum, V&A Museum and Bitforms Gallery.
Event Info
Tool
Sakoku Browser
The "SAKOKU Browser" is an app developed by YCAM for the "Am I nothing but net?" referencing a type of cyber-attack, Man-In-the-Middle. Man-In-the-Middle interrupts communication between computers and servers to eavesdrop on or alter the contents of the communication. In the "SAKOKU Browser" app, YCAM interrupts the communication between participants.
Sakoku Explorer
The "SAKOKU Explorer" is a web application developed by Kyle McDonald, one of the creators of Unlearning Language, that displays the data that companies are acquiring about our behavior in an easy-to-understand manner. It is currently available for anyone to access and use.
First, download the data collected publicly available as part of the user support for Facebook and Google accounts. By sharing it in the "SAKOKU Explorer," you can see when, where, with whom, and what you did in a calendar format and your data stored on the Internet. Please look at yourself from the view of how the Internet knows you.
Review
Japanese only
Related Event
2020/02/11 Sakoku Walled Garden Project Talk
YCAM + Kyle McDonald + Surya Mattu