I’ll be giving 3 talks this week on my short visit to New York and Boston. Tweet me if you might be around and would like to make it:
AdNauseam and Obfuscation @ SFPC
Monday, April 20th 3pm.
School For Poetic Computation – 155 Rivington St., Floor 4, New York, NY 10002
As online advertising is becoming more automatic, universal and unsanctioned, AdNauseam works to complete the cycle by automating all ad-clicks universally and blindly on behalf of the target audience. Working in coordination with your ad blocker, AdNauseam quietly clicks every blocked ad, registering a visit on the ad networks databases. As the data gathered shows an omnivorous click-stream, user profiling, targeting and surveillance becomes futile.
AdNauseam.io is a browser extension designed to obfuscate browsing data and protect users from surveillance and tracking by advertising networks. Simultaneously, AdNauseam serves as a means of amplifying users’ discontent with advertising networks that disregard privacy and facilitate bulk surveillance agendas. The talk covers both the background to the project and reviews various practices of data obfuscation.
Disinformation Visualization – How to lie with Dataviz @ MassArt
Wednesday, April 22 6pm.
MassArt, Kennedy Building, Room 406 – 621 Huntington Avenue Boston, MA
Designers, statisticians, journalists, researchers and technologists often apply visualization techniques in an attempt to get the big picture out of large quantities of data. In this rush towards informational imagery both creators and viewers are often taken by the lure of what Edward Tufte defines as “beautiful evidence”. But is information visualization indeed just another type of evidence, or is it a form of visual argument? This work was also published as an essay on Visualizing Advocacy.
How Interfaces Demand Obedience @ MIT MediaLab
MIT Center for Civic Media – MIT Media Lab, 3rd floor – 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA
The internet, once associated with openness and decentralization, is increasingly understood in terms of the control exerted by government agencies (like the NSA) and advertising (targeted ads). What is less commonly discussed is how this subliminal control is embedded in interface design. In this talk Mushon Zer-Aviv argues that web interfaces demand our silent obedience with every page load and he tries to offer tactics and strategies for challenging the politics of the interface.