Beautiful Evidence, Pretty Lies / Art Review

Art Review’s wonderful Hettie Judah interviewed me and some of my dear colleagues for a piece about data, its visualization and their discontents. The article refers to my previous writing about Disinformation Visualization. It was just published in Art Review’s December 2014 issue: As surveillance culture and the mass gathering of data have grown, so … Continue reading Beautiful Evidence, Pretty Lies / Art Review

Launched: oBudget.org

We’ve just launched oBudget.org — The Budget Key (מפתח התקציב) an Israeli budget transparency site exposing, comparing and visualizing the way the budget changes and extending civil society’s ability to follow the money. This is one of the Public Knowledge Workshop’s main initiatives. It was led by Adam Kariv (who developed it) and by myself … Continue reading Launched: oBudget.org

Slides for my “Conflict of Interface” talk at Eyebeam

Conflict of Interface (eng) from Mushon Zer-Aviv Originally presented at The Politics of Interface and Obfuscation a special event at Eyebeam, NYC on March 11th, 2014, together with Helen Nissenbaum (NYU) and moderated by Michael Connor (Rhizome). The internet, once associated with openness and decentralization, is increasingly understood in terms of control exerted by government … Continue reading Slides for my “Conflict of Interface” talk at Eyebeam

The Turing Normalizing Machine

A machine learning experiment trying to decode social normalcy. This is a collaboration between Yonatan Ben-Simhon and myself and was initially presented at the Science Museum in Jerusalem as a part of the Other Lives exhibition inspired by the life and work of Alan Turing on his birthday anniversary. More at the project’s page: mushon.com/tnm Continue reading The Turing Normalizing Machine

RE: Open Knowledge Festival—Between Open Data and Public Knowledge

The first Open Knowledge Festival (#OKfest) took place in Helsinki, Finland, September 17-22, 2012. The festival, arranged by the UK based Open Knowledge Foundation was dedicated to the growing culture of openness extended through digital technology. Following that spirit it covered 13 different “topic streams” coordinated by multiple program planners and attracting talks, panels, workshops … Continue reading RE: Open Knowledge Festival—Between Open Data and Public Knowledge

Dis-Information-Visualization Workshop Summary / Helsinki Sep 2012

The 1st Open Knowledge Festival was also the host of the 1st Dis-Information-Visualization workshop, a critical attempt to actively explore the dark side of information visualization. In the full day workshop (led by me, Mushon Zer-Aviv, and organized by Pixelache and the Mushrooming Network) 4 groups were encouraged to lie with infographics. Rather than falsifying the data, the dis-info-visualizers have manipulated its meaning by creating truthful, yet misleading representations.

We started with an introductory presentation offering a few critical tools through which to investigate (and generate) visual manipulation. The talk suggested that rather than looking at data information visualization as “Beautiful Evidence” (to quote the title of a book by Edward Tufte) we should read them as often beautiful and sometimes even seductive arguments.

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At the Open Knowledge Festival, Helsinki

click to enlarge This week I’ll be presenting Wikipedia Illustrated and participating in other events at Helsinki’s Open Knowledge Festival. I would love to see you there: Monday, Sep 17, 5pm Open Publishing and Visual Free Culture – A satellite event hosted by M-Cult and Pixelache, discussing Collaborative Futures, Wikipedia Illustrated and more Thursday, Sep 20th, 4pm … Continue reading At the Open Knowledge Festival, Helsinki