’Tis the season to be algorithmically presented

Ending of the year presents us with the opportunity to look back and reflect the past year. Fortunately, if you happen to be in Facebook, they provide the review for you in their "yearly review"-app.  Based on your status updates of your year, the app puts them together and presents your year to you. Then you can share it. To be extra kind Facebook also pre filled the text on the status update.

In many ways, one could consider this as a nice gesture and piece of software from Facebook. Now we don’t have to do the hard work at reflecting back our year. No need to think and decide the important points. In a true style of the Silicon Valley solutionism  the problem is solved. - Of course, I know I do not have to share the presentation if I don’t want to, but it is popping in my feed time and time again and every time I get shivers down my spine from this.

Why?

Well, first it reminds me of how much this big corporation knows about me, or think it knows. And the information served to us in the form of yearly review is just a fraction of data Facebook collects about us. (and sells to their advertisers.) This yearly presentation just shows us a little glimpse of the algorithms working in the background. Churning away quietly, patiently collecting all the little bits and pieces we pour into it. 

It is not that algorithms are bad in some way; they are essentially just pieces of code, instructions to do predefined task. But the way and cases we use them trouble me. Why isn’t there more open algorithms aimed to enhance commonwealth and wellbeing? This video by Harlo Holmes for example, is just a tiny peek on what we could achieve with algorithms, when put on to good use.  Why is it that the most sophisticated algortihms are used to gather information about us, categorising us like a herd and then selling this information to advertisers?  You can be single, married, divorced, male, female, white, gay, in your mid twenties, etc. You might also be profiled to like a certain genre of clothing, music, movies. You are most active with these friends, and then your friend's data is compared to yours etc.... All this to collect a profile of the way you act, what makes you happy -how to deliver an advertisement that speaks to you. For your benefit, naturally. Another technological solution to a problem that doesn’t need solving: how to deliver ads so that they are effective and not annoying. (IMHO: all ads are annoying by their nature. )

There are naturally many more uses for algorithms; Christopher Steiner has a nice review of algorithms in his book: Automate this: How Algorithms came to rule our world. 

“He writes: Algorithms normally behave as they’re designed, quietly trading stocks or, in the case of Amazon, pricing books according to supply and demand. But left unsupervised, algorithms can and will do strange things. As we put more and more of our world under the control of algorithms, we can lose track of who— or what— is pulling the strings. This is a fact that had sneaked up on the world until the Flash Crash shook us awake.”


Second, they force me a solution I don’t want or need. They present me with a template for and of my life. All the things are from within the bounds of Facebook. - That’s where everything happens and we are our true selves, naturally. They want to engage me more into their ecosystem. -on a side note, have you noticed how difficult it is to share anything you find in Facebook outside of Facebook? Especially in mobile devices. It might be nice to take a look back at your status updates yourselves and see what you have done. This is similar to Think Up that might serve some meaningful glance about your use in social media. But it is worth asking that why share it with everyone? Or why Facebook wants us to share it with everyone? In a way, this reminds me of the ways Facebook slowly and quietly invades into our life more and more. Who remembers the beacon episode?  After that Facebook has slowly and quietly launched more and more ways to gather knowledge about us. But in a very quiet fashion. Of course, sometimes something spills. 

Why all this is a problem ?  -Maybe it isn’t  -depends on the angle you look at it. For me, personally I found all this to limit my freedom as a ”user”. And this is true to most social media sites and beyond. (Yes, I’m looking at you Google the behemoth) These companies keep their algorithms and source code so secret that you might suspect some sinister magic is beyond it. Probably is too. But the more down to earth reason is that if we want to live in digital world and interact with each other in it, wouldn’t it make sense to do it in either public open way, intheoretical open platform or in your own style? I don’t recall sending letters to my friends that were pre filled. Why to do it in the digital world? Because it is easy? Really?

Third, the yearly review does not have any thought in it. If we don’t count the countless hours some developers poured into it. But the working product is just algorithms, code. The process is thoughtless, emotionless. This can lead to inadvertent algorithmic cruelty, like in Eric Meyer’s case. And the inadvertent cruely may be even more common according to Dale Carrico in his post in World Future Society

“Eric Meyer writes: Algorithms are essentially thoughtless. They model certain decision flows, but once you run them; no more thought occurs. To call a person “thoughtless” is usually considered a slight, or an outright insult; and yet, we unleash so many literally thoughtless processes on our users, on our lives, on ourselves.”

After all this lecturing and preaching I must say that I am not opposed to seeing people share their yearly reviews (Must admit, I do not look at them.) I am just hoping that if you want to share your yearly review that it  would be genuine and hand-made. And not feel-good ego boosts, done in a double click. What the digital world does not need is that we  automate more emotions and empathy, what it does need is  handcrafted individual works made by humans, something that can be felt. 

First and second generation of the internet

I recently stumbled across this tweet:

And although I can see it's intention I do think that I somewhat disagree on that.I also understand that there is naturally the ambiguous nature of concepts like 1st gen. and 2nd gen of tech. But as I understand it it means the generations of digital technologies and the internet. It could just as well mean the generation of cars of the old and contemporary cars. It would not make that huge a difference.

If we look at the internet in it's 1st generation, I would say that was a real time of personalization and humanization of the internet. Learning to script your way through to get your first web page showing, or starting a blog with LiveJournal or movable type felt, and was personalization in the internet at it's best. It was before the internet was monetized. (and maybe I am just old fool who thinks everything was better back when.)  True it did take effort to get something to the web. But that is part of human experience. If I just hit a sticker to a piece of paper and call it my painting, I rarely have the feeling of accomplishment. (Unless it's an artistic statement on fine art of course.)

Now the second gen of internet offers as a "web 2.0", social media and the like. It is so easy to write and share. And we even have stickers now on Facebook!

By making something easy is not humanizing or personalizing.

Under all this machinery that makes this easy are large corporation collecting and mining our personal data. To probably be sold to marketing firms. Or in the case of Google or Facebook to be used as a value to offer to marketers to get into their platforms. 

One good example is the sudden fame of tilde.club

And if we don't talk about the internet, but tech at large. Then the 1st gen wins there too. With a little knowledge or with a book from the library we could, if we wanted, fix our cars, clocks, radios, phones even. But now it's almost impossible. 

If we think how new tech with smart watches and smartphones brings us personalisation and humanization, we have to realize that at the same time they bring the opposite. Algorithms that suggest you new music, new exercises, new restaurants are just bunch of code. All that may be happening is that we are left in a filter bubble instead of hearing something little (or lot) out of our comfort zone - And maybe end up liking it.

I would agree that the fight we are having right now is to bring humanization back to the tech. But I wouldn't say it's a fight against the first generation, It's the fight against corporations and to the whole attitude of tech industry: What is needed is not new solutions by engineers, but civic engagement and realization. Like Sherry Turkle said in her book "Alone Together" we must realize that the internet and digital technologies are not done and ready but they are in their youth. We need to take a step back and think what we want and need from technology. 

It also very well may be that I have misunderstood the tweet completely wrong, which is so common in the era of trying to say something in little space and as quick as possible. But I got to write this nevertheless.

Big Data, Small Politics

Evgeny Morozov recently gave a talk on the relationship of digital technologies and their relationship with societal and political systems in Collegezalencomplex Radboud University, Nijmegen. It's a lomg talk, but worth a watch. Even the first half an hour sheds light to the complex problems that may arise when internet-solutionism and data surveillance are married with governments that outsource more and more of their services to private sector.

Big Data, Small Politics Lecture by Evgeny Morozov Thursday October 16, 2014, 19.30 - 21.30 hrs, Collegezalencomplex Radboud University, Nijmegen Organised by Soeterbeeck Programme

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Creative coding in art education. Presentation at FADS 2014

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FADS is a Finnish Art Education Doctoral Studies network and Im glad to be a part of it. We held our first symposium at Pyhätunturi this october. Here is my presentation.

Here is some short notes for each slide:

Slide 1

I am doing my dissertation at Aalto ARTS in Helsinki and the subject of my thesis is ”Creative Coding in art education” 
I have started my dissertation this January and In this presentation I want to present some starting points in my research. 
My research question is that if and how creative coding can be used as an emancipatory force through art education? Interesting subquestion is that how creative coding can join digital and analogue worlds together in a meaningful way?
My study is in a way tottering between the borders of education, technology and arts. Or in a wider perspective culture, education and technology.

Slide 2

I will start with creative coding. 
It is most commonly affiliated with electronic tools aimed at the creative market and to art world. It includes different kinds of programming languages and development kits such as processing or open framework, but is not limited in the software world. For me Creative coding refers to using cheap electronic components, new manufacturing tools and wide array of other digital technologies with artistic freedom and curiosity. 
In a way it is using the digital tools at their most rudimentary form.
I have some examples about creative coding, to give some kind of idea what I am talking about.

Slide 3

First example is installation work I did with my brother. The piece projects different datasets as graphs, so you can compare them. You can interact with the piece by placing different fruits or vegetables on the tray. Each vegetable has it’s own dataset embedded in it.It is a humoristic comment on big data. You can read more about the installation here: http://www.thispagehassomeissues.com/blog/2014/10/30/fractalnoia-11-eleven-datasets-you-dont-believe-just-happened

Slide 4

This is one example of the conclusion our ”algorithm” would do based on the presented data. -Fractalnoia, 2014

Slide 5

The second example is an art work, made in Art & Craft school Robotti’s winter-camp 2014. All the participants were 7-9-years old. In the camp we used littlebits- electronic building blocks that attach together by magnets. It is easy and informative way to got to know how different electronic systems work. 

Slide 6

In Art & Craft school Robotti we also have three ongoing gropus. Two for 7-9 years olds and one for more experienced makers. Drawing bot’s were made with Arduino and programmed to draw different random things with Arduino-

Slide 7

Three examples doesn’t really do justice to creative coding and its practices, but may give a bit larger perspective into it: Creative coding is not just sitting in front of computer.
Creative coding has many connections to diy-culture and specially to maker-movement. For me the aspects of exploration, hacking and tinkering are important forces when thinking about creative coding in art education. 
It is about going from consuming to creating - in taking control of our digital life. 

Slide 8

Another important viewpoint for me is the idea of code literacy.
Digital technologies surrounds us and alters the way we interact with the world.
Digitality creates inequality -digital divide- between those who understand it and those who dont.
Main thing in all of the digital technology is that it is based on code.
Code literacy is about being able to read and write in code. Still it is not that anyone has to become software engineer -We learn to read and write in schools and not everyone becomes a writer or a poet. I will next present three perspectives why I think code literacy is needed.

Slide 9

First is individual perspective.
It is about our freedom as an individual. The freedom to choose what we do with computers and how we’d like to do it. This is wishful thinking of course, but something to take into consideration. Understanding code is almost crucial if we want to partake in this freedom. For example free software movement is not a movement without people participating in it.

Slide 10

Second perspective is about the nature of code. It’s own biases. One clear example is the origin digital technology: It’s binary nature. A computer is either on or off, 0 or 1, yes or no. For digitality there is no maybe, it is all based on the binary and dual idea, adapted from Leibniz. We can off course program hundreds of yesses and nos to get to finer granularity, but it is very different in it’s nature to our life.

Slide 11

Third perspective is about social issues. Code is not some force of nature that has been discovered by scientist. 
No. It is a plastic model created entirely by humans and can be changed by us anytime we want it. 
- But the code that we are using is creating it’s own structures and laws, which we must obey, if we want to use that particular patch of code. Be it a operating system like windows, mac or linux or word processor etc.

Slide 12

One of the main problems with the code is that is often untested and unthought in societal sense. It is commonly created by white young american males, in few spots in US. Software maybe the gold rush of our age, but at the same time it creates a wide array of political and societal problems. These problems are presented into our society from the backdoor.


Slide 13

I am interested in bringing critical pedagogy into digitality. Freire himself asked for the proper use of technology in education. He collaborated with Seymour Papert, a researcher at MIT who already in seventies had interesting ideas on how to use computers in education. But I want to bring maybe even more critical thinking into this. Critical thinking that aims at emancipation of the digital culture -Not to abandonment but in reflective use of digital technology.

Slide 14

I have realized that the world created by code is a complex and it’s use very widespread. The explosion of internet and the rapid development of computers have led into lot’s of new kinds of problems. Privacy, search engines, big data, and algorithms to name just few. Code forms and reforms our world all the time. We live in data-driven world.
I have been thinking about a good term for this, but I think Morozov nails it.
Computational arrogance.
For me this includes the whole field from algorithms that do the stock trading, choose our hit songs or even compose them, to big data and the alteration of our culture by software products. 

Slide 15

This brings us into the the art world. Where similar problems are echoed and also maybe unanswered or even unquestioned.
Digital divide is the inequality between those immersed in code and those who have no clue. We use digital tools like they were analogue. Photoshop like it was a paint brush.

Slide 16

Last I want to bring some ideas on how I think this all ties in with art education. Art education offers a space for exploration, space to use and misuse code and other digital technologies. 
To form and reform our thoughts by doing. 
Seija Kojonkoski-Rännäli says it well: The thought in our hands. 
(In finnish we use the term käsittää where the base for the world comes from hand - käsi,  when we understand or aspire to understand something. )
Understanding OR different kind of understanding of digitality can maybe be made by mushing it together in our hands. 
Kojonkoski-Rännäli talks about the apprehension of quality. Meaning quality in an ethical sense, creating an understanding of that which is good. 
For me as an artists this bodily understanding and thinking makes a lot of sense. And I think is something that creative coding can bring to digital world
So here in a condensed form were some of the, lets say, starting points in my research that I wanted to bring about. Right now I am writing an article about Maker movement and when looked from the perspective quality as coined By Kojonkoski-Rännäli or from Marjo Räsänen’s experiental art understanding, it can bring about the understanding of quality.

    

 

Fractalnoia -11 eleven datasets you don’t believe just happened.

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FRACTALNOIA

- 11 datasets you cannot believe just happened. 

 

The collection of data is increasing exponentially and it is more and more available to the general public as private databases are opened up. This Big Data holds promises of new insights, unparalleled innovation, even articifical intelligence. However, the ubiquity and availability of data connected to our human desire to see patterns where none exist means that humans have to deal with increasing amounts of meaningless data analysis, "fact-based" conspiracy theories and click-bait infographics. As the data is all digital, it morphs easily into whatever we want, releases itself from the context and appears on fashionable graphs that may look nice, but carry no meaning.

In our installation, we want to show how arbitrary and easy it is to make "data analysis", deduce causations from correlations and combine different datasets. In addition, we want to give the audience a physical feeling of the datasets, although it is inherently false, to further point out how the context of the dataset can be chosen. The audience gets to manipulate the data by placing everyday physical objects, such as fruit, to a table. The objects present different datasets and graphs are created based these datasets. We thus combine a primitive action of moving common objects to the digital world of information technology and project the resulting graphs for the audience to see. By being able to literally grasp the data and create any type of combination of the datasets, the audience gets to experience both the ease and complexity of drawing meaning from data.