I read “How Artists Can Bridge the Digital Divide and Reimagine Humanity“, and the societal issue that was addressed was access and affordability of information and communication technologies (ICT). The article discussed the problem in filling the digital divide known as the “production gap” and how the majority of user-generated content is built from a small sector of ‘elites’. This highlights the importance of digital collaboration with digital artists through transdisciplinary educational initiative can become the solution to bringing these multiple divides.
I liked how the writer showcased numerous artist-led experiments in order to give a visual representation of these unique creators. For instance, I thought Victoria Vesna‘s hacked gaming technology to show the destructive power of noise pollution across oceans was a great example of STEAM artists utilizing their resources and knowledge to foster both a positive and sharable attitude for using digital media. Overall, I enjoyed educating myself on the significance of creating a sustainable and equitable digital society.
link:https://www.vice.com/en/article/4x4p43/6-art-projects-prying-the-lid-off-online-privacy Title: 6 Art Projects Prying The Lid Off Online Privacy
dvargas David Vargas
The artists printed out the downloaded profiles the collected and turned them into a wallpaper covering every surface of a room.
If anyone can use our photos to their own nefarious ends, how much are we sacrificing in personal value of our identity?
The vice article I read highlights a number of art exhibits that deal with the question of privacy in the digital age. The artists challenge the idea of relinquishing our data so easily to companies like apple or facebook. One of the art exhibits was fbfaces where the artist combed the internet for facebook profiles with a profile photo, name, and other identifiers, downloaded the profiles and created a wallpaper with the data. Each pixel of the wallpaper representing someone. This piece makes it clear just how open our information is to be used by absolutely anyone for any reason. The installation begs the question “If anyone can use our photos to their own nefarious ends, how much are we sacrificing in personal value of our identity?”
Another installation is “A charge for privacy”. This installtion is a power station that charges your phone however it in exchange gets access to your phones saved photos after agreeing to the ‘terms and service’ In this installtion the taking of your data is treated as a transaction just as it is in real life. The photos are then legally owned by the gallery and are projected to be viewed at the gallery for all to see. The installation lays bear the reality of digital privacy or the lack of it.
Anna Grubauer writes about a series of artists and activists that have faced prejudices or noticed prejudices made from Artificial Intelligence. She writes that, as AI becomes more and more common, it is important for us to be aware of the shortcomings and even harms of this system. For example, Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru investigated AI face recognition and found that the error rate for this system is significantly higher among women, and even higher among women with darker skin. This is harmful as face recognition is often used in medical fields to detect skin cancers, so if it is not accurate for a certain group of people, it puts them at risk. In addition, Mary Flanagan pointed out more discrimination in her project “[help me know the truth]”. She found that AI often has stereotypes based on race and will label “leaders” as those with more western features. The good news is that there are many up and coming feminist computer programmers working to get rid of this gap in research. One of these names is Caroline Siders, who has a website called Feminist Data Set which is a multi year art project that combines resources for a collection of feminist data.
I read the article “Women in Media Arts: Does AI think like a (white) man?” by Anna Grubenar. The societal issue that was discussed was the absence of diversity in supposedly objective algorithms, which produces biased data sets. These biased sets are fueled by not only the underrepresentation of women in tech but also the lack of minorities in the tech field. Furthermore, discrimination and racist/sexist tendencies are common in AI algorithms. For instance, AI facial recognition algorithms tend to make many more mistakes when analyzing women, and even more mistakes when analyzing women of color. The article also gave many pieces of artwork that were created to encourage diversity and inclusivity in tech such as “Gender Shades”, “Help me know the truth”, “Feminist Data Set”, and “Women Reclaiming AI”.
Melian Solly wrote an article about how ImageNet Roulette, an AI tool created by Trevor Paglen, is biased when it comes to how it categorizes people. When a white person uploads a picture of themselves it talks about an occupation or a characteristic. However when other races upload their picture it stereotypes them. This is probably due to the data that was used while creating the program. There was most likely more data sampling of white people, when it comes to other races the creator’s bias might have impacted the data or they might not have created a diverse data set. This shows how important it is to pick good and diverse data samples and to keep in mind the wide range of people that would be using the program. Even though a programmer might be designing for themselves when creating the app, at some point in the process it is important to step back and consider the users as well. The data is just showing a summary of what developers put into categorizing people, and because of that the developers biases leak into the program.
Mimi Ọnụọha is a visual artist whose work critiques how tech companies’ unprecedented access to data has shaped the information we often blindly accept as complete and holistic. In Us, Aggregated, Ọnụọha takes her own family photos and reverse image-searches them, then compiles the resulting photos into a gallery. While we see image searches so commonly when even just looking through similar google images, Ọnụọha brings attention to the differences between the images and the diversity of people lumped together by an AI algorithm. She explores the power imbalances perpetuated by technology and seeks to de-normalize the “projected realities” we have been conditioned to perceive as natural.
The Library of Missing Datasets (2016)
The Library of Missing Datasets is a physical repository (both in a file cabinet and on GitHub) that calls attention to the things we do not have quantified, but perhaps should in a world where so much is collected. Ọnụọha calls our attention to issues of the privacy of our information as well as the privacy of data that has either been not collected or intentionally hidden from the public.
Kate Crawford (left) and Trevor Paglen (right), as classified by ImageNet Roulette Courtesy of the artist
ImageNet Roulette is a classification tool created by artist Trevor Paglen and AI researcher Kate Crawford as a provocation design to help us realise the way in which humans are classified in machine learning systems. This tool regularly returns racist, misogynistic, and cruel results which is because of the dataset it derives from ImageNet’s ‘Person’ category, which is an offset of face recognition experiments.
The ImageNet dataset is largely used for object recognition such as finding out apples and oranges when an image is uploaded. One of the subsets of ImageNet is the person category which are classified and labelled in terms of race, gender, age, and character. These labels used to tech the AI were supplied by lab staff and crowdsourced workers who introduced their conscious and unconscious opinions and biases into the algorithm.
Shortly after the ImageNet Roulette went viral, the ImageNet team announced plans to remove over 600,000 images featured in its people category. On the 27th of September 2019, the ImageNet Roulette has been taken off the internet after proving its point on how things can go wrong and remains as a physical art installation at the Fondazione Prada Osservertario in Milan.
The article “How Artists Can Bridge the Digital Divide and Reimagine Humanity” by Agnes Chavez discusses the importance of bridging the ‘digital divide’ with regards to accessibility on 3 fronts:
Digital capacity building
Digital public goods
Digital inclusion
Space Cloud
Space Cloud VR headsets
The ‘Space Cloud’, a 10,000 sqft inflatable pavilion equipped with programmable LED lights and virtual reality headsets is one such example of how focused long term engagement can help to dissemination such knowledge to students in rural New Mexico. This is just one method of working towards an “equitable and sustainable digital society” via “digital cooperation”.
Chavez outlines 2 levels of digital divide – the first being accessibility and affordability of information and communication technologies (ICT) and the second being the “production gap”. According to Chavez, current production of the digital content is monopolized by “a small group of elites”. Giving a diverse pool of people the skills to transition from consumers to producers of such content would not only help empower people of underserved communities, but it would also ensure a greater range of content and deep our understanding of society.
Chavez concludes by emphasizing the importance of multiplicity with respect to solving modern problems: “In a world of complexity and constant change, no one approach is sufficient… By supporting these artists creating new digital tools and experiences, we allow our diverse communities to participate in reimagining our humanity.”
One thing that was heavily emphasized in my undergraduate Architecture education was how multidisciplinary any given project could be. In the same way we are all participants in a larger society, a single building is but part of a greater urban fabric. The inclusion of multiple voices is essential for any amount of success.
Works Cited
Chavez, Agnes. “How Artists Can Bridge the Digital Divide and Reimagine Humanity”, National Endowments for the Arts, https://www.arts.gov/impact/media-arts/arts-technology-scan/essays/how-artists-can-bridge-digital-divide-and-reimagine-humanity.
in the reading “NFTs and Copyright”, Jonathan Bailey discusses problems surrounding the recent rise in NFT popularity, especially ones concerning copyrights. One of the main problems he brings up is the instance where artists had their designs and art pieces stolen and turned into NFT’s without their consent. Moreover, Bailey discusses ways NFT auction sites have been trying to combat this with a stricter verification and certification process that removes everything that does not pass. After discussing the problems surrounding NFT’s, Bailey moves on to the positive and much more intended side of NFT’s – its ability to help creators’ public exposure. NFT’s recent popularity helps people spot truly special or meaningful designs when tons of NFT’s are arrayed with each other. To finish, Bailey takes about the circumstances that surround NFT, discussing the unsureness of its future and the sustainability of the system as it gets more and more easily accessible.
Bailey, Jonathan. “NFTs and Copyright.” Plagiarism Today, 16 Mar. 2021, https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2021/03/16/nfts-and-copyright/.
I chose to look at the article about the Beeple sale by Sebastian Smee. The piece discusses the ongoing issue of the value of NFTs (non-fungible tokens), which is digital art made to be owned by individuals through blockchain security. (Note that any digital artist who has ever done commissions has likely found ways to maintain the commission-holder’s ownership of the work without all this extra stuff.)
The Image of the Beeple piece “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” from the Washington Post
I found the piece to be overall quite interesting, as it posits that art must be to a degree anti-capitalist, as it is a thing without a functional purpose (necessarily, there can certainly be functional things which are artistic, but generally it is not meant to carry out a menial task like say sweeping the floor, or something) and because it is without functional purpose, the purchase and sale of it is purely what Smee says Marxists call “commodity fetishizing.” While I agree that the concept of any piece of art being sold for such an exorbitant amount of money as an NFT is certainly a yawn, and that the piece isn’t particularly interesting, what I think is more interesting perhaps is the argument that Smee is being very careful to word in the good American way:
Art shouldn’t need money to be interesting. Art isn’t a commodity to be bought, sold, traded, and appreciated in value for some hack who didn’t even make it to make millions off the piece a hundred years after the artist is dead. Nor is it a vehicle for capitalist expansion, as much as capitalists may want this, because the work of an artist is not meant to become a stock. There is art meant to be sold, there is art meant to help prop up an artist’s livelihood, but art hadn’t been made with the intent to manipulate the market (necessarily) until now. I think that’s what’s interesting. We’ve entered such a stage of capitalism where we are cautious to not assign something a monetary value, even garbage made by an AI. Imagine where we would be, artistically, if we supported our creatives monetarily through social welfare and encouraged them to create freely, and explore the limits of their potential?
I guarantee you the world would be full of artists. The argument against the decapitalizing of art and granting it public support is often that the “quality of art would decrease” because we aren’t pushing people to compete. But if this sale proves anything, the opposite is true. The commodification of art has led to a decline in quality, not the other way around. The fear of poor quality art is ridiculous especially coming from people who have no artistic background. Were I to choose, I’d rather have a world of half-hearted artists than a world of unwilling and unwitting soldiers, corrupt corporations and morally bankrupt politicians.
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