I’m a sucker for the intersection of art and technology. Several years ago, the Listening Post exhibit in San Jose nearly convinced me to go AWOL from a conference focused on mentoring new teachers. I could have spent a week with that exhibit and a new exhibit is just as intriguing. Personas, from the MIT Media Lab, confronts the concerns about online privacy and data mining with a digital bar code for each of us to consider.
In short, the artists behind the San Jose exhibit created a system to combine text posts from Internet chat rooms around the world, musical tones, light effects and a synthesized human voice. The humanness of the familiar phrases exchanged and the routine events of daily lives crated a comfortable environment. But then the observer realizes they’re being assaulted by unfathomable quantities of information. As the data continues to come at you relentlessly the musical tones, flashing lights and emotionless voice combine require you to consider how artificial it all is. There is a statement about our digital lives in there somewhere.
It’s more personal with Personas. This exhibit attempts to display what the World Wide Web knows about you. Click here to play along. Here’s my online persona for Stepwinder (you’ll have to click on it to see the annotation, but from L to R–fame, sports, politics, music and social ):
The designers expect both surprise at what the web can find and frustration over inaccuracies you’ll see whiz by during the analysis. They explain on the site:
Data mining is ‘technologically neutral’ in the sense that its power is derived from what people do with it. The creators of an algorithim choose how to model the world, deciding (somewhat arbitrarily) what inputs and outputs to use. You as the potential ‘victim’ of data mining cannot control any of these factors, especially given the usual lack of transparency of the process.
The “sports” in my persona appeared to be supported by my association with the University of Houston. They play sports there. I think the football team had a pretty exciting year, but I know very little about that or any sport at all. And, with that, there is a powerful statement about what exactly is in the data.
