Urs Fischer

Not sure how this is related yet, but was in London so thought i would pop in!

Lieux de memoire

looking at the focus and lack of information in many key events - who are the blocked people in the background? whilst the focus is on a figurehead what are we missing? these characters sometimes exaggerated by the press and governments as scape goats and targets of emotion - look at the bigger picture...

Suzanne Treister gallery visit

Algorithm

Suzanne Treister: In the Name of Art and Other Recent Works

CLICK HERE TO GO TO LINK

Going to this exhibition tomorrow - looking forward to some alternate insights on the matters of the bottomless depths of government control and military surveillance in our post-Snowden/WikiLeaks society.

Sources of my "Digital Contrail"

• I make a mobile phone call:  Phone location tracking data (i.e. from towers) created and tracked by the carrier; phone log files; data created and stored by multiple mobile apps and their own hosting infrastructures 
• I browse the web: Site tracking; clickstream storage; site analytics; Email storage, including replication on devices as well as replication in geographical-mirrored data centers.
• Driving my car: Location-based tracking by RFID tags at toll booths; unique instrumentation data such from as OnStar systems
• Go to the bank: data streams initiated and stored from a simple ATM withdrawals; security analysis of banking transaction patterns; audit and verification trails for individual transactions; mirrored/backed-up data within the bank's data center
• Go to a shop: data streams initiated and stored from a simple credit card transaction; product inventory changes; buying patterns stored and allocated to individual affinity discount programs
• Browse an online store: All of the above, plus clickstream storage and analysis
• Plan some travel: Airline reservations & pricing systems such as SABRE ticketing; airline tracking databases; TSA flyer database updates & analysis
• At my house: electricity usage via smart metering data collection
• Using entertainment: Uploaded Photography and Video; sales pattern data and DRM data 
• Go to the doctor’s surgery: Medical imaging , EMR data, reports, other records
• Somewhere in the background: With everything I do, there are surely security systems,  kicking-off background data processes and analytics DB’s
• Also somewhere the background: Every service is sourced from a data center, where all data (including device data) is surely replicated and backed-up, including log files.

http://fountnhead.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Big%20Data

Your digital shadow.. the information you do not wish to share but that follows you through your online journey

A few years ago, we introduced the concept of the digital shadow (see Figure 6). This shadow is
growing faster every year, and most of the time without our knowing it. Our digital shadow is made up
of information we may deem public but also data that we would prefer to remain private. Yet, it is
within this growing mist of data where big data opportunities lie — to help drive more personalised services, manage connectivity more efficiently, or create new business based on valuable, yet to be discovered intersections of data among groups or masses of people.

You cannot trust the internet with your data, it multiplies and duplicates across many levels

We are seeing this discussion around trust unfolding before us today. Online data collection is 
becoming more invasive, data mining analytics and big data make it possible for businesses to profile 
individual consumers, and individuals are expanding their digital shadow through their use of mobile 
device applications and their participation in social networking sites. As a result, there are increasing 
calls from advocates, academics, and regulators to amend the current privacy and data protection 
regimes. 

Big Data

Big data is a horizontal cross-section of the digital universe and can include transactional data, 
warehoused data, metadata, and other data residing in ridiculously large files. Media/entertainment, 
healthcare, and video surveillance are obvious examples of new segments of big data growth. Social 
media solutions such as Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter are the newest new data sources. 
Essentially, they have built systems where consumers (consciously or unconsciously) are providing 
near continuous streams of data about themselves, and thanks to the "network effect" of successful 
sites, the total data generated can expand at rapid logarithmic rates. 

http://www.emc.com/collateral/analyst-reports/idc-extracting-value-from-chaos-ar.pdf

FOG

Where I'm at

So I began by looking into treasury tags, a simple device, which keeps hole-punched paper bound together. After looking into compression of layers, and the strength of the tag I decided that the function was weak.

These tags are not very secure, I’ve concluded that the hole-punched papers are often torn and pages in a bound document can be lost and distorted because of this.

I was interested in the importance of this document, what missing information could do to harm the content. Does the narrative have a darker side and this information is lost on purpose. Are there parts of government documents left out of the general public awareness?

In the present these documents would not be physical but digital instead. (I may still look into older documents as I like the connotations of a shady past full of espionage and secrecy done manually through coding’s and subtly).

The common stories discovered in my current affairs research all resolved around Edward Snowden and his unravelling of western governments spying on each other. He leaked vital documents that proved that the US had been spying on British citizens, as well as hacking into Google and keeping tabs on the publics movements.

This intrusion into everyone’s privacy (not just criminals or suspects) I find very interesting. What systems are in place to protect our human rights if even our government is secretly dismissing them?

How can we control the digital world? When it is a language that the majority of us cannot decipher or use ourselves? We cannot understand how our data is transferred or how to control it.

Visually I enjoy the juxtaposition between 70's early digital graphics and latest data that would be incomprehensible to someone from that time.

sketches

Concept Development after 3 weeks of project

Ryoji Ikeda :: superposition

                                                   Go to video

Ryoji Ikeda :: data.anatomy

                                                   Go to video

Binary Prints, by Alex Trochut

Click to see