In 1989 Department M had 10 divisions, which were subdivided into 36 units. The head office, which consisted of 8 divisions and their corresponding units, was located in East Berlin. The divisions were organized based on mail destinations (western, non-communist countries for example), types of mail (like parcels or telegrams), or function within the scope […]
The Stasi surveilled the post of the GDR for nearly 40 years, starting with the founding in 1950, until the fall of 1989 when the Berlin wall fell. The number of workers in Department M rose from a few dozen in the beginning, to nearly 2,200 by the end. The largest office occupied two buildings […]
Read More… from Stasi / Facebook / Big Data DAAD Day 4 – MfS Department M (the workers)
The Ministry for State Security’s Department M was tasked with “postal control”, or the inspection of domestic and international letters and packages. They conducted their work thanks to cooperation with Deutsche Post which, as another state institution concerned with “security of the state,” was subject to the same politics and power infrastructure of the single […]
Read More… from Stasi / Facebook / Big Data DAAD Day 3 – MfS Department M
The former East Germany’s Ministry for State Security (more popularly referred to as the MfS or “Stasi”) is widely known for the inventive and clandestine gadgets that appear in films like Das Leben der Anderen (English: The Lives of Others) or on exhibit at the Stasi Museum in Berlin. Some of my favorites from the […]
This is the first post in a long time. Over the next two months I will add one every day while I’m working on a new stage of an ongoing project I began in Berlin in 2010. I haven’t posted like this in a while. I find it extremely helpful to share and collect research, […]
Read More… from Stasi / Facebook / Big Data DAAD Day 1 – Willkommen in Deutschland
I Know Where Your Cat Lives will be featured at the new exhibition, Big Bang Data, opening today at Somerset House in London. This is a traveling exhibition curated by Olga Subirós and José Luis de Vicente. Emails, selfies, shopping transactions, Google searches, dating profiles: every day we’re producing data in huge quantities. Our online […]
I’m enjoying reading this new book which discusses three of my works (Give Me My Data, Camp La Jolla Military Park, and Keyword Intervention): Thinking Through Digital Media:Transnational Environments and Locative Places by Dale Hudson and Patricia R. Zimmermann (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) Give Me My Data offers users a tool to see, if not claim, […]
Read More… from Thinking Through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places
This week I’m presenting at the Creativity and Technology Symposium hosted by the North Carolina State University Libraries. Using our feline friends as a theme, we will explore a variety of topics that relate to the ever-expanding and complex work of libraries and academic institutions including: GIS-data enabled location tracking and the implications for privacy rights; […]
Read More… from Creativity and Technology Symposium (C.A.T.S.) at NCSU
Photos from the Story-re-telling exhibition at the National Audiovisual Institute (NInA), Warsaw, Poland (September 25–October 18, 2015) curated by Anna Desponds. “I know where your cat lives” proclaims artist and programmer Owen Mundy. And indeed – the website created by him can not only recognize pictures of cats from the web, but also precisely pinpoint […]
Read More… from Story-re-telling exhibition, National Audiovisual Institute (NInA), Warsaw, Poland
This month found me at the excellent Beautiful Data II workshop at the MetaLab at Harvard University sponsored by the Getty Foundation. Participants worked together in the Carpenter Center and Harvard Art Museum under the theme “Telling Stories About Art with Open Collections.” There were presentations by known visualization and museums experts, breakout sessions exploring […]
Read More… from Beautiful Data II @ Metalab at Harvard University