Tag: art

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 activity, alongside that of businesses and governments, has led to a massive explosion – a ‘Big Bang’ – of data.

This radical shift in the volume, variety and speed of data being produced, combined with new techniques for storage, access, and analysis, is what defines the proliferation of data. It is radically reshaping our world and is set to revolutionise everything we do.

Data today gives us new ways of doing things: from scientific research to business strategy, politics to social interaction, our new data-driven society that has the potential to be more fair, stable, and efficient and yet it also created a tools for unprecedented mass surveillance and commodification. Data access and usage rights, along with the value they comprise, are at the heart of many concerns.

Big Bang Data explores the issues surrounding the datafication of our world through the work of artists, designers, journalists and visionaries. As the data explosion accelerates, we ask if we really understand our relationship with data, and explore the meaning and implications of data for our future.

The exhibition, which runs Dec 3, 2015—Feb 28, 2016, includes over 50 works by artists, designers and innovators, comprising also a number of authors I’ve long admired like:
Brendan Dawes, Charles Joseph Minard, David McCandless, Ellie Harrison, Eric Fischer, Erica Scourti, Eva and Franco Mattes, Fight for the Future and Demand Progress, Florence Nightingale, Forensic Architecture, Future Cities Catapult, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Horst Ademeit, IF, Ingo Günther, Ingrid Burrington and Dan Williams, Interaction Research Studio, Goldsmiths, ITO World, Jaime Serra, James Bridle, John Snow, Jonathan Harris, Jonathan Minard, Julian Oliver, Julie Freeman, Kamel Makhloufi, Kiln, Laura Poitras, Lev Manovich and Moritz Stefaner, Lisa Jevbratt, Lise Autogena and Josh Portway, mySociety, Nesta, Nicholas Felton, Open Knowledge, OpenCorporates, Owen Mundy, Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico, Philipp Adrian, Rafael Lozano Hemmer, Ryoji Ikeda, Safecast, Stefanie Posavec and Giorgia Lupi, Tekja, TeleGeography, The Guardian, The Long Now Foundation, Thomson and Craighead, Timo Arnall, Umbrellium, William Elford, and Zach Blas

Some press is emerging already and I’ll add more images as the show opens:

• I Know Where Your Cat Lives: Feline photo mapping website exposes how easy it is to track the owner’s location by Nick Clark, The Independent
• How uploading pictures of your pet cat can breach your privacy: Professor reveals that uploading pictures of your favourite feline gives stalkers a chance to pinpoint where YOU are by Thomas Burrows The Daily Mail
• The Data of Our Lives, Illustrated by Linda Poon, Citylab (The Atlantic)
• London’s Dazzling “Big Bang Data” Exhibition Reveals the Ugly Truths of Our Digital Lives by Matilda Battersby, ArtNet News
• Big Bang Data at London’s Somerset House by Cajsa Carlson, Cool Hunting
• Big Bang Data, Somerset House, review: ‘alarming’ by Mark Hudson, The Telegraph
• Big Bang Data Domus
• Big Bang Data offers worries, wonders and some cats by Alun Anderson, New Scientist
• Review: Making Big Data visible and tangible
  By Richard Beales, Reuters

Meanwhile time for a…

2015 Update on IKWYCL

Just over a year ago I launched I Know Where Your Cat Lives and it immediately went viral. I’m gracious for all the positive attention the project has received, and even more so for the reach it generated. In addition to a notable influence on research and dialogue around metadata security, the impact for individuals has been significant. Over 25% of owners of cat photos from the original sample have removed or increased privacy on their images and, even more noteworthy, nearly 60% of users have chosen to leave their photos public but have manually removed their location data from the images they shared, underlining the importance of this project to experts in the field, as well as everyone who uses social media.

Since then I’ve found time to evaluate the project’s impact and begin to work on the conclusion. The site I shared was only a prototype, containing just one million images from the at least 15 million tagged with #cat on social media. Thanks to everyone at FSU’s Research Computing Center, and to support from Dr. Ostrander at the FSU Office of Research, I’ve made great progress in collecting and visualizing the millions of images that users have unknowingly uploaded with geolocation data. With this exhibition at Somerset House I’m uploading another large dataset to bring the total number of cats to just under 5.4 million!

The final project will include expanding the data set to run in real time, as well as a mobile app called “Like Tinder for Cats,” and a book project which contextualizes and documents the research, the technology I developed, and most importantly, the impact of this ephemeral web-based work on industry, academia, and culture. I’m also thankful for the opportunity to work with my longtime colleague and amazing writer, Shana Berger, on the writing for the project, the first essay of which is currently under review.

Highlights from the last year

The IKWYCL prototype website has already received press in Motherboard/Vice Magazine, The New York Times, Time Magazine, The Atlantic, Wired Magazine, MSNBC, NPR, and many others. It has been featured in several international exhibitions including the Tempo Documentary Festival in Stockholm, Sweden, and numerous others like:

I Know Where Your Cat Lives was nominated for a 2014 IDFA DocLab Award for Best Digital Storytelling at the International Documentary Film Association (IDFA) Festival. While ultimately the amazing Serial podcast took the prize, I was thrilled to be nominated among many great interactive documentary works including Miranda July’s conceptual app Somebody. Read more about IDFA DocLab in this review on We Make Money Not Art.

I was also excited to take part in the festival, not only as a presenter, but a mystery guest on the evening of my talk. Previously I had shared a selection of my Google searches with a team of experts who led a quiz style analysis of my search history, complete with an artist who did a rendering of what my family looked like according to my searches, and a chef who prepared food for the audience based on what my data revealed.

Mystery guest revealed: @owenmundy maker of I Know Where Your Cat Lives. Drawing by Rafaella based on his Websearches pic.twitter.com/aR8JdOaKXb

— IDFA DocLab (@DocLab) November 22, 2014

That same month found me giving a presentation on my work during the L2 Forum at the Morgan Library in New York City.

While in NYC I also spoke at the LISA (Leaders in Software and Art) Salon at Postmasters Gallery

This is what the LISA salon looked like at @PostmastersNYC and it was awesome! @owenmundy @c_tl_n pic.twitter.com/wOZiZs8mNX

— LISA (@softwareandart) November 25, 2014

In May 2015 it was featured among works by Trevor Paglen and Jason Salavon in the exhibition Art In The Age Of… Planetary Computation, at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam curated by Adam Kleinman. This was followed by an exhibit on interactive storytelling and the future of digital media at the Polish National Audiovisual Institute (NInA) in Warsaw curated by Anna Desponds.

Finally, I was very honored to be interviewed this summer for two separate European journalism projects around the cultural impact of technology.

Silvia Font published an extensive discussion which included many of my previous works for El Diario. The interview, Las fotos de tu gato en internet ponen en jaque tu privacidad (in Spanish), was part of a series that included interviews with Laura Poitras and Jacob Appelbaum.

And, Charles-Henry Groult interviewed me for an ARTE web special about people shaping the culture and politics of the internet. The interview is in English but the interface elements are only in French and German

The dialog with these professionals was really gratifying. I’m so glad to have created something that is so thought-provoking, has proven impact, and yet is extremely fun to use. Thanks to everyone for the support :-)

It has been an intense couple weeks since my last post. It turns out the internet loves cats even more than data, maps, and politics. So here is an update on many things “cat”…

Update on the project

I Know Where Your Cat Lives has received an overwhelmingly positive response from international press. Besides photos of cats on a world map, there are charts, an FAQ and (now) links to press on the website.

I have to admit I specifically picked cat photos as an accessible medium with which to explore the privacy issue. Still, I was astounded at just how much the internet responded. It’s not only cats, the issue was important for discussion, and I appreciated that as well as the thoughtful responses from everyone. Even the puns.

The privacy implications of cat pictures (4:24) MSNBC Interview with Ronan Farrow

Meet The Guy Who’s Putting Your Cat On The Map — To Prove A Point (2:12) Interview with National Public Radio’s All Things Considered

“If you have posted a picture of your cat online, data analyst and artist Owen Mundy, and now, the rest of the world, knows where it lives. And, by that logic, he knows where you live, too. That should probably creep you out a little bit, and that’s really the point.”

—This Guy Is Cyberstalking the World’s Cats in the Name of Privacy, Motherboard / Vice Magazine

“Using cat pictures — that essential building block of the Internet — and a supercomputer, a Florida State University professor has built a site that shows the locations of the cats (at least at some point in time, given their nature) and, presumably, of their owners.”

—What the Internet Can See From Your Cat Pictures, The New York Times

“Attention all 4.9 million users of the #Catstagram hashtag: You’re being watched.”

—This Website Knows Where Your Cat Lives, Time Magazine

“I recognize that a single serving site like this should be easy to quit, but I’ve been refreshing for hours and looking at all the different cats of the world. Near, far, wherever they are, these cats just go on and on and on.”

—Here’s The Website You Will Never Ever Leave, Jezebel

“If I put up a “cat” photo on Instagram, I am not just sharing a cat photo on Instagram. I am offering up data about my, and my cat’s, location. “I Know Where Your Cat Lives” is, as a title, meant to be vaguely threatening.”

—The Cats of the World, Mapped: A lesson in digital privacy The Atlantic

“Owen Mundy just ruined the Internet. What were once innocuous photos of grumpy cats, tired cats, and fat cats, have now become adorable symbols of just how little privacy we have online.”

—Cat Photos, The Privacy Debate, & The Project That Brought Them Together Refinery29

Some charts

Because, charts.

Traffic and hosting

So far 19,169 cats have been removed from the map due to privacy settings on their photographs being increased. I think this is awesome. And, it is also the ironic part of this project in that its success is measured in increased privacy. Meaning, the more people who are convinced to manage their data better, the less cats I will be able to represent on the map!

Truthfully speaking, I don’t think I have to worry about running out of cats, since this is a small portion of the total one million. And, I figured out a clever way to show this progress as it unfolds:

The bandwidth and computing resources consumed by this project have been crazy. Even with a very fast Amazon EC2 server (high I/O computing-intensive 4XL server with 16 virtual cpus and 30 GB RAM) I watched the CPU hover at 100% for the entire day of The New York Times article. And this is after I put many hours indexing the database columns and making the scripts efficient in other ways. All told my bill for “going viral” was $1,019.73 (the month of July 2014).

I used a few different logging tools to monitor the status of the server. Here are some basic stats (from awstats installed on the server) from the three weeks since I launched the project. This is for the requests and bandwidth on the EC2 server only. It does not include the actual cat photos, only the website itself (html, css, json, php, etc):

• 353,734 unique visits
• 14,141,644 pages (total clicks on the site)
• 16,786,127 requests (additional files)
• 8846.24 GB bandwidth (again, only text files)

I also used CloudFlare CDN (thanks for the tip Tim Schwartz!) to cache the site files and cat photos and serve the data from various locations around the world. This helped with the speed and to decrease my costs. Since all requests are routed through their DNS I believe their stats are likely the most reliable. According to CloudFlare, they served:

• 20,631,228 total requests (3,089,020 of which were served through CloudFlare’s cache)
• 10.2 TB bandwidth!! (437.3 GB of this data (site files and cat photos were served by CloudFlare)

The Kickstarter has <3 days left!

And great news, thanks to 123 backers, including a big push from the awesome folks at Ghostery and Domi Ventures, the Kickstarter will be funded! There’s still time however, to help contribute to the number of years I can keep the site live while getting fun rewards from the project like I Know Where Your Cat Lives themed beer koozies and plush fish-shaped catnip-laced cat toys, as well as a limited edition signed I Know Where Your Cat Lives archival ink jet print. The kickstarter closes on Sat, Aug 9 2014 11:49 AM EDT.

Thanks again to everyone who supported the project. It’s been fun.

I just launched a new ongoing project this week. Here’s the text, a video and some screenshots. I’ll post more about how I made it soon.

Welcome to the today’s internet—you can buy anything, every website is tracking your every move, and anywhere you look you find videos and images of cats. Currently, there are 15 million images tagged with the word “cat” on public image hosting sites, and daily thousands more are uploaded from unlimited positions on the globe.

“I Know Where Your Cat Lives” iknowwhereyourcatlives.com is a data experiment that visualizes a sample of 1 million public pics of cats on a world map, locating them by the latitude and longitude coordinates embedded in their metadata. The cats were accessed via publicly available APIs provided by popular photo sharing websites. The photos were then run through various clustering algorithms using a supercomputer at Florida State University in order to represent the enormity of the data source.

This project explores two uses of the internet: the sociable and humorous appreciation of domesticated felines, and the status quo of personal data usage by startups and international megacorps who are riding the wave of decreased privacy for all. This website doesn’t visualize all of the cats on the net, only the ones that allow you to track where their owners have been.

Folks can also contribute to a kickstarter to help with hosting costs.

Here are some shots from the recently released Art and the Internet (Black Dog Publishing, London) with contributions from Joanne McNeil, Domenico Quaranta, and Nick Lambert. The book is a welcome update to writing on the subject and contains many well known works by artists I’ve admired for years. Nice to be included.

Trust (Evidence Locker) (2004) Jill Magid. Essay by Joanne McNeil.

Simple Net Art Diagram by MTAA (1997). Essay by Domenico Quaranta

Colorflip.com (2008) by Rafaël Rozendaal

Every Icon (1997) by John F Simon Jr

Tommy Chat Just Emailed Me (2006) by Ryan Trecartin

1:1 (1999-2002) by Lisa Jevbratt

They Rule (2001) by Josh On

My Generation (2010) by Eva and Franco Mattes

Artist’s Statement No 45, 730,944: The Perfect Artistic Website (2000) Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries

I am Unable to Fulfill Your Wish (2012) by Owen Mundy

No-one Ever Cried At A Website (Speed Show)

November 22, 5:00–6:30 pm EST, Computer training room, Facility for Arts Research, 3216 Sessions Road, Tallahassee FL

With FSU students: Monique Boileau, Alexis Cooper, Jonathan Davito, Danielle English, Justin Greenstein, Antoinette Janus, Scotty Johnson, Melissa Lidsky, Michelle Medrano, Denise Morrow, Lena Weissbrot, Meghan “Red” Yancey. Curated by: Owen Mundy

Students from the Fall 2013 Network Art and Typography classes in the Department of Art at Florida State are staging an exhibition titled No-one Ever Cried At A Website (Speed Show) on November 22 5:00–6:30 pm EST at the computer training room in the Facility for Arts Research, Tallahassee FL.

The exhibition title is modified from an article called, “No-one Ever Cried At A Website,” written by artist/coder Matt Pearson. The document examines how emotion is often forgotten when analyzing technologically-sophisticated works of art such as those which exist on the internet. It reminds readers that painting was once a technology, and asks how beauty, empathy, and interaction can all be triggers for emotional response regardless of the medium for delivery. The prompt for the works in this show, created mostly collaboratively, over the course of 10 days, and specifically for this exhibition, is to address how emotion can be used to engage online audiences to look, listen, and be moved by internet-based art.

Speed Show exhibition, popularized by artist, Aram Barthol, are arranged as following: “Hit an Internet-cafe (or computer classroom), rent all computers they have and run a show on them for one night. All art works of the participating artists need to be on-line and are shown in a typical browser with standard plug-ins.”

Poster: Print resolution and E-mail resolution

README for After Douglas Davis
==============================

Statement
————–

The World’s First Collaborative Sentence was created by Douglas Davis in 1994 and donated to the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1995. Much like today’s blog environments and methods for crowdsourcing knowledge, it allowed users to contribute practically any text or markup to a never-ending sentence with no limits on speech or length.

At some point the sentence stopped functioning, and in early 2012 the Whitney Museum undertook a “preservation effort” to repair and relaunch the project. Measures were taken during the “restoration” to stay true to the original intent of the artist, leaving dead links and the original code in place.

During the preservation the curators placed small sections of garbled ASCII text from the project on Github with the hope that others would “fork” the data and repair the original. However, the Whitney Museum did not succeed in realizing that the collaborative culture of the net Davis predicted has actually arrived. This is evident not only through sites like Wikipedia, Facebook, and Tumblr, but the open source movement, which brings us Linux, Apache, and PHP, the very technologies used to view this page, as well as others like Firefox, Arduino, Processing, and many more.

In the spirit of open source software and artists like Duchamp, Levine, runme.org and Mandiberg, on September 5, 2013, I “forked” Douglas Davis’ Collaborative Sentence by downloading all pages and constructing from scratch the functional code which drives the project. I have now placed this work on Github with the following changes:

1. All pages are updated to HTML5 and UTF-8 character encoding
2. The functional code was rewritten from scratch including a script to remove malicious code
3. The addition of this statement

I was originally disappointed the Whitney Museum didn’t place the full source code in the public domain. What better way to make it possible for artists and programmers to extend the life of Davis’ project by learning from, reusing, and improving the original code than to open source this work? Though, possibly like Davis, my motivation is largely in part an interest in constructing a space for dialog, framing distinct questions and new possibilities, and waiting to see what happens from this gesture.

Included software
————–
HTML Purifier http://htmlpurifier.org/

Live version
————–
Enter After Douglas Davis

About the author
————–
Owen Mundy http://owenmundy.com/

CYBER IN SECURITIES
Dates: August 30 – September 27, 2013
Location: Pepco Edison Place Gallery, 702 8th Street, NW, Washington, DC

Curated by: Lisa Moren, Professor, Department of Visual Art, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Participating Artists: Birgit Bachler, Walter Langelaar, Owen Mundy, and Tim Schwartz; Channel TWo (CH2): Adam Trowbridge and Jessica Westbrook, with Jesus Duran; Heather Dewey-Hagborg; Hasan Elahi; The Force of Freedom with Dave Young; Taylor Hokanson; Ricarda McDonald and Donna Szoke; Lexie Mountain; Preemptive Media; David Rokeby; Julia Kim Smith; and WhiteFeather

Opening Reception: Friday, August 30, 2013, 6-8pm
Exhibition Hours: Tuesday – Friday, 12pm-4pm

Experimental Media Video Screening Series
Juried by Jason Eppink, Associate Curator of Digital Media, Museum of the Moving Image, New York

Experimental Media Video Series Night One: Thursday, September 12, 2013, 6:30pm
Location: The Phillips Collection, 1600 21st Street, NW, Washington, DC

Experimental Media Video Series Night Two: Monday, September 24, 2013, 6:30pm
Location: The Corcoran Gallery of Art and College of Art + Design, 500 17th Street, NW, Washington, DC

Experimental Media Symposium: Saturday, September 21, 2013
Location: Pepco Edison Place Gallery, 702 8th Street, NW, Washington, DC

Experimental Media 2013 will explore security, privacy, and surveillance in the digital age, through a gallery exhibition, video screenings series, and panel discussion.

The Washington Post recently published a review recently about my and Joelle’s exhibition at Flashpoint Gallery in D.C. Check it out: Joelle Dietrick & Owen Mundy: Grid, Sequence Me, by Maura Judkis, Jan 11, 2013.

A few elements will be recognizable, such as the brutalist outline of the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building, but many are stripped down to their most generic shapes, making rows of windows look like charts and bar graphs. The projections of some of those shapes echo and interplay with the forms of the Flashpoint gallery interior.

Dietrick and Mundy also scraped The Post’s listings of recent home sales, with architectural elements from some of those homes appearing before a dense thicket of live-streamed code. It’s a visual reminder of just how complicated the housing industry has become.

…

There’s a sense in the animation that the structures are tumbling away from you — just as homeownership has slipped out of the grip of many Americans. But the piece will elicit a different reaction here than in Florida, where the effects of the housing market crash have been far more pronounced. In Washington, we’ve mostly been insulated from it: Foreclosures are few, short sales are sparse. In the jumble of buildings and code, “Grid, Sequence Me,” may serve as a warning for those who haven’t experienced that sense of loss — but who indirectly, though policy work, may have influenced the systems that led to the crash.

I also finished a short piece with video from the installation and screen captures of the Processing visualization.

I am tele-participating in a one-week online performance of Google queries at Transmediale 2012 in Berlin. The project, plainly titled, “Google,” is organized by Johannes P. Osterhoff and will run from Jan 30 to Feb 5, 2012. Each participant edits the search method for their browser search bar so that everything they type in this box, from the personal to the mundane, becomes instantly visible at google-performance.org.

The project (“manifesto” below) makes public what Facebook, Google, and any online search engine, crowdsourcing website, or social network already does by harvesting searches from users, and re-representing that data in a new context. While Google uses these queries to build and sell condensed user demographic data to advertisers, Osterhoff’s project asks, who actually owns your search data?

We shall do an one-week performance piece.

The piece is called “Google” and documents all searches we perform withthe search engine of the same name.

The performance shall take place during transmediale 2012 and shall start on Monday, January 30 and shall end on Sunday, February 5, 2012.

We shall not use undocumented ways to use the search engine Google during this time.

Each of our search queries shall create a web page that is indexed by this search engine and thus makes our searches publicly available as search results for everybody.

Finally finding time to edit documentation from A Single Composite exhibition this summer in Berlin.

A Single Composite is a series of kinetic installations and projection apparatuses that stretch, twist, and loop film strips containing declassified and other found reconnaissance footage. Using reconstituted digital printer chassis, this cinematic enterprise is projected on walls, ceilings, and floors, to form a series of individual moments of surveillance and implied violence.

I am happy to announce the launch of the new website for Drain: Journal of Contemporary Art and Culture and the corresponding release of issue #11 POWER, which I co-organized with Avantika Bawa.

POWER, issue #11

This issue of Drain attempts to expose the cultural faciality of power, as well as manifestations of power as simulacra which obfuscate traditional inquiries into its construction. If power connects the virtual and the actual, how does cultural creativity channel or destabilize this connectivity? The corporate-academic-entertainment-military-industrial complex and its front-end, the global information machine floods us with images and images of images, to cause sensory overload, and yet, at the same time, acute sensory deprivation. Most of all, power entrenches a visual literacy that allows us to see only its style, leaving us unable to access other ways of seeing and becoming. How can we parody this visual literacy, and the speed, cadence and grammar of this power and its affects?

Necropolis by Roi Kuper

If the simulation of power is necessary and absolute, can creative acts and molecular politics slip through the surveillance and desensitizing of territorializing systems?

GWOTEM by J.M. Badoud

This issue of Drain presents artworks, essays, and other creative works to actualize answers to these questions and re-channel them into different connectivities, ways of becoming and conceptual production.

The Gift of Giving by Oscar Perez

We are pleased to present Ian Buchanan and Roi Kuper as our feature writer and featured artist. This issue also includes essays by Emma Cocker and Chris Revelle, as well as interviews by Alexander Stewart with artist Andy Roache and Bertha Husband with Blazo Kovacevic. In our Creative Writing section, we present works by Camille Meyer, BT Shaw & Elizabeth Lopeman, Vanessa Norton, Emma Cocker and Morgan Campbell. Art projects works by Jamie Badoud, Diana Heise, Cyrico Lopes, Bob Paris and Oscar Perez.

Past issues

A semantic network visualization and detail using tags generated from the hierarchical tagging system I created with Thomas Evan Lecklider as part of my Camp La Jolla Military Park project.

For example this item, Defense Contractors recruit at UCSD Job Fair, in the park is filed under: business » arms industry » spending » recruiting

Just received files from the portraits taken during The Americans exhibition in Niceville, FL. See more images on my website.

Many thanks to K.C. Williams, Director of the Holzhauer Gallery at Northwest Florida State College for her help in coordinating this project.

If you are in Los Angeles / Long Beach check out Keyword Intervention at this group show:

inSCRIPTion: … text … image … action …
November 8th – December 9th
Opening Reception: November 9, 2010 (3-7 pm)

Cerritos College Art Gallery
11110 Alondra Blvd
Norwalk, CA

The current ubiquity of transmediated and telepresential dialogues, most notably via the casual and partially-inscriptive technologies of computer-aided chat programs and cell-phone text messaging, certainly complicates the age-old distinction between written and oral communication, and between langue and parole. In part, this conceptual convergence is predicated on the collapsing of linguistic signifiers into the immanent patterns of (un)becomings inherent to computational code. In such an (intra-)active environment, the living fluidity of dialogue is often actualized by digits (a technophenomenological fusion of finger movement and binary language) and the lifeless permanence of inscription can manifest as a dynamic system of inSCRIPTion.

Reveling in the physical and conceptual opacity of words, the fourteen contemporary artists participating in inSCRIPTion at the Cerritos College Art Gallery, in aiming for a field of matrixial encounters, produce materialized event-scores that hover somewhere between notation and realization and which play games with language through transplantation into various deviant contexts. Some of the diverse multi-media works in the exhibition demand that the artist and/or viewer perform an action, while others emphasize the creative and performative act of reading itself. Still others contain moving, as opposed to static, text and/or process found language through a scripted algorithm. The end results of these (re)visualized schemas include readymade actions, speaking objects, and literal semiotic machines that nevertheless remain discursively framed, which is not to say trapped, by the nationalist, racial, gendered, and sexed, political/philosophical structures in which they are embedded.

Participating Artists: Lisa Anne Auerbach, John Divola, Jonmarc Edwards, Mark Steven Greenfield, Jim Jenkins, Sherry Karver, Jason Manley, Katja Mater, Anna Mayer, Owen Mundy, Christina Ondrus, Lizabeth Eva Rossof, Cody Trepte, and Penny Young

Curated by James MacDevitt.

TINA B. in VENICE
at Claudio Buzziol Gallery and in the Church of St. Leonardo, Venice, Italy.

Artists:

Ludovico Bomben
Enoc Armengol
Pedro Valdez Cardoso
Daniel Gonzalez
Daniel Hanzlík / Pavel Mrkus
Jenny Marketou
Katharina Lackner
Santi Moix
hNkD
Owen Mundy / Joelle Dietrick
Norman Leto

Thanks to TINA-B and Exchange Radical Moments!.

I’m speaking about new work at the upcoming Art Clinic #3 in Neuköln, Berlin.

ART CLINIC # 3 @ WERKSTADT e. V
1.11.2010
MONTAG 20-22UHR

Owen Mundy (USA)
Boris Duhm (DE)
Enda O’Donoghue (IRL)

Werkstadt Kunstverein Berlin e.V.
Emser Straße 124
12051 Berlin Neuköln
www.werkstadt-berlin.com

I launched Keyword Intervention in January 2007 and for almost four years now it has been scraping topical search terms and attracting random traffic. Today I moved the project to its own domain, keywordintervention.com and also updated the documentation on the site. Below is a sample of the last 500 search terms by users all around the world. The full list is here.

New project posted here

Images from the lamp exchange/soup conversation at Nostic Palace in Prague.

Joelle and I are speaking at Prague College and the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (Akademie výtvarných umění v Praze) this week about our individual work and the project we are doing at the Nostic Palace. Many thanks to artists Molly Radecki and Natalia Vasquez for assisting us with The Difference Between Now and Then.

Czech version of flyer for our project at the Prague Contemporary Art Festival

Howdy, it’s been awhile since I last shared news about recent and ongoing projects. Here goes.

1. You Never Close Your Eyes Anymore

You Never Close Your Eyes Anymore is an installation that projects moving US Geological Survey (USGS) satellite images using handmade kinetic projection devices.

Each device hangs from the ceiling and uses electronic components to rotate strips of satellite images on transparency in front of an LED light source. They are constructed with found materials like camera lenses and consumer by-products and mimic remote sensing devices, bomb sights, and cameras in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.

The installation includes altered images from various forms of lens-based analysis on a micro and macro scale; land masses, ice sheets, and images of retinas, printed on reflective silver film.

On display now until July 31 at AC Institute 547 W. 27th St, 5th Floor
Hours: Wed., Fri. & Sat.: 1-6pm, Thurs.: 1-8pm

New video by Asa Gauen and images
http://owenmundy.com/site/close_your_eyes

2. Images and video documentation of You Never Close Your Eyes Anymore will also be included in an upcoming Routledge publication and website:

Reframing Photography: Theory and Practice
by Rebekah Modrak, Bill Anthes
ISBN: 978-0-415-77920-3
Publish Date: November 16th 2010
http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415779203/

3. Give Me My Data launch

Give Me My Data is a Facebook application designed to give users the ability to export their data out of Facebook for any purpose they see fit. This could include making artwork, archiving and deleting your account, or circumventing the interface Facebook provides. Data can be exported in CSV, XML, and other common formats. Give Me My Data is currently in public-beta.

Website
http://givememydata.com/

Facebook application
http://apps.facebook.com/give_me_my_data/

4. Give Me My Data was also covered recently by the New York Times, BBC, TechCrunch, and others:

Facebook App Brings Back Data by Riva Richmond, New York Times, May 1, 2010
http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/01/facebook-app-brings-back-data/

5. yourarthere.net launch

A major server and website upgrade to the yourarthere.net web-hosting co-op for artists and creatives. The new site allows members of the community to create profiles and post images, tags, biography, and events. In addition to the community aspect, yourarthere.net is still the best deal going for hosting your artist website.

Website
http://yourarthere.net

More images
http://owenmundy.com/site/design_yourarthere_net

6. The Americans

The Americans is currently on view at the Northwest Florida State College in Niceville, FL. It features a new work with the same title.

More images
http://owenmundy.com/site/the-americans

7. Your Art Here billboard hanger

I recently designed a new billboard hanging device and installed it in downtown Bloomington, IN with the help of my brother Reed, and wife Joelle Dietrick.

Stay tuned here for news about Your Art Here and the new billboard by Joelle Dietrick.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Your-Art-Here/112561318756736

8. Finally, moving to Berlin for a year on a DAAD fellowship to work on some ongoing projects, including Automata.

More images
https://owenmundy.com/blog/2010/07/new-automata-sitemaps/

I’ll be giving a paper about Automata at the upcoming ISEA2010 conference in Ruhr, Germany.
http://www.isea2010ruhr.org/conference/tuesday-24-august-2010-dortmund

Many thanks to Chris Csikszentmihályi, Director of the Center for Future Civic Media http://civic.mit.edu/ , for inviting me to the MIT Media Lab last August to discuss the project with his Computing Culture Group: http://compcult.wordpress.com/

I am very much enjoying the video my friend, Asa Gauen, is working on for You Never Close Your Eyes Anymore, which is installed at AC Institute in New York until July 31.

Katherine Sweetman, has just posted a great video documenting the Lucent project we did at the University of California, San Diego.

You Never Close Your Eyes Anymore opens tonight at AC Institute in Chelsea.

July 1 – July 31, 2010
Opening: Thursday, July 1, 2010 6-8pm

AC Institute [Direct Chapel]
547 W. 27th St, 5th Floor
New York, NY

Gallery Hours: Wed., Fri. & Sat.: 1-6pm, Thurs.: 1-8pm

Here are a couple installation shots of You Never Close Your Eyes Anymore leading up to the AC Direct installation in New York. Everyone should be so lucky to have a retired shop teacher for a father in law!

BBC News reports on Give Me My Data. Their website and video player is pretty clunky, and while they avoid crediting the developer, its still a nice plug to wake up to.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/8744514.stm

Just installed “The Americans” exhibition and artwork with the same title. Here are the details:

The Americans
June 20–July 25, 2010
Holzhauer Gallery
Northwest Florida State College
Niceville, Florida

“Open sourcing” the schematic for the electronic components for You Never Close Your Eyes Anymore.

Products:

RBBB boards (Arduino clone)
custom-designed circuits
– female headers
– TIP31 transistor
– 6-wire Unipolar Stepper motor (48 step Nippon Electric Pulse Motor)
– ULN2803A Darlington Array
– hook-up wire
– various resistors
– LEDs
used camera lenses
aluminum “flat bar”
hose clamps
rubber wine corks
various mounting hardware

More photos from You Never Close Your Eyes Anymore production.

This issue of Drain attempts to expose the cultural faciality of power, as well as manifestations of power as simulacra, which obfuscate traditional inquiries into its construction. If power connects the virtual and the actual, how does cultural creativity channel or destabilize this connectivity? The corporate-academic-entertainment-military-industrial complex and its front-end, the global information machine floods us with images, and images of images, to cause sensory overload, and yet at the same time, acute sensory deprivation. Most of all, power entrenches a visual literacy that allows us to see only its style, leaving us unable to access other ways of seeing and becoming. How can we parody this visual literacy, and the speed, cadence and grammar of this power and its affects?

If the simulation of power is necessary and absolute, can creative acts and molecular politics slip through the surveillance and desensitizing of territorializing systems?

This issue of Drain invites artwork, papers, and other creative works to actualize answers to these questions and re-channel them into different connectivities, ways of becoming and conceptual production.

Submission deadline: Sep 15, 2010

Please send submissions to:

Owen Mundy owen -at- drainmag -dot- org
or
Avantika Bawa avantika -at- drainmag -dot- org

After 4 months the new yourarthere.net website and member-run content management system is now live. Thanks to Braylin and Brittany Morales, Beth Lee, and Chris Cumbie for all their hard work.

The site is valid XHTML/CSS and runs on PHP/MySQL using the Codeigniter framework. All the details from our research from inception onward are archived here.

This site is based around the idea that members should have control of the content on the website. Every member has a profile where they can add images, text, tags, and events to promote their artwork or group. Members can create a new profile for every domain they host with yourarthere.nets.

Joelle Dietrick and I sent images this week to two international group shows at the Golden Thread Gallery in Belfast, Northern Ireland, U.K. and the Raccolte Frugone Museum in Genoa, Italy. We were invited to submit proposals that “could not be realized” to Sean Miller, who curated the exhibitions as part of his John Erickson Museum of Art project.

Our process involved first constructing a 3-dimensional model of the space. I did this using Google SketchUp.

A different view of the final model.

The first work, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know But Were Afraid to Ask, constructed inside the space using SketchUp.

Following are the final works on paper.

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know But Were Afraid to Ask, 11×8.5″, archival inkjet on paper, 2010

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know But Were Afraid to Ask, 11×8.5″, archival inkjet on paper, 2010

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know But Were Afraid to Ask, 11×8.5″, archival inkjet on paper, 2010

JEMA.3333, 11×8.5″, archival inkjet on paper, 2010

JEMA.3333, 11×8.5″, archival inkjet on paper, 2010

JEMA.3333, 11×8.5″, archival inkjet on paper, 2010

Museum All-Over
June 4-August 29, 2010
John Erickson Museum of Art: Next Chapter and
Raccolte Frugone Museum
Genoa, Italy

Little Wonder
June 4-June 17, 2010
John Erickson Museum of Art: Next Chapter and
Golden Thread Gallery
Belfast, Northern Ireland
U.K.

Give Me My Data (fb_friends_20100128_white)

Give Me My Data (fb_mutualfriends_20091114_black)

Give Me My Data (fb_mutualfriends_20100430_dark3)

Give Me My Data (fb_profile_xml_20100430)

Give Me My Data is a Facebook application that helps you reclaim and reuse your facebook data. It is currently in-development but starting to receive an amazing amount of traffic from Facebook users. Apparently the developers at Facebook made a change to the interface this week leaving many users unable to find or display specific information they had added to their pages. Give Me My Data helps users circumvent the problems they are having with the interface by giving them another way to access their data.

Due to the amount of questions I have received about the application I decided to launch a new website to share information about it here: givememydata.com

Facebook application interface

Visitors from this week (via statcounter)

The application profile page
Use the application

Keyword Intervention has been included in the recent HZ Net Gallery update. Also included were: Alysse Stepanian, Rudi Punzo, Aaron Oldenburg, Aaron M. Higgens, Anders Bojen & Kristoffer Ørum.

Joelle Dietrick and I have been selected to participate in the upcoming Europe-wide Art Festival Exchange Radical Moments! Organized by Austrian collective, Die Fabrikanten, the festival includes interdisciplinary projects exploring the nature of contemporary Europe and will culminate on 11.11.2011 as a moment of simultaneous fruition. Featured participants include Gabriela Gerber and Lukas Bardill; Scott Bunham and Juliane Stiegele. Download the promotional magazine here.

Joelle and I will be generating a project based on The Darkest Hour is Just Before Dawn, a redux if you will. More soon…

Original post here

The FSU Art Review System is live.

More images online here.

Thanks to Jack Stenner and Sean Miller for hosting my upcoming artist talk at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

University of Florida Artist Talk
Gainesville, FL
October 15, 2009
7:00 PM

“Anemophilous Formula for Computer Art, 2007, by Joelle Dietrick and Owen Mundy. One of my five selections. It consists of a wall projection of Tallahassee’s airport lounge, which hosts a wall size photographic reproduction of Mcklay Gardens. The city is often bombarded with pollen during the month of March. The airport lounge offers a reference of nature in an artificial space. Under the concept of non-places, which was my curatorial thematic, this work was placed in Centro Multimedia’s hallway where people constantly walked, to emphasize the use of the original image in a “non-place.””
—Eduardo Navas

Reblogged from http://remixtheory.net/?p=394

The International Festival of Electronic Arts and Video Transitio_mx is the most important platform in Mexico that expresses and analyses the contemporary practices of artistic creation with electronic media and digital culture. It has a biannual character and has three main activities: a symposium, an exhibition, a contest.

Curator’s Inauguration: * Dissent. Non places & Device Art * (first disagreement)

Artistas: Sabrina Raaf, Paul Ramírez Jonas, Carlos Rosas, Vicky Funari, Sergio De la Torre, Joelle Dietrick, Owen Mundy, Yuri Suzuki, Nova Jiang, Ariel Guzik y Gilberto Esparza.

Curaduría: Machiko Kusahara y Eduardo Navas

Activity: Muestra internacional

Venue: CENART/Galería Manuel Felguérez/Galería AB/Área de Camerinos

drain: Journal of Contemporary Art and Culture is pleased to announce the launch of Issue #10 COLD

A collective behavior of baroque, abundant consumption has led to an economic and climatic meltdown. The push toward a frenzied emphasis on growth & mass consumption has manifested a cascade of aesthetic opulence in the form of brightly colored advertisements & plastic disposable goods. In the wake of this recent collapse; the purity, simplicity & refinement of a calmer and cooler culture is now alluring. Can transparent, clear and meditative practice counter this lavish, hot & hysterical culture? Subverting the old notion of icy bureaucratic indifference remediated through hot empathy, might the forces of hot commodity be slowed by an intervening cold? Is it possible for the lucidity of coolness to connect cultures & move us into the future?
This issue of Drain presents a collection of critical writing and art practices that has touched on many continents, climates and cultures to transform the way in which we think about how various degrees of cold collaborate.

We are pleased to present Celina Jeffery and Owen Mundy as our feature writer and artist.

This issue also includes essays by Edwin Janzen and Eduardo Navas, as well as interviews by Scott Waters with artist Andrew Morrow, Shannon Stratton with Michael Milano; reviews by Gean Moreno (on Ernesto Oroza) and Edith-Anne Pageot (on Construction Work: Lorraine Gilbert, Josée Dubeau, Jinny Yu).

In our Creative Writing section, we bring to you works by Adelheid Mers, Ellie Krakow, Kathryn Yusoff and Allison Kudla.

Art projects, include two sections; Freeze – with works by Leah Bailis, Lou Mallozzi, Sally Grizzell Larson, Noelle Mason and Deborah Wing-Sproul and Thaw – with works by Jonathan Van Dyke, Nitin Mukul, Kim Jackson DeBord, Rachel Moore, Adrian Göllner and Living Lenses

While this issue explored Cold as an aesthetic experience and concept of our times, THAW – The Meltdown- A Panel and discussion forum held at Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, took this investigation a step further through conversation that addressed the aftermath of the residual coldness.

We wish you an enjoyable read and look forward to contributions from you for our upcoming issues on Militarism and Rewind respectively.

Drain would not have been possible without the support of you, our patrons. Thank you for your continued support!

This issue was curated by Avantika Bawa and Stuart Keeler.

Managerial board: Avantika Bawa, Celina Jeffery, Adrian Parr

drain – Journal of Contemporary Art and Culture
www.drainmag.com

Saturday, August 29, 2009, I will be talking about Keyword Intervention in a paper titled, “Intervention and the Internet: New Forms of Public Practice” at ISEA2009: the 15th International Symposium on Electronic Art in Belfast, Ireland.

Full program
http://www.isea2009.org/images/programme15july.pdf

A script that plots points within the confines of an ellipse using Processing and distance from the center.

http://owenmundy.com/work/_sketches/draw_inside_ellipse/

Images of shifting 3d spaces using Processing and found aerial photography. Click the sketch to refresh the image.
http://owenmundy.com/work/_sketches/aerial_3d_textures/

Owen Mundy and Joelle Dietrick, The Darkest Hour is Just Before the Dawn, installation view, York, AL, 2006

A touring exhibition at Broadwalk Arts, Bristol then at The Willesden Gallery, London includes national and international artists and writers exploring the notion of connectivity, correspondence and dialogue entailing a subversive perspective to the theme.

Exhibition Details

Subversive Correspondence #1 Broadwalk Arts, Bristol, BS4 2QU.
Monday 20th July – Thursday 23rd July 2009

Subversive Correspondence #2
The Gallery at Willesden Green, 95 High Road, Willesden, London, NW10 2SF.
Wednesday 19th August- Wednesday 2nd September 2009
Private View 19th August 6-9pm

Curator: Diana Ali

Concept

The interpretations encounter political statements or disperse cultural observations; correspondence that is not immediate but perhaps depends on the contingencies of travel. Subversive systems of posting and collecting dialogue create the emergence of new narratives that are shared and reacted upon through hybrid texts, images and temporary ownership. Show cased as a touring exhibition at Broadwalk Arts, Bristol then at The Willesden Gallery, London, the works continue to explore language, visual interchange and systematic dialogues.

Alice Bradshaw
Aman Tadevosyan
Colin Andrews
Guy Bigland
Jacqueline Bradley
Johannes Gerard
Katie Watters
Kevin Timmins
Louise Tett
Mary Elizabeth Hubbard
Mary Rachel Fanning
Osvaldo Cibils
Owen Mundy and Joelle Dietrick
Ozzy Yorulmaz
Rachel Marsden
Robin Boothroyd
Sibyll Kalff
Ting
Tushar Waghela
Ziggy Evitts

Screenshots of a sitemap of my website generated using Graphvis and a .dot file created with a PHP spider.

Activate: MK Foltz, Steven Gagnon, Owen Mundy
June 6-July 24, 2009

Opening reception: June 6, 4-7 PM
Pabst Visitor Center & Gallery, Atlantic Center for the Arts
1414 Art Center Avenue, New Smyrna Beach

Gallery hours: Tuesday through Friday, 10 AM to 4 PM
Information: 386.427.6975
www.atlanticcenterforthearts.org

Free/Public Invited

Joelle Dietrick and I are talking on a panel for the upcoming release of Drain Magazine’s “Cold” issue at The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center on Thursday, May 21 at 6:00 pm. Check it out if you’re in town!

http://www.thecontemporary.org/education_currentschedule.asp#may21
http://drainmag.com/

Opening Reception April 10, 6–9 PM
April 10–August 8

Material Afterlife explores the rich terrain developed by artists who address waste and need in society, are mindful of environmental cause and effect, and expand ideas of consumption through a cyclic approach of material use. This terrain has never been more fruitful than with the work of today’s artists. This exhibition will assert the growing relevance of artwork that examines environmental degradation, consumerism, personal value, and frugality, as well as celebrate the significance of recycling, sustainable methods, and thrift-store culture as medium and subject matter for artists.

On Monday, January 19, Joelle and I are giving a presentation titled, “The Darkest Hour is Just Before Dawn: Research and Optimism in Community-Based Art,” to Florida State University’s ART&DESIGN for Social Justice Symposium.

http://interiordesign.fsu.edu/symposium/

The ART&DESIGN for Social Justice Symposium focuses on how the tools and inherent abilities within the areas of art and design can be utilized in addressing issues confronting less advantaged groups within our local communities, states, regions or world. The event is designed to generate synergy, spawn collaborative projects among participants, create new scholarly initiatives, and allow examination of the role that art and design plays in the telling of a broader social narrative.

2009 Art and Design for Social Justice Symposium
Florida State University
Location: HCB, “The New Classroom Building”

8:00-8:30 Late Registration, Coffee and Pastries

8:30-8:45 Welcome, Eric Wiedegreen, Dean Sally McRorie, Dave Gussak,
Room 103

8:45-9:30 Eve Blossom, Keynote Speaker, Room 103

9:45-10:15 Presentation, Room 205
“Close to Home: Studying Art and Your Community”
Pat Villeneuve & Donald Sheppard, Florida State University

Presentation, Room 210
“Separating Desire from Desperation: Parallel Existences in Sao Paulo,
Brazil”
Hannah Mendoza & Matthew Dudzik, Savannah College of Art and Design

Film, Room 213
“Pillars of Justice: An examination of courthouses and their role the
search for justice.”
Brenda Waugh & Paulette Moore, Center for Justice and Peace at Eastern
Mennonite University

10:25-10:55 Presentation, Room 205
“Art Therapy as Part of a Multidisciplinary Team: Developing an Arts in
Corrections Program”
Caroline Cook, Florida State University

Presentation, Room 210
“From Sheltered Students to Sheltering Others”
Patrick Lee Lucas & Suzanne Cabrera, The University of North Carolina-
Greensboro

11:05-11:35 Presentation, Room 205
“Art and Place Relationship: Evaluating Sense of Place in a Community
Based Public Art Installation”
Marlo Ransdell, Florida State University

Presentation, Room 210
“i+TiBET: A Community Effort to Preserve Tibetan Culture-in-Exile”
Angela Tank & Carrie Ann Christensen, University of Minnesota-Twin
Cities

11:45-12:15 Presentation, Room 205
“The Darkest Hour is Just Before Dawn: Research and Optimism in
Community-Based Art”
Owen Mundy & Joelle Dietrick, Florida State University

Presentation, Room 210
“Incorporating Civic and Social Responsibility into Design Curriculum”
Jillissa Moorman, University of Northern Iowa

12:15- 1:30 Lunch (with Music by Charles Atkins)

1:40- 2:10 Presentation, Room 205
“Integrating Social Justice in the Thesis”
Alison Keohane, Jessica Menrath, Cheryl Watson, Hannah Mendoza,
Savannah College of Art and Design

Presentation, Room 210
“Research to Application: How an Innovative Arts in Corrections Program
Was Developed”
Dave Gussak, Florida State University

2:20-2:50 Presentation, Room 205
“The Cradle of Hope: One Year Later”
Jill Pable, Rachelle McClure, Sean Coyne, Florida State University

Presentation, Room 210
“A Place of Their Own: Shaping Behavior Through Design in an Arts-
Based Community Center”
Tracie Kelly, Florida State University

3:00- 3:45 Endnote Speaker, Joan Frosch

3:45- 4:00 Closing Remarks

Aspect: The Chronicle of New Media Art
Volume 12: Vital presents nine artists exploring that which is essential, grave, indispensable, and/or critical to existence. Mirroring preconceived notions of reality, these works re-imagine new deities, investigate animal nature and human desire, contemplate the body vs. the psyche, meditate on the circular nature of our existence, and in one case force us to witness the final minutes of life. We confront our own profound mortality, experience fear and displacement within a technological landscape, and consider the sustaining reciprocal relationship of artist and gallery.

• 9-11/9-11 by Mel Chin w/ commentary by Ute Meta Bauer
• Liberation of the Paranoid World; Gargoyling; Pressing the Vessel by Goatsilk w/ commentary by Ricardo de Mambro Santos
• Primate Cinema by Rachel Mayeri w/ commentary by Meredith Tromble
• Sequence of Good Intentions by Park McArthur w/ commentary by Michael O’Malley
• Bathyscape by Andrew Mowbray w/ commentary by Matthew Nash
• Anemophilous Formula for Computer Art by Joelle Dietrick and Owen Mundy w/ commentary by Eduardo Navas
• Freund Hein by Elisabeth Smolarz w/ commentary by Angelique Campens
• Polar Bear God by Deke Weaver w/ commentary by Una Chaudhuri
• excerpts from Untitled (Red); Untitled (Blue); Tell Me; Ned Talking by Suara Welitoff w/ commentary by Andrew Witkin

Anemophilous Formula for Computer Art by Joelle Dietrick and Owen Mundy
custom software
2007

Inspired by Jim Campbell’s Formula for Computer Art and Tallahassee’s annual sea of tree pollen, Mundy and Dietrick created a data-based animation referencing new forms of cross-pollination and re-use. Made to be meditative and aesthetically pleasing, the format parodies computer art that simply crunches numbers to create useless forms. The diligently recorded data of the National Allergy Board guides the animation down a predictable path and stands in stark contrast to the chaos of everyday life. The project calls into question our obsession with mapping nature, as if grasping its sublimity would be essential to finding lifelong satisfaction.