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More from my bus trip from New York to Atlanta with radio and handheld recorder!

I wasn't able to pick up anyone broadcasting on the shortwave spectrum but produced this piece by simply adjusting tuning, volume, and the antenna of the radio as we were leaving Atlanta.

The image is raw sound data from Audacity transcoded into visual data in Photoshop.

More information on my thesis project / radio show: The Radio Unheard on WNYU New York.

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I traveled by bus from New York to Atlanta with a Kaito WRX-911 radio, a 3.5mm Audio Cable, and a Zoom H5 recorder. I listened to the radio for hours ~in 10 states~ but my favorite part was the extraordinary static I captured between and across stations. This piece catalogs the trip geographically - it is a record of the sounds I produced with the radio from North to South.

The image is a map of the route, as captured by OpenPaths.

I’m going to be playing this piece tomorrow on WNYU at 4:30 pm!

More information on my thesis project / radio show: The Radio Unheard.

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http://www.theradiounheard.org/piratetheradio Tune in to my thesis project / radio show Saturday at 4:30 pm! You can choose to listen to the 'real' episode on WNYU or tune in on my site for the remix! You could even switch between the two!

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Faces in Extremis: New Territories in Technology Mediated Sexual Identity Project + words completed in collaboration with Pamela Liou The process of querying large databases with facial recognition, technologies developed for militaristic or surveillance purposes, has flourished commercially through Facebook’s automatic detection API. This API, allowing the system to recognize people in a photograph without tagging. A new Facebook-led initiative, called DeepFace reconstructs a 3D model of a person’s face, allowing for near-human levels of accuracy. The ability to rapidly pinpoint an individual in a network coupled with the technology to reconstruct that individual’s likeness poses profound ontological disturbances, and if recent precedents are any indication, those disturbances are disproportionately doled out to women. In Faces in Extremis, we attempt to navigate these new terrains by subjecting our own images to a series of exercises designed to reconstitute how existing mechanisms view us. ---------- In Ways of Seeing, John Berger details the inherent paradox of female subjectivity– namely the incessant burden of their image as perceived by others. Social conditioning effectively de-couples a woman’s identity so that she is both looking out into the world and looking into herself. The internet provides the perfect companion for this condition– a two-way mirror for which a woman can view themselves as others view her. To fantasize about women– of a particular woman– sits comfortably within the legal rights of an individual. The law does not mandate a notarized form of consent from the subject of a man’s desire. Her consent in the realm of fantasy is, effectively, moot. Those affordances all but vanish when a person makes an untoward advance on a woman physically– her consent matters. Where consent becomes problematic is in the realm between the vistas of the mind and physicality. The digital world is one such murky domain. ---------- In the sub-Reddit /r/doppelbanger, men submit photos of women they desire — an ex-lover, an aloof co-worker, a comely barista. Moderators and members attempt to match these photos to lookalike porn star. For our purposes we submitted Pam's photo to these pro-bono mechanical turks. Pam's photo gives no impression of her body– just the shoulders up. Other than an inconclusive recommendations to “Cyndall” and a few hilarious jabs at her green coiffure, it didn’t really make it to the front page. Instant slush pile. And yet, the photo garnered 6230 views within weeks. After an initial spike, views held steady. Our conclusion is that the participants in these forums are less interested in offering matches than the submitted content itself. ---------- Using a service like FaceMatch or GreatFap offered instant matches. The nether regions of the internet are littered with these sites that promise to match any face to a porn star using crude face recognition technologies. By submitting a photo to this site, you are giving the service blanket rights over the distribution. So naturally we submitted our own photos. We took are closest matches and blended their photographs to reconstitute an after-image of how these algorithms view us. We fed our results back into the engine, and it was intelligent enough to detect a few matches in our composite. The reification of fantasy through technology is coming closer and closer. What happens when something as lossy as fantasy achieves total vérité? ---------- We aren’t meant to see our sexual desires played out at high resolution. As Roland Barthes states, “it is intermittence, as psychoanalysis has so rightly stated, which is erotic: the intermittence of skin flashing between two articles of clothing (trousers and sweater), between two edges (the open-necked shirt, the glove and the sleeve); it is this flash itself which seduces, or rather: the staging of an appearance-as-disappearance.” In the internet age, perhaps the intermittence is the space between pixels, or a JPEG artifact. If any woman can be made into a naked puppet without her consent or even knowledge, the result becomes banal, and ultimately a universal deadening of the erotic.

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Meter analysis of code For our text-focussed section in data art, I was interested in understanding how programming languages use meter to convey a message. I began by adapting a meter analyzing script in Python that uses the Natural Language Toolkit. I ran snippets of code that perform the same function in languages such as C++, Java, Lisp, JavaScript, Ruby, and Python itself. I also ran through poems to see how they would compare. In my small sample I found that the code tended to have a much higher proportion of stressed syllables than the poems. These stressed syllables often aligned with some of the functional words that appeared most in the code (such as "var" or "int"). With this in mind I became interested in how meter analysis of code could be used to improve code-writing. I found an old Processing sketch I wrote from when I was still using a lot of poor practices and began running it through the Python code. The meter analysis helped me to recognize patterns in my code and neaten it up. I iterated and iterated until I had something clean, condensed, and reusable. I even went as far as to use the meter analysis to inform my naming of variables. Above is the analyzed result of this process. Stressed syllables appear in bold black and unstressed syllables appear in light gray. Numbers and symbols are written out as they would be read by a human. ---------- Code is functional. Code is text. Code is poetry. So why don't we better use what we know about poetry to inform the way we write code? Or even further, the way we write programming languages? I'd love to find the time to write a plugin for processing that uses meter analysis and other tools to inform our code-writing. In the meantime, grab the Python code here and analyze your code!

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Punkass Kids!! Get Off My Browser This weekend I worked with Patrick at the Stupid Hackathon on a Chrome extension that wreaks mayhem in the browser once it's installed. Content flees from your hover and the page resizes every so often. We're hoping people use it on: + parents + grandparents + classmates before thesis presentations + friends before “important investor meetings” + public computers + frenemies + shitty clients who don’t pay on time Download it in the Chrome extension store.

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Technocrat / luddite comparison This is a data visualization of the terms 'technocrat' and 'luddite' over 50 years in New York Times articles. The vertical lines represent the frequency of 'technocrat' and the horizontal lines represent the frequency of 'luddite'. It's interesting to me that the two terms seem to follow one another, perhaps reflecting our dueling concerns at the time. There is a dramatic rise in both terms over the last 10 years, with technocrat spiking significantly las year. I initially used Processing to make the graphic but then decided to translate my findings back into an analog sphere using some yarn and burlap. The burlap was extremely uneven and proved to be an interesting way to reflect something as seemingly rigid as 'data'. Grab the code here!

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Ads Against Student Debt There are lots of extensions that sneak ads into users browsers but I though that it would be funny to make an extension that unabashedly fills your browser with extensions. After graduation from my undergrad I worked briefly on a project from an ad agency and it was really eye opening to be around people who legitimately enjoy ads and want to watch / look at them in their free time. For me, ads are a visual menace and don't deserve my brainspace. This got me thinking about the scale of ad revenue ($500 billion per year) when compared to other things, namely, student debt ($1.2 trillion). Just imagine this with me: if we diverted a few years of ad revenue to something like student debt, student debt would be gone! You can't use Google AdSense within an extension yet (Google claims to be working on this) but you can include third party ads. "Currently, AdSense may not be used to serve ads in Chrome extensions or packaged apps, per AdSense policies." I have begun trying to figure out how this would work but am far from a working extension so this mockup will have to suffice for now! I want to collect money from the ads and then donate it to Rolling Jubilee.

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I saw this patent diagram from a Sony patent a few days ago and can't stop thinking about it. Our dystopian future never felt so close! As a way of responding to it, I decided to turn a Google Voice number into a 'free burger hotline'. When people call (347) 395-5656, they are prompted to say "McDonald's" and then I text them, "You have won a free burger!! Use code CORPORATEPUPPET at your local McDolands location." I styled the graphic as 'vaporwave' because it works well in this situation. Vaporwave intrigues me because some of the critiques of corporatism end up being sorts of promotions which speaks to the complicated relationship we have with these entities. I haven't been able to post many of the flyers around but I am hoping people call the number! If I get enough response I would like to try to turn the results into some sort of audio track / song.

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I will give anyone my DNA I posted this Craigslist ad Monday evening. I wasn't hopeful anyone would see it but I was nervous about going out on Tuesday and not getting to interact with anyone so I posted it. My desire to share my biological material with others comes from an interest in understanding the matter we constantly produce, shed, and share as a connective and useful material for making things. I conceived of this project the day before ebola came to NYC and was hesitant to move forward with it given the change of context. However, I decided that it is even more important now to have calm discussions about our biological matter than before. I had planned to give out urine and saliva in vials but the vials didn't arrive in time and this was probably for the best. I had earwax, skin, nails, hair, and a cheek swab on offer. From the moment I began setting up my station, I was engaged in constant discussion. It was so busy! I had intended to keep notes and stats on anyone who took a photo, talked to me, or took a sample, but I had no time to. I got to talk to: + a rapper / film maker who didn't want to take a sample but hung around for around 40 minutes listening to all of the discussions (and occasionally interjecting) + a pubic hair fetishist who saw my ad and was disappointed that I only had head hair + an artist who questioned my project as "art" but who later conceded that it mostly met his requirements for "art" + a homeless dude who shared with me his stories of selling his clean urine to others at his shelter (he also requested one of each sample) + a guy who wanted me to "sign" the inside of his baggie with my thumb + a girl who wanted me to sign her baggie with a sharpie + some dudes who asked if I am a comedian + a guy who 'appreciated the metaphor of me giving away samples of myself and managing to insert myself into the work in multiple ways' (to paraphrase) + some reporters who saw my ad and dubbed me "craigslist dna lady" + a Union Square security guard who took some earwax + a few tourists + a group on an office scavenger hunt + and so many more... Many people would shake my hand after we met. This was amusing to me as an additional exchange of biological matter. As I got more into it, I began to have to develop a sort of operating code for myself. I decided that no request was too strange. I decided that I would not judge anyone who engaged with me because what I was doing was crazier than anything they could tell me. This meant that I was talking to a meth addict in the same breath as a wealthy white dude and that we were all engaging together. At one point I had six people crowded around me, all talking to me-- and one another. I gave away 17 samples of my DNA yesterday. Hair and skin were the most popular-- after an explanation of my motives in a spray of breathy microbes, that is.

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my first cinder drawings in which I show my mastery of lines, solids, and (accidentally) writing code that makes my computer glitch out.

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Feedback / interference

I love the sound of feedback. On Live at WREK, my weekly radio show from college where we brought in a band for a set, we used to struggle endlessly to silence it. For a time we were having the show on this small circular stage with a domed ceiling. If you stood right in the middle and made any sound it was pulled upward and returned to you as an angry echo in every direction. Feedback was inevitable. I guess I grew so accustomed to the shrieks that it stopped startling me and I started hearing it as an interesting counterpoint to the "real" music. My goal for this week was to try to tame feedback. I connected a piezo to a speaker and mounted it to a servo. While testing this I started noticing interesting interference from my phone with the speaker. For my performance in class I am going to run the feedback instrument while texting on my phone.

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I made this gif at a workshop at ITP Camp!

traveling thru gif-space with sarah

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Sculpting (energy) data into (light) This semester I have been working with datasets related to world energy consumption to create a light that allows people to view a physical representation of this data. I chose to pair the energy data with the form of a light because it is a sculptural object that allows for a lot of freedom creatively. Pairing something so abstract and free with a large dataset requiring such care in representation presented an interesting challenge. I also wanted to move past the form and to use the function of the object (in this case light) to represent something about my datasets. Here I used five years of UN Electrical Power Consumption per Capita data from 41 countries from the years 1991, 1996, 2001, 2006, and 2011. To add another layer of meaning to this dataset I sorted the countries by the percentage of renewable electrical energy each country uses. Each data point has a pyramidal structure that was printed in clear plastic to represent the former dataset. Each the 205 3D prints was sorted and then glued to a CNCed wooden frame. For the final show at school I will be milling a circuit for each data point with a surface mount LED. These will be wired into 41 independently controlled circuits. Peak energy usage occurs between 4-7PM and I will be condensing a day worth of world consumption down to 10 minutes to show where in the world and in what volumes energy is being consumed by controlling the intensity of the LEDs over time. Combining the static data with this sort of dynamic data should be enlightening! Looking at my model as it is currently, I am surprised that we are still largely consuming energy at the same rates we were 20 years ago. In fact, since this is per capita data and the population over the past 20 years has grown by hundreds of millions of people, the damage is actually much worse than is visualized here. I have been reflecting on what factors could be contributing to this stagnation. Our appliances are more efficient than ever. We feel like we are doing the world a real favor when we install our outrageously efficient light bulbs and program our Nest thermostats. My guess would be that the rise of personal computing means that these small improvements are being negated by the proliferation of digital stuff in our lives that draw power. As a designer who is working in that realm, seeing our impact in these terms is striking. As we send more things into peoples' lives to draw the worlds' power it's important to understand what systems we're contributing to on a larger scale.

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Animated GIFs have become an Internet staple, but will the online image format every gain acceptance as an art form.

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This is my first iteration of a 12 tone music generator. Right now it is just a monophonic composition but I would like to add chord handling in and to control the arcs of the dynamics and tempo rather than just relying on random in the next week. I made a version of this sketch that allows you to speed up and slow down the tempo and included a couple of simple representations of the sound.