Art+Code: Becca Ricks

Data collection & statistics has been used for centuries to manage and deal with large human populations. The type of data that is tracked is situated in historical, social, and political contexts. The kind of information we choose to collect, to monitor, and track shapes what we pay attention to - and what we don’t pay attention to.

John Cheney-Lippold says that this kind of cybernetic categorization has an elastic relationship to power. It persuades users towards specific kinds of behaviors by constantly renegotiating what those categories of identity are.

How does the knowledge that we are being surveilled change the way we express and perform ourselves online? How is that data being used to fuel systems that could deepen inequalities? And what role can we as creatives and artists play in engaging with these issues?

Transcript

1. BECCA RICKS <--- Technologist / Researcher @baricks beccaricks.space
3. “In social networks we become codes, images, posts that cannot be reduced to our offline presence. We begin to exist simultaneously in different databases, information banks and other technomaterial assemblages.” ---> Tero Karppi, “Digital Suicide and the Biopolitics of Leaving Facebook” <--- -
5. Logged in from, 2017
7. “Cybernetic categorization provides an elastic relationship to power, one that uses the capacity of suggestion to softly persuade users towards models of normalized behavior and identity through the constant redefinition of categories of identity.” ---> John Cheney-Lippold, “A New Algorithmic Identity: Soft Biopolitics and the Modulation of Control” <---
15. THANK YOU @baricks beccaricks.space