bias

The piece is based on a custom developed software which uses so called suspicious social media content to drive an audio visual sculpture. Light and sounds are triggered / synthesized in realtime by incoming twitter feeds. The trigger words derived from a list of key words, which was part of the ‘Analyst’s Desktop Binder’ the DHS (Department of Homeland Security) was forced to release by a freedom of information request in 2011.

Each minute a message containing one of these words is picked from the data stream and sent to the audiovisual system. A text to speech synthesizer is used to read out the text messages, then the audiosignal is fed into a feedback mechanism so that the received more or less meaningful sentences are slowly transforming to data noise within the given length of the exhibition. Every time a feed comes in the sculpture built out of LED fibreglass strips flashes. This work aims to remind us to think twice about wether online mass surveilance is an appropriate tool one should give in the hand of intelligence organizations without democratic regulation.

bias @BDA | Munich (D/2013)