Mouse and Motherboard

Mouse and Motherboard serves as the digital archive for writer, artist and educator Dorothy R. Santos

[mouseandmotherboard]

Hate the Player — Real Life

Sexist video games and pick-up artists both try to gamify gender norms

A piece I wrote for Real Life Magazine based on my research of Angela Washko's work, The Game: The Game .

[mouseandmotherboard]

One of the essays I worked on this year was for COLL.EO's work, The Mythic Being in Liberty City. Excerpt below.

Masculinity in Liberty City: Adrian Piper’s Mythic Being as Digital Simulation

"No matter how much I ask my mother to stop buying crackers, cookies, and things, she does anyway, and says it's for her. Even if I always eat it. So, I have decided to fast."

One of the most stereotypical feminine statements, actually. I've heard men say this, but not often. It's a funny phrase to have the Mythic Being state over and over again. Set against the backdrop of Liberty City within Grand Theft Auto, Adrian Piper's already fictitious character is iterated, modified, and brought to digital life in a different way and within the confines of a gaming environment. Strangely, the type of bravado seen in the Piper’s Mythic Being is reminiscent of Andrea Fraser's work, Men on the Line described by writer Emily K. Holmes as a recreation “a public radio broadcast of four men discussing their relationship to feminism in 1972, during the height of the second-wave feminist movement.” Beyond Fraser's work, however, there is something far different about a woman of color playing to the tropes of masculinity as opposed to a cis white woman playing to those roles. There's something greater at stake when Piper plays to a dominant, hegemonic role of the masculine.

The gendered lens from which the piece originated from comes into play, quite literally, within a hyper masculine space of Liberty City where characters ride around in cars and crime is intrinsic to the game play, hence the name Grand Theft Auto. It appeases to the escapism that game play offers as a way of playing and performing criminal and illegal acts. The game becomes a cathartic release from physical reality. The modified character of Niko Bellic in Grand Theft Auto is given a proxy - a digital version of Adrian Piper’s Mythic Being.

[mouseandmotherboard]

Media art research thesaurus created by Oliver Grau

[mouseandmotherboard]

Wrote a piece about the ABRA by Kate Durbin, Amaranth Barsuk, and Ian Hatcher for Weird Sister. I enjoyed playing around with the app and researching the process that went into creating it. Click here to read the piece.

[mouseandmotherboard]

Welcome to World Wide West: A Summit on the "Side Effects" of Technology

POINT ARENA, Calif. — A few months ago, a group of artists, writers, curators, and creative technologists received an email with a link to a video requesting participation in a summit held in the small coastal town of Point Arena, California. I was one of 30 individuals who received the message.

Thinking about my first World Wide West summit in 2015. Here's a piece I wrote for Hyperallergic about it. Such a great time.

[mouseandmotherboard]

Re-learning Processing...got some projects I want to work on for 2017. Starting early for the new year.

[mouseandmotherboard]

I could have written my thesis on Jacolby Satterwhite's work when I was in grad school. He is definitely one of my favorite contemporary artist. One day, ONE DAY, I will meet him. I would love to curate his work. ONE DAY. Throwing it out there in the universe.

[mouseandmotherboard]

One of the shows I grew up watching, Small Wonder, which was in syndication from 1985-1989. The primary character was V.I.C.I. (aka Vicki Lawson) played by Tiffany Brissette. Quite frankly, Brissette was the best actor on the show. I've been thinking about re-watching the series for research purposes, but there is SO much to watch and read. Here's the first episdoe of the first season. And yes, the show is (very) white and suburban. There's a lot of social and cultural commentary, but I'll save that for another day.

[mouseandmotherboard]

This post contains spoilers.The plot line dictates, culturally and historically, a dominant narrative told many times in film and media. I wish it were different. With the myriad of racial, cultural, and social stories flooding the media, visibility of API bodies is still so very far behind in the mainstream culture even when it is inserted into film as an aside.

Since I was a little girl, I've been fascinated by artificial intelligence, chatbots, cyborgs, humanoids, and bionic women. This past year, I've had the opportunity to be in conversation with some brilliant people. From talking about robotics at the De Young museum to one of my favorite conferences, Theorizing the Web, it's been a real treat to meet Pieter Abbeel, Darius Kazemi, and Judith Donath and others. That being said, I thought I would share a piece I wrote about Ex Machina last year. I need to expand this piece!

[mouseandmotherboard]

In TLDR, Artists Explore the Changing Nature of Language in a Digital World | East Bay Express

On a quiet Saturday afternoon on the outskirts of Downtown Oakland's Chinatown, co-curator Joanna Cheung met me in person at B4BEL4B gallery to discuss an...

Had the pleasure of meeting with artist and curator Joanna Cheung. It was great getting a walk through of the space and the show. As a writer and editor, the show resonated deeply with me since the artistic practices showcase a wide array of interpretations of the show's title - TLDR. The art works certainly make me think of the bits of information we take in on a daily basis. The show is up until October 2, 2016. I highly recommend checking it out. Totally worth it if you are into language. Even if you're don't consider yourself a voracious reader, it doesn't matter, it's worth the trip.

[mouseandmotherboard]

gChat with Caroline Sinders

Dorothy: Hello!! ☺ Thank you for agreeing to do this. I have to ask, what prompted you to apply for the Eyebeam/Buzzfeed residency?

Caroline: A dear friend Wes Hennigh-Palermo was there last year and I was interested because it was a re-start of the Eyebeam Open Labs fellowship that Jonah Peretti ran back in 2005. Since my work is at the intersection of critical design, technology, and art, I think about 'usability' and thoughtfulness in what I'm making, which means a lot of my art work ends up being product work - practical things that come out of my critical design and machine learning research.

Dorothy: Let's go back to the 'usability' and product work. What do you define as product work? I mean, isn't every piece of artwork, well, a product?

Caroline: Totally! But there's this fascinating (and at times, pedantic) debate about whether design is art or not. Design can be art. But it can also strictly be 'design.' By that I mean, design can encompass things like the Nike Fuel Band or Smell Dating. One is designed to be a product and one is inspired by a by product of capitalism.

Dorothy: Smell Dating? Ha. That caught me off guard for a second. What is THAT?

Caroline: It's a project by Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne about dating. People wear a shirt for three days and then send it back to smell dating. It's cut up and sent out and people who smell the samples and rate what they like.

Dorothy: WOW. But back to your work...I remember attending your Theorizing the Web 2015 talk about online communities, which is where we first met and where I learned a lot about these communities.

Caroline: So, my work comes out of a lot of strange, complicated, and often times, what feels like 'forbidden research' into online communities around harassment, fandoms, etc. I like to make work around that, but also having the background of a UX designer. I end up thinking about how the products that people congregate on are designed and what they do to facilitate and disseminate language and conversation. I end up making practical stuff sometimes - and then things that are just kind of strange and bizarre and inspired by that work.

Dorothy: Well, I love strange and bizarre.

Caroline: I've been making more practical, product driven work recently and have been actively trying to make more strange things.

Dorothy: Like what?

Caroline: In 2015, online harassment and fandoms started coming into the public consciousness, primarily because of Gamergate. Social Media Break Up Coordinator (SMBUC) is definitely more bizarre and strange.

Dorothy: Yes, I remember, which is why I was so fascinated by your talk. You think SMBUC is strange?

Caroline: It's where I physically enact a self help algorithm and robot to give people advice. But I want to keep exploring to make it stranger. I'm also working on a VR game on web surveillance, etc. It's definitely not a chrome extension to end harassment.

Caroline: Given my body of work, it's definitely more 'strange' and tongue in cheek. I feel like SMBUC is something you need, but don't realize that you need it until you are confronted with circumstances of a break up (of any nature).

Dorothy: I remember participating in a session, but it was a break up related to organizations and other activists.

Caroline: Right! I remember that session.

Dorothy: You provided some interesting feedback. I'm wondering, are you planning on doing follow ups?

Caroline: Yes. I want to relaunch the entire project. Right now, I'm doing some fact finding with interviews with college freshmen.

Dorothy: Oh, THAT would be incredibly fascinating. I think they have a wider base of concerns to consider as opposed to someone like myself. I was in college in the 90s, before Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. Which is why this particular population is rife and sounds perfect for your research.

Caroline: It's interesting because teens seem to be using Snapchat as a way towards privacy, etc. Harassment, stalking, and doxing are all things I didn't really consider when it came to my online life back then. Like they seem super privacy minded, which is awesome.

Dorothy: What about consent? Oh, wait, the population would be college students > 18 years old.

Caroline: I'll be drafting up public release forms to see if I can take photos or publish any of the notes we take, etc.

Dorothy: How about briefly describing SMBUC? ☺ Then, I have questions about your current and upcoming projects.

Caroline: “social media break up coordinator” is a performance piece that explores the interconnections of our online and offline lines. It's about exploring the connections between our digital tools, and human intervention. Where do algorithms fail and where must humans intervene? As users of social media, people live their most beautiful, angry, complex, and complicated lives online. To do this, I turn a space into a clinician's office and I enact a kind of 'therapist' that gives algorithmic feedback based off a quiz participants have filled out before I got there. I came up with a set amount of solutions that can be put together for a variety of situations - these situations can be one night stands, best friend break ups, ending abusive relationships, ghosting, and long term partner break ups, as well as a myriad of others.

Dorothy: Great overview. I remember your talk at the Oakland Fusion office with artist (and experience producer for Fusion's Real Future team), Cara de Fabio. I think it was safe to assume that most people found the project quite illuminating in terms of how something so complicated (such as a break up, of any kind) manifests in a digital space. I'm going to wait for the SMBUC site and share. Regarding your VR project, could you share what you're working on within this realm?

Caroline: I was incredibly inspired by this fantastic talk Jenny O'dell gave at Eyeo (2016). She referenced David Hockney's work, which I am so sad to admit that that was my introduction to his work, particularly his photographs. I was really taken with his photo collages; they were beautiful disjointed scenes that kind of reminded me of Jeff Wall and James George's work. Jenny's talk was on old machines, art theory, and her work around objects- but she focused a lot on how artists see technology and referenced how Hockney creates.

Dorothy: And how has this informed your current work?

Caroline: My background is in photography, I'm a trained photojournalist and portrait photographer. I've been missing photographing and have been leaning towards incorporating photography into what I'm doing now. I'm photographing rooms a la David Hockney style and placing those into VR spaces as game objects. This current game is exploring an imagined future of the web surveillance. But I'm building the entire room out of a couple hundred images. The room where the computer sits. It's kind of ridiculous but its an experiment to see what it's like to interact with style images as objects in a 3D space. Photography represents a kind of reality, similar to virtual reality. It looks real but it's not film, and it's not a 3D space, it's a flattened version of what our eyes see - so I love that tension especially when building out 3D spaces. I think of photography in VR as like painted theatre backdrops that need to represent like infinite space - or a street. I've also been thinking a lot about the role of photography as a creative but non-documentarian tool in 3D spaces and in VR.

Dorothy: What do you think of photogrammetry? For those that are not familiar, taking a photograph of an object from various angles, then extracting the 3D geometry and making it into a virtual object.

Caroline: I'm really intrigued by it, to be honest.

Dorothy: Seems like a totally complicated process, but I ask, because you are a trained photographer.

Caroline: Sometimes I wonder if people really aim way too much for the thing to be 'real' or feel seamless and I love the seams, I love the gutters of images, of things off camera.

Dorothy: Is this why working in VR presents a way for you to play around with those aspects of photography?

Caroline: Totally and my thesis work at ITP was around making a story world for mobile - so a combination of a moving graphic novel, a game, and a real novel. I love how mobile is considered pretty low brow but it's a device that people carry all the time. The VR work I'm doing is for cardboard, so that's what I find interesting how to make new stories for the phone. Sally Potter's Rage was a huge inspiration. You know, I have to admit that the whole cardboard as VR wear made a lot of sense to me.

Dorothy: Looks like our time is up. Thank YOU so much, Caroline!

Learn more about Carolline here

[mouseandmotherboard]

As a teaser of what's to come, I wanted to share a link to Episode 77 ("Rock, Paper, Bot, How Ai Changes Life") of the podcast Mindful Cyborg with special guest Caroline Sinders.

I decided to start having conversations (in all forms - gChat, text message, etc.) with writers, artists, educators and cultural producers I deeply admire and include my interactions (with permission) on M&M. Chat transcription with Caroline is forthcoming. I'm excited to post the conversation. She is up to SO many wonderful things. Soon!

[mouseandmotherboard]

The Three Laws of Robotics: 1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Isaac Asimmov

[mouseandmotherboard]

Image: AI*SCRY creators, Tara Shi and Sam Kronick of Disk Cactus

Below, you will find an excerpt of a piece I wrote for art publication Hyperalleric on the application, AI*SCRY by two members of the art and design studio, Disk Cactus, Tara Shi and Sam Kronick.

When I was a little girl, I always wondered what my Teddy Ruxpin mechanical bear would say if there wasn’t a cassette tape commanding his interactions with me. I had the “Velveteen Rabbit” fantasy of having my toys take on a life of their own with their own perceptions of the world. My childhood aspiration of creating cyborgs of my toys and stuffed animals, in many ways, was the beginning of my fascination with machines and robots. From an unhealthy fixation on my iPhone’s photo capabilities to obsessively having Siri tell me the closest gas station, I’ve begun to wonder whether my objects will become sentient after all.

The result of pointing AI*SCRY at a salad (click to enlarge) A couple of months ago, I drove about 45 minutes to the city of Emeryville to meet Sam Kronick and Tara Shi, two members of the Oakland-based art and design collective Disk Cactus. The duo created the iTunes app AI*SCRY (pronounced “eye-scry”), a name derived from Artificial Intelligence and the act of scrying, which is the practice of looking into a translucent object, namely a crystal ball for prescient visions. While scrying is oftentimes associated with fortunetelling or divination, it’s interesting to think of a smartphone as an object that can tell the future (i.e. weather, stock market information, etc.). A source of inspiration for the project was the research of computer scientist Andrej Karpathy and his blog posting “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks,” which explores how artificial neural networks work when image captioning.

The way the app works is essentially like using your smartphone camera: You hold up AI*SCRY as if you were about to snap a photo of an object. But unlike taking a photo, when an image of your immediate environment registers on the screen, lines of text slowly emerge. The words, pulled directly from the image recognition database Microsoft COCO (Common Objects in Context), present the viewer with a description of the objects the AI registers. According to Kronick and Shi, the app is especially adept at identifying scissors and rocks. But the application is not perfect, since it read my red notebook and pen as “a cup of coffee and a banana on a table.” Yet the imperfect perception of AI*SCRY is key to the point of the project, which is to expose the ways in which image recognition still has quite a long way to go in terms of describing our surroundings with a high degree of precision.

You can read the full article here

[mouseandmotherboard]

Last year, I had the honor of having two interviews I conducted published in Public Art Dialogue. Below, you will find an excerpt from the co-editors, JC Freeman and Mimi Sheller.

"In pursuit of provocative awareness we lastly asked Dorothy Santos, a young writer and critic from the San Francisco Bay Area, to interview two young artists working in the realm that some might consider Post-Internet Art — a topic that both Lichty and Gauthier detail in their contributions to the journal.

In her interview with Jim Dessicino, the artist discusses his recent sculpture of Edward Snowden. Although very conventional in its appearance, the project went viral when Glenn Greenwald — formerly of The Guardian, who published the first of a series of reports detailing United States and British global surveillance programs, based on classified documents disclosed by Edward Snowden — just happened to be having breakfast with Jeremy Scahill across the street. He came over and tweeted images of himself and the sculpture, and within minutes, New York City's media outlets descended, just as Dessicino was being kicked out of Union Square for not having a parks permit. Dessicino's reflections on the production of the work provide interesting context for reading the commentary by Gauthier (who curated the show).

Santos also interviews Kate Durbin about her performance work, Hello, Selfie! Firmly situated in the public square, it nonetheless leveraged social networks around the world, as all of Durbin's performers were posting hundreds of images, as they were taking them, in realtime. Durbin's “tweaking” of the “teen girl Tumblr aesthetic” or “channeling” of reality television shows reminds us of both the precariousness of female bodies in the public sphere (including online), but also the disruptive power of the figure of the teen girl in those otherwise masculine and sometimes violent public spaces. For her, it is the creation of “energies through our networked relations” that remains crucial."

here

[mouseandmotherboard]

Developers face a further challenge in that they must also decide how those meanings can be created through human interaction with data structures. There are diverse approaches to building effective imaginative worlds computationally. To frame discussion of the challenges of this endeavor, let us consider a representational perspective trying to computationally represent human common sense.

D. Fox Harrell, Associate Professor of Digital Media at MIT ~ Excerpt from his book, Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and Expression

[mouseandmotherboard]

Photo: Selfie Drawing 52 “Powers of Ten” by Carla Gannis

The Lumen Prize 2016 Shortlist has been announced and Carla's work has made the shortlist!! To learn more about this prestigious award, you can visit The Lumen Prize site here

Visit Carla's site here to learn more about her phenomenal work.