&Now 2015: Blast Radius

We are interested in language on the Internet, how it is created, by whom, where it exists, and how it is used. Three examples: Google reads our emails, garners information from our personal messages and uses that profiling strategy to select “relevant” ads. It then displays those ads on the screen next to the very emails from which the information was initially taken. Facebook and other social media platforms use similar methods of securing and storing data — data that is paradoxically private and public, and all personal. Further, crowd-sourced encyclopedias like Wikipedia are shaping the way we read, learn, and think. Language is what links all of these sites together. All of the sites’ underlying organization and structures have been built to follow the logic we ourselves employ in using language. “Robots” read content, algorithms interpret it and databases memorize it. The impact of this process is no longer confined to the Internet, but has reached beyond it into our everyday lives. 

“Narrative Fragments” will start the discussion with an introduction of American Psycho, an artist book we produced in 2011. American Psycho was created by sending the entirety of Bret Easton Ellis’ novel American Psycho through GMail, one page at a time. We collected the ads that appeared next to each email and used them to annotate the original text, page by page. When printing it as a perfect bound book, we erased the body of Ellis’ text and left only chapter titles and constellations of our added footnotes. What remains is American Psycho, told through its chapter titles and annotated relational GMail ads.

“Narrative” Fragments will continue with a broader discourse on the practices and implications of networks like Google, Facebook and Wikipedia, and the ways they affect our understanding of language. We have assembled a panel of artists, critics, and writers who will address this phenomenon from their own research and interests. The core question of this panel is: What can we learn about the invisible and mutable algorithms and structures that dominate our participation on the internet? The discussion will provide a richer perspective on the way language behaves online, and aims to uncover the systems that are changing the way we speak, think, read and learn.