1/19-2/19/05: "Cyphorg Citizens" at www.newlangtonarts.org

NET ART EXHIBITION (online at www.newlangtonarts.org)
Cyphorg Citizens and Unwitting Avatars
Lucas Bambozzi, Radical Software Group and Brooke Singer
Curated by Rick Rinehart
January 19 - February 19, 2005

New Langton Arts presents Cyphorg Citizens and Unwitting Avatars, a net art exhibition that explores the ways we are digitally tracked, coded and counted as we go about our daily business. Lucas Bambozzi, Radical Software Group, and Brooke Singer present net art projects that investigate the shifting boundaries between individual, corporate, and civic spaces in an era where technological advancements in data-mining, data-surveillance, sensors, and other technologies present mounting challenges to privacy and security.

Learn what information is stored in your driver’s license bar code, explore software that spies on computer networks, and experience the frustration of endless web forms leading nowhere. The artists in Cyphorg Citizens explore the terrain where our “data selves” reside, asking important questions and offering subversive strategies to reclaim our digital identities. Cyphorg Citizens is part of Langton’s continuing NetWork online exhibition program. The online exhibition may be accessed through Langton’s website, at www.newlangtonarts.org. For information call 415 626 5416.

Elements of our identity as consumers are increasingly represented as data, creating invisible “data self” alter-egos with lives all their own. Cyphorg Citizens and Unwitting Avatars goes beyond digital avatars, online identities intentionally created by video gamers or chat room users. Rather, the exhibition focuses on digital identities created as unwitting by-products of everyday activities: surfing the web, purchasing goods, driving to work. The resulting “cyphorgs” are organisms comprised of an individual’s personal information, which may be bought, sold and tracked.

Lucas Bambozzi’s Meta4walls (2004) (http://comum.com/diphusa/meta/) is a web project simulating meta-surveillance on the Internet. It employs mechanisms used to collect personal information and other data on the net through forms, cookies and questionnaires, and generates automatic feedback in the form of pop up windows. Meta4walls invites the user to visit a range of illicit links or to access "secret" information, suggesting to site visitors the feeling of being observed and having their privacy endangered as they experience their personal data being collected.

Brooke Singer’s SWIPE Toolkit (2004) (http://www.turbulence.org/Works/swipe) is a collection of web-based tools that looks at how personal data is collected and used in the United States. The tools allow site visitors to read the bar code on their driver’s license, search out companies that are storing and selling their personal data, and even calculate the market value of their own personal data bits.

Radical Software Group’s Carnivore (2004) (http://www.rhizome.org/carnivore)is a surveillance tool for data networks. At the heart of the project is a software application that listens to all Internet traffic (email, web surfing, etc.) on a specific local network. Next, it serves this data stream to interfaces that animate, diagnose, or interpret the network traffic in various ways. Artists may use the software to convert the data into artworks that can be seen or heard. Carnivore is inspired by software used by the FBI to perform electronic wiretaps.


The Artists

Lucas Bambozzi works in video-installation, single channel video, film and music video. His videos have been screened in solo and group exhibitions in more than 20 countries, including the World Wide Video Festival, the 7th Havana Biennial and at the 50th Sao Paulo Commemorative Biennial. In 1995, Bambozzi created the first Internet experimental art-lab in Brazil at Casa das Rosas. He received the top prize at the VII Prix Mobius in Paris, France for the CD-ROM Jacks In Slow Motion. He lives in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Brooke Singer is a digital media artist and arts organizer who has exhibited work throughout the United States and abroad, including at the Biennale de Montreal; Break 2.2 Festival, Ljubljana, Slovenia; Subtle Technologies, University of Toronto, Canada; FILE 2002 Festival, Sao Paulo, Brazil; and SIGGRAPH 2002. In conjunction with NYCwireless, Singer co-produces "Art in the Wireless Park" events, bringing networked art off the screen and into public spaces. She was recently appointed Assistant Professor of New Media at SUNY Purchase, New York. She lives in Brooklyn.

Radical Software Group is a collective of computer artists residing in cities throughout the world. It is directed by Alex Galloway, artist, co-founder and co-director of the new media organization Rhizome, based in New York. Carnivore, the group’s first public release, was recently included in the exhibition Open_Source_Art_Hack at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, (2002). It premiered at the Princeton Art Museum in Anxious Omniscience: Surveillance and Contemporary Cultural Practice, Princeton, NJ (2002).