[spectre] A Life in AdWords, Algorithms & Data Exhaust.

[marc garrett]

Sorry for any cross posting...

A Life in AdWords, Algorithms & Data Exhaust.

An interview with Erica Scourti.

By Marc Garrett.

http://www.furtherfield.org/features/interviews/life-adwords-algorithms-data-exhaust-interview-erica-scourti

Millions are blissfully unaware of the technological forces at work 
behind the scenes when we use social network platforms, mobile phones 
and search engines. What lies behind the content of the systems we use 
everyday are algorithms, designed to mine and sort through all the 
influx of diverse data. The byproduct of this mass online activity is 
described by marketing companies as data exhaust and seen as a deluge of 
passively produced data.

Felix Stalder and Konrad Becker, editors of Deep Search: The Politics of 
Search Beyond Google,[1] ask whether our autonomies are at risk as we 
constantly adapt and tailor our interactions to the demands of 
surveillance and manipulation through social sorting. We consciously and 
unconsciously collide with the algorithm as it affects every field of 
human endeavour. Deep Search illuminates the politics and power play 
that surround the development and use of search engines.

But, what can we learn from other explorers and their own real-life 
adventures in a world where a battle of consciousness between human and 
machine is fought out daily?
Artist Erica Scourti spent months of her life in this hazy twilight 
zone. I was intrigued to know more about her strange adventure and the 
chronicling of a life within the ad-triggering keywords of the “free” 
Internet marketing economy.

About Erica Scourti

Erica Scourti’s work addresses the mediation of personal and collective 
experience through language and technology in the net-worked regime of 
contemporary culture. Using autobiographical source material, as well as 
found text collected from the internet displaced into social space, her 
work explores communication, and particularly the mediated intimacy 
engendered by a digital paradigm. The variable status and job of the 
artist is humorously fore-grounded in her work, assuming alternating 
between the role activist, ‘always-on’ freelancer, healer of social 
bonds and a self-obsessed documenter of quotidian experience. 
http://www.ericascourti.com/art_pages/biography.html

[1] Deep Search. The Politics of Search Beyond Google. Editor's Konrad 
Becker & Felix Stalder. Publisher: Studien Verlag (Dec 2009).

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