Dr. D‘s latest project, a collaboration with Disobedient Films, takes his ad busting beyond billboards. Sly TV, a parody of the British satellite TV company Sky (a part of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire), is perhaps most visible as a series of wheatpastes in East London.
Sly TV has its own website, and Sly’s ad campaign extends from street art to digital advertising.
It’s amazing what kind of targeting powers digital advertisers have. For as little as $10, you can buy an ad on Facebook and narrow your audience so that it’s only seen by wealthy young British men who go to university and love classic rock. Or just about any other audience you can imagine. Similar thing on Google. Want to reach people thinking about buying a new car? You can buy ads that display when people search “how to buy a car.” What if you want to reach people who are thinking about Sky TV? You can buy ads that display when people search for “Sky TV,” “Sky News,” or “Sky box.” And that’s just what Dr. D and Disobedient Films did.
Now, if you search any of the above search terms, there’s a chance that an ad will appear for the Sly TV website. Here’s what that ad looks like:
Sly TV bought similar ads for Facebook. So, if you fit their target audience (English-speaking men who live in the UK), keep an eye out for Sly TV in your newsfeed.
On any day, Facebook might have thousands of potential stories to show to any given user, of which that user will only ever see a handful. So does Facebook decide what to show, and how do you stand out on Facebook? How do you get your content on everyone’s News Feed? Fra.Biancoshock decided to find out.
The trick to being seen is, of course, to buy ads. So Fra.Biancoshock bought one…
Compare the results of Fra.Biancoshock’s ad to a typical post on his Facebook page…
The unpaid post on his Facebook page was seen by 192 people.The sponsored post was seen by almost 5,000 people, for just a few dollars.
As Fra.Biancoshock’s piece shows, slots on your Facebook News Feed don’t go to the best content. They go to the highest bidder. Facebook may be in favor of net neutrality on the internet as a whole, but what are Facebook ads if not viral content’s version of an internet fast lane?
On one level, this is all good fun, and technically Facebook made a few bucks in the process so they shouldn’t be too upset, but it’s also a bit scary. Facebook’s algorithm turns the internet into a walled garden, and you have to wonder: When Facebook decides what news you see, what news are you not seeing?
The profile page for the Twitter bot @anagramatron.
It’s no secret that Twitter bots can be pretty entertaining and/or confusing. Sometimes they’re artworks or jokes. Sometimes they’re somewhat useful tools or coding experiments. Generally speaking though (and excluding spambots), Twitter bots don’t actually interact with other users. You could follow @everyword, but it wasn’t going to follow you back or respond to your tweets. And most of the bots that will respond to your tweets won’t respond unless you’ve reached out to them in some way first (like @DearAssistant). There are, however, a handful of non-spambot Twitter bots that will find you even if you’re not looking for them. These bots are examples of invasive viral art, art that exists only online but acts a bit like street art or graffiti, treating the Twitter stream as public space and public tweets as content to appropriate or engage with.
So what do these invasive viral art Twitter bots look like and do? They all seek out other users’ tweets to engage with, and from there things can go in a few different directions.
Darius Kazemi, one of the most prolific and best-known creators of Twitter bots, has @VeryOldTweets. The bot simply “retweets one of the first 7500 tweets (first 90 days of Twitter) four times a day.” The tweets of Twitter’s earliest users are recontextualized as a semi-random look back at “history.” As much as the bot is interesting to random outside observers, there’s also the engagement of the users whose content is being appropriated. I would find it weird and a bit shocking if a tweet of mine from almost a decade ago was suddenly retweeted.
The most obviously “artistic” Twitter bots of this sort relate to poetry and word games.
Colin Rofls has @ANAGRAMATRON and @HAIKU9000. Both bots mine Twitter and then combine “matching” tweets from separate, otherwise unrelated, users.
@ANAGRAMATRON finds tweets that are anagrams and then retweet the matching pairs. For example, on April 9th, @pranksterstyles tweeted “i did my nails before”, and on April 19th, @warneholly tweeted “I’m so drained by life”. When @ANAGRAMATRON found that the pair matched, it notifies Rofls, and with his okay, the bot retweeted both tweets. @ANAGRAMATRON’s retweets are approved by Rofls so the process isn’t completely automated, but that’s mostly to keep out spambots. It’s still the algorithm doing most of the work. As Rofls notes, “[anagrams are] especially interesting because they’re so hard to come up with manually.” Really, without any cheating, who was ever going to think up the pair “i did my nails before” and “I’m so drained by life”?
Similarly, @HAIKU9000 searches for tweets that each fit the rules to be one line in a haiku, and then combines three such tweets into one poem/tweet with credit to its sources, pulling together disconnected Twitter users and appropriating their words in a way that was probably not the author’s intent.
Hug a mom today! I’ve been drunk the past three days. She throwing me off — (@)RainCityRCA / (@)___kaaatherine / (@)ItsJussFrankie
Maybe I’m just too naively optimistic, but I wonder if any of the users appropriated by @ANAGRAMATRON or @HAIKU9000 have ever connected with one another after their tweets were brought together by the bots. I asked Rofls how people respond to his bots, but the result was disheartening. He said, “Mostly they don’t, to be honest. Very occasionally they’re thrilled, sometimes confused, but mostly just silent.”
Rofls was inspired to create @ANAGRAMATRON after seeing Ranjit Bhatnagar‘s @pentametron, a very popular Twitter bot with this fantastic bio: “With algorithms subtle and discrete / I seek iambic writings to retweet.” Like @ANAGRAMATRON, @pentametron searches out matching pairs to retweet, in this case tweets in iambic pentameter that get retweeted together as rhyming couplets (“You fuel my desire to succeed.” / “How many chances does Hernandez need!”)
And then there’s the (currently inactive) Accidental Haiku from Cameron Spencer, which used to find entire tweets that could be broken down into a single haiku. For example:
The other major category of bots search for certain keywords and offer an (often unexpected) canned response, usually related to pop culture. Maybe not as intricate or clever as the anagram and poetry bots, but a pleasant or confusing surprise for users nonetheless.
Colin Mitchell has been a bunch of these kinds of bots, but unfortunately most are currently inactive/retired (@mirror_magick, @for_a_dollar, @iaminigomontoya). My personal favorite from Mitchell is perhaps the most predictable, but it’s also still active: @Betelgeuse_3. Simply tweet the magic words (“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice”), and see what happens… Like this guy did.
The most famous bot in this category is probably @DBZNappa. Do you know how often people tweet about something being “over 9000”? Apparently, it’s all the freaking time, because @DBZNappa responds to all of those tweets with “WHAT?! NINE THOUSAND?!”, from a Dragon Ball Z meme, and the bot has tweeted well over a million times since it when live in November 2009. Daniel Lo Nigro, who created the bot, describes it as “a pretty good example of a simple ‘search and reply’ Twitter bot, that could easily be extended to do more useful things.”
A personal favorite of mine, although now inactive, is @StealthMountain, which responds to tweets that use the phrase “sneak peak” instead of”sneak peek”. The one beautiful thing about this bot now being inactive is its last tweet:
Of course, there’s no better bot to end on than the most hilarious and low-brow: @fart_robot. The bot searches out mentions of farts on Twitter, and retweets them to its 12,000+ followers with the note: “FART ROBOT APPROVES.” For example:
RT @KathCalabro Sometimes when I fart my fiancé literally gags.. FART ROBOT APPROVES.
While not all of these bots creators (Daniel Lo Nigro for example) consider their bots to be artworks, I disagree. Or, the very at least, I think bots like @DBZNappa can/should inspire artworks. It’s fascinating that you could just be going about your day, tweeting whatever silly thing you might tweet to your followers, only to have your words appropriated by @pentametron or to be perhaps mildly embarrassed by @fart_robot, which is not unlike walking to work and being surprised by a piece of street art or graffiti. Most people might ignore that piece or street art or an odd retweet, but for some, the occurrence catches them at just the right moment and it affects them.
We live our lives in the public spaces of the internet. Let’s put art there. I hope there are more Twitter bots to come.
So you’re swiping right and swiping left, swiping left and swiping right, swiping right and swiping left… Tinder is a practically mindless activity, at least anytime I’ve ever seen someone use it. But what are you swiping right and left, yes and no, to? Sometimes, it’s people’s lives.
This isn’t actually a new project, but last summer artist and hacker Matthew Rothenberg was inserting imagery of drone strikes and drone strike victims into Tinder for an artwork he calls Swipe Left. That bearded young man gazing off into the distance wasn’t another Williamsburg hipster. It was Hakimullah Mehsud, a commander in the Pakistani Taliban. Mehsud was killed by a US drone strike in 2013. Which way did you swipe? And what about that odd black and white photo that you liked on “Haki’s” profile? Blurry abstract art? No. Footage from a drone about to unleash hell on a target.
Since Rothenberg has already written so well about the social and political meaning ofSwipe Left, I just want to make a note about its meaning within the art world. Rothenberg considers the piece to be performance art, and yes it is, but what I think is most fascinating about Swipe Left is its relationship with street art. It’s a great example of what I’ve called invasive viral art, art that treats digital public space like street art and graffiti treat physical public space. While Tinder users are expecting one thing, Rothenberg gave them another, and he used the app for something it isn’t intended for.
Swipe Left may not immediately appear as art to viewers, but that’s okay. Plenty of street art doesn’t either: John Fekner’s random dates series, Dan Witz’ Broadway Poem, Jenny Holzer‘s Inflammatory Essays when they first appeared on the street as posters, and of course Shepard Fairey‘s early work could all appear as something other than art to someone seeing it for the first time, but it could still reach them. And as Rothenberg points out, “Tinder members who encounter the images are forced to make a decision.” Unlike street art, which can be ignored, Rothenberg’s project can be swiped away or not understood by the view, but it can’t be ignored entirely, and any reaction to Swipe Left‘s content is a valid and interesting data point.
But even if Swipe Left is a bit hidden within Tinder, arguably really meant to be be considered by observers reading about the work later on, not the Tinder users participating in the performance/experiment, the piece shows the potential for a new venue for performance art and invasive viral art.
What if someone like Shepard Fairey joined Tinder and used it to put his art in front of a new and unsuspecting audience? Every day, he could upload a different poster as a profile picture. Suddenly, his work would be reaching people in a relatively random way, like a sticker or a poster on the street does. And if people are playing with their phones and browsing Tinder as they ride the bus to work rather than looking out the window where they might see some street art, why not place that art on Tinder instead of, or in addition to, the street? Reach people where their eyeballs already are. I’d swipe right to that.
Today, artist Ryan Seslow and I launched Encrypted Fills, a new digital exhibition space and archive for creations at the intersection of digital art and street art. Essentially, the site is a site to archive artworks being produced specifically for the internet by street artists. Encrypted Fills brings together the best of a usually disparate set of artworks onto one website and into what will become a collection of digital exhibitions. If you’ve read Viral Art, you’ll probably be familiar with a lot of the content on the site, or at least understand my interest in it.
Ryan and I have been watching for years (and Ryan’s been participating as an artist himself) as people in the street art and graffiti world have turned to experimenting with new mediums like GIFs, video art, and related forms of electronic documentation to express their ideas on digital platforms. Sometimes the aesthetics of the work are nearly indistinguishable from static street pieces, and other times these digital works are hardly recognizable as related to street art or graffiti, but we believe that these new works come from the same place. Artists who have been getting up outdoors are now reaching out to a similar digital public, and it’s opened the door for those artists to reach beyond static images.
“We are very excited about this development,” says Ryan, “We want to promote this work and identify it as something particular and distinct from other art being produced in the street art and graffiti communities, and we also want to preserve the best examples of it for posterity, lest in the future we think of these works as standard and forget the artistic leaps that were made in the last few years and those that will be made in the years to come.”
In addition to archiving works already available, we plan to use Encrypted Fills as a platform to exhibit new digital works, specially commissioned for the site. As Encrypted Fills grows and develops, exhibition lengths will vary, but all of the works and exhibitions presented will be archived on the site for future reference.
For Encrypted Fills’ inaugural and eponymous exhibition, we have collected a range of pieces from more than a dozen artists to show the breadth of what street artists are doing when they move into digital art. Exhibited artists include Peter Drew, John Fekner, Olek, Vandalog contributing writer Caroline Caldwell, and more. You can view the inaugural Encrypted Fills exhibition here.
INSA just finished this new GIF-ITI piece at le M.U.R. XIII in Paris. I haven’t posted about INSA since the release of Viral Art, so I think it’s time to revisit his GIF-ITI work.
As I and many others have noted, INSA’s GIF-ITI is clearly designed for the internet. But what I like about it is that it’s not only for the internet. Blu’s animations look great as a finished product, but they’re not so beautiful if you visit those walls in person long after Blu has left. Some murals photograph well or make sense when you look at them, but they don’t pop or make sense when you see them in person. Others look great in person, but are difficult to photograph. INSA’s GIF-ITI pieces work amazingly well online (certainly better than most still photos) and still looks great on the street. That’s an uncommon combination.
I’ll be speaking about two main themes: 1. How the communication technologies from zines to books to the internet have affected the street art and graffiti that we see on walls and 2. How street art and graffiti are closely linked to hacking and net art. That will be followed by a Q&A, which I’m really looking forward to.
So if you’re in Philadelphia, I hope you’ll stop by SPACE on Thursday, April 10th. The event runs from 6-8pm. The talk is free, but you can RSVP here.
A few weeks ago, a site launched that is being hailed a major experiment for 21st century journalism and a bastion of freedom in a world increasingly less safe for adversarial journalism, even in the USA (anyone notice how far the USA dropped in the press freedom rankings this year?). That site is The Intercept, whose contributors include Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras (best known for their articles based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden) and Jeremy Scahill (probably best known for the book and the film Dirty Wars). So, on a site like that, where the focus is politics, law and security and the contributors are world-class journalists who specialize in those topics, would you have guessed that one of their very first articles on launch day would be by an artist? Maybe I’m not giving the arts enough credit, but I was surprised to see a post by artist Trevor Paglen on my first visit to The Intercept.
In partnership with Creative Time Reports, The Intercept published three stunning photographs by Paglen of offices that make up a small part of the America’s international intelligence/surveillance network: The headquarters of the National Security Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. The publication of those photos alone is interesting, but not really news for Vandalog. What really makes these three photographs special, and why I’m writing about them here, is that Paglen released them into the public domain. That means anyone can legally reuse the images pretty much however they want without having to ask Paglen’s permission, crediting him or paying him anything.
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency headquarters in Springfield, Virginia
The images are just out there. Free. Ready for whatever you might need them for. Go ahead. Use them. Spread them around. Paglen’s hope is that we can have better conversations about these agencies if we can picture them. He wants these photographs to be seen.
It’s that desire for sharing, and the will to act on that desire in a way that traditionalists would argue is against the photographer’s own self-interest, that makes these images are so fascinating to me. I write in my recent ebook Viral Art about how images exist online in much the same way that street art exists in public spaces. Photos on Facebook or Tumblr reach the same general population that street art is trying to reach, except perhaps more efficiently. Sure, plenty of images get reposted and shared on the web every day, but so much of that sharing technically violates copyright laws and is illegal. In this case, Paglen is actively encouraging sharing and making it legal, which can only amplify how far and wide the photographs are spread.
These photos are artworks not just because they’re beautiful images of interesting subject matter and speak to issues of the surveillance state. They’re conceptual artworks in which we are all implicated by our moral obligation and legal right to freely share them, a legal right that Paglen has chosen to grant us. And I’m writing about them because Paglen’s choice of licensing makes them organic viral art, in the freest way possible, and I also felt an obligation to share the images.
Plus, I wanted to finally write about some viral art that is completely disconnected from street art, hopefully providing some idea to those who haven’t yet read the book of my thinking about what viral art is and can be.
The headquarters of the National Reconnaissance Office in Chantilly, Virginia
I want to thank everyone who has been sharing the news about Viral Art these last two weeks, especially everyone who supported the Thunderclap campaign. Just this afternoon, there have been over 200 posts about Viral Art across Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. So, a big thank you to everyone who participated in that. Promoting this book is an entirely grassroots effort, and I’ll be forever grateful for your help.
In case you didn’t catch that last post or you’ve forgotten, here’s a reminder of what Viral Art is all about…
Viral Art traces how the histories of street art and graffiti have been shaped by communication technologies, from trading photos by hand to publishing books to sharing videos online. It’s the most comprehensive look to date at how the internet has affected street art and graffiti. Conceptualizing the internet as a public space, I conclude the book by arguing that the future of street art and graffiti may lie in digital interventions rather than physical ones.
Why does Viral Art matter?
If you want to understand street art and graffiti, you have to understand how books, movies, magazines, photographs and the internet have affected artists and fans. Viral Art gets into all of that.
Today we live on our laptops and smartphones, so I argue that the best way for street art and graffiti to stay relevant is for artists to take over the public space of the internet. It’s a claim sure to cause controversy in the street art, graffiti and internet art communities.
Viral Art isn’t just another street art book cheer-leading the movement on. It’s history and theory with a critical stance, and my plea to keep the core values of street art and graffiti alive in a digital world.
What else is inside?
In researching for this project, I interviewed over 50 members of the street art and graffiti communities. In Viral Art, you’ll find brand new interviews, quotes and anecdotes from Banksy, Shepard Fairey, KATSU, Poster Boy, Ron English, Martha Cooper and many more.
Another cool touch is the cover, which you can see at the top of this post. It’s an animated GIF designed by General Howe, featuring artwork by Diego Bergia, General Howe and Jay Edlin, as well as photographs by Martha Cooper and myself.
This book is the result of two and a half years of mostly-unpaid labor. It’s being self-published. My marketing budget consists of a few bucks for ads on Facebook. Major publishers spend thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars marketing everything they produce, but this project has no book tour or publicist or anything like that. There’s only your support. If Viral Art sounds interesting, or you read it and you think it is interesting, please tell your friends.
Today I have some news that I hope you’ll find very exciting, although you may have already heard a bit about it if you’re following me on Twitter. I’ve been waiting two and a half years to say this… Viral Art: How the internet has shaped street art and graffiti, my new ebook, comes out in just two weeks. Starting December 16th, the entirety of Viral Art will be available to read for free online at ViralArt.net. For now, there’s a brief excerpt published on Hyperallergic, and two more excerpts will be going up on other blogs between now and the 16th.
What is Viral Art about?
Viral Art traces how the histories of street art and graffiti have been shaped by communication technologies, from trading photos by hand to publishing books to sharing videos online. It is the most comprehensive look to date at how the internet has affected street art and graffiti. Conceptualizing the internet as a public space, I conclude the book by arguing that the future of street art and graffiti may lie in digital interventions rather than physical ones.
Why does Viral Art matter?
If you want to understand street art and graffiti, you have to understand how books, movies, magazines, photographs and the internet have affected artists and fans. Viral Art gets into all of that in depth, from the early days of graffiti through today.
Today we live on our laptops and smartphones, so I argue that the best way to keep the core values of street art and graffiti alive is for artists to take over the public space of the internet. It’s a claim sure to cause controversy in the street art, graffiti and internet art communities, but it might be the best way to save all three from irrelevance.
At Vandalog, we try to take stands and to go beyond just posting the latest pretty pictures. In that same vein, Viral Art isn’t just another street art book cheer-leading the movement on. It’s history and theory with a critical stance, and my plea to keep street art and graffiti relevant in a digital world.
What else is inside?
In researching for this project, I interviewed over 50 members of the street art and graffiti communities. In Viral Art, you’ll find never-before-published interviews, quotes and anecdotes from Banksy, Shepard Fairey, KATSU, Poster Boy, Ron English, Martha Cooper and many more.
Another cool touch is the cover, which you can see at the top of this post. It’s an animated GIF designed by General Howe, featuring artwork by Diego Bergia, General Howe and Jay Edlin, as well as photographs by Martha Cooper and myself.
What’s all this gonna cost?
Nothing. You will be able to read Viral Art for free online. There will also be PDF and EPUB versions available for download.
How can fans support the book?
To help get the word out about Viral Art, you can join the campaign on Thunderclap.it. Thunderclap is kind of like Kickstarter, but instead of asking for money, I’m asking you to send out a link on the day that Viral Art goes live. Joining the campaign that will let you automatically tell your friends about Viral Art through Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr on December 16th.
This book is the result of two and a half years of mostly-unpaid labor. It’s being self-published. My marketing budget consists of a few bucks for ads on Facebook. Major publishers spend thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars marketing everything they produce, but this project has no book tour or publicist or anything like that. There’s only your support.
If you can help spread the word about Viral Art by joining the Thunderclap, I would be extremely grateful. Thank you. And of course, I hope you’ll read the book come December 16th.
