May 26, 2019 fkirschner

As a week of presentations and traveling comes to an end, we are slowly getting back into our weekly routines, including the collection of interesting reading material for you to digest on the weekend. And boy, what a week it was. Let’s try to compile some less obvious articles that might be of interest to you.

Most Bestest Christina Xu (@xuhulk, go follow!) writes about bullet comments in logicmag.io:

In the West, the Chinese internet is mostly depicted in negative terms: what websites and social platforms are blocked, what keywords are banned, what conversations and viral posts are scrubbed clean from the web overnight. This austere view is not inaccurate, but it leaves out what exactly the nearly 750 million internet users in China do get up to.

Os Keyes writes best about Big Data and its accompanying mindset for Real Life Mag:

As a state action, the existence of the MEDS dataset could be explained by that administrative orientation toward separation — treating those the state interacts with as less than and distinct from the processes of the state itself. But the MEDS dataset stemmed not from a monolithic, bureaucratic but from the efforts of a small team of named individuals. Even if its existence could be blamed on state bureaucracy (who obviously hold some of the responsibility, here), it would do nothing to explain who so many scientists in public and private institutions have been comfortable reusing this data.

Zach Blas interviews Queer Media Art Pioneer Shu Lea Cheang for Frieze.com:

SLC In the Taiwan Pavilion, a tower of ten projectors will be installed in one gallery, inverting the function of an operating surveillance system. There will also be a small gallery recast as the control room, which will be set up with computer monitors to expose how the surveillance system in the installation functions. We will be asking people to send in selfies. These images, as well as the 3D scans captured by the surveillance cameras will then be manipulated. It’s like in your work, where you use 3D modelling to morph facial recognition data to produce unrecognizable forms: the idea is to obscure.
ZB Don’t forget the detail that I thought was so intriguing about the control room: that it’s modelled after Hugh Hefner’s control room in the Playboy Mansion!
SLC Right.

That’s all for today. Go Vote!

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