JULIA KAGANSKIY AND AN XIAO
E-Derive: Psychogeography and the Digital Landscape
Image courtesy Personas by Aaron Zinman
Date: Saturday 9.19
Start Time: 10:00am
Location: Rm. 101, Barney building
Informed by the psychogeographic strategy of “derive,” we will be creating data visualization maps, or “portraits,” of a sample group’s virtual meanderings. These portraits will then be displayed in an online gallery.
Please note: Wifi-ready laptops are required to participate in this workshop
“In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there…”
The topography of the digital landscape—an intricate web of links and nodes—promotes the kind of randomized exploration and discovery that psychographers find so intriguing in the urban environment. As we traverse the web’s information channels, we are far more willing to put aside external motivators and stray off course, to let ourselves wander and submit to the whims of our curiosity—our sense of discovery and awareness of our “surroundings” is heightened.
Image courtesy Personas by Aaron Zinman
In this workshop we will be using a variety of tools to track participants’ travels online and then map each trajectory with data visualization tools. Each map will serve as a psychogeographical data “portrait” of both the participant’s and the group’s unique experience navigating the web for a period of time.
Attendees must bring a wifi-ready laptop to participate. We highly recommend setting up a Twitter account beforehand, if you do not already have one.
Julia Kaganskiy is a freelance social media and digital strategist. She is also the founder and organizer of the Arts, Culture and Technology meetup in New York City. Her work focuses on exploring the ways new media is changing the way people interact with cultural materials and helping institutions understand how to communicate with their audiences and reach new ones. She can be found online at www.juliaxgulia.com and @juliaxgulia.
An Xiao was recently listed in The Guardian’s “who’s who” of the Twitter art world - she has shown her award-winning photography and digital media in publications and galleries internationally, including the Brooklyn Museum, Yale/Haskins Laboratories, The New York Times and ARTNews. She founded and directs @Platea, a global online public art collective, and blogs on art and social media technology for Art21.
She can be found online at www.anxiaostudio.com and @thatwaszen.
Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab. As a critique of data mining, it uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity.
