Jennifer Gradecki
Jennifer Gradecki's art and research focuses on the relationship between information and power, and aims to make specialized knowledge and technical information more accessible. Gradecki is currently a PhD candidate at SUNY Buffalo in Visual Studies. She earned her MFA in New Genres from UCLA's Department of Art in 2010 and has participated in numerous international exhibitions and conferences, including the New Media Gallery in Zadar, the AC Institute in New York, the Science Gallery in Dublin, Critical Finance Studies in Amsterdam, and the International Symposium on Electronic Art in Vancouver.
Presenting with Derek Curry
Crowd-Sourcing Social Media Network Surveillance
We will discuss the findings from our artistic research project, the Crowd-Sourced Intelligence Agency (CSIA)—a web-based application that allows the user to participate in, and discuss the surveillance of social media networks. Created from documents on intelligence gathering techniques currently in use that have been made available through FOIA requests or leaked to the public, the CSIA app is open to anyone with a Twitter account. Agents can debate each other’s ratings, and defend their own tweets. The aim of CSIA is to foster a more informed debate on the problems associated with secret, automated, “collect it all” surveillance by opening up the process of intelligence production for all to see. By giving users first-hand experience with how social media surveillance works, we also hope to provide them with the means to navigate the security apparatus to choose if they want to evade algorithmic capture, jam the system with too much information, or find another mode of engagement. The CSIA not only opens a debate about the effectiveness of surveillance techniques, but it also enables users to reflect on how they want to engage with it.
In our talk, we will demonstrate how our application works and allow the audience to participate on their own computer or mobile device. We will then present some of our findings from the project, including information about how intelligence agencies operate, some of the limitations and choices we were confronted with while programming the application, and user interactions with the application that we have observed.
