Nick Briz

hi, my name is nick briz && i'm a new_media artist / educator / organizer living + working in chicago, IL. i'm critically obsessed w/the Internet + all my work is re:to digital culture; specifically: digital literacy + ecology, netizen rights, glitch art, net art, remix. i organize events on these topix ( GLI.TC/H, NO-MEDIA, etc ) && teach on these topix ( SAIC, Marwen, www ) && produce work on these topix ( independently && commercially w/Branger_Briz ). my work's been shown internationally ( FILE Media Arts Festival, the Images Festival, the Museum of Moving Image, the Tate, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, etc. ) && i've been featured in on/off-line publications around the world ( VICE, Rhizome.org, Fast Company, El Mundo, Neural, etc. ).

Presenting

their tools, ur rules: the tactical mis-use of online platforms

is it a contradiction if a post discouraging people from using Facebook receives lots of likes, comments && shares on the platform? artists/activists movements--from the Situationists to Culture Jammers to Tactical Media--have for years been resisting the corporate agendas of mass media through a series of techniques centered around the un-authorized re-use of content which was only ever meant to be consumed. but how do these techniques fare in the age of digital interactivity, when the media produced by these institutions isn't only meant to be consumed, but--in fact--designed to be used? what does resistance look like on platforms which anticipate + even monetize those conversations aimed at criticizing them, where it's all too easy to mistake the "protocologically enforced" modes of participatory behavior for our own "tactical" agency. "With so many 'customizable options' available, how can she 'resist'?", writes new-media artist/theorist Curt Cloninger, "The danger of MySpace and YouTube is not the threat that they may wind up archiving and owning all the ‘content’ I produce, or that they are currently getting rich off the content I produce, but that they control the parameters within which I produce ‘my original’ content."

while resistance may seem futile, this talk presents why/how it is not. through a theory of mis-use rooted in the tradition of the previously mentioned political art movements, i will present work by artists/activists who intentionally disregard the terms && conditions none of us ever read. i will also present some of my own projects && experiments demonstrating how we can leverage the malleable nature of (present day) desktop browsers to enact this kind of mis-use. for example, mis-using a browser's developer console to batch automate, edit, remove && download content on ur Facebook profile for which the platform provides no official interface or mis-using YouTube's APIs to scramble + unscramble content to the video hosting site which would otherwise not be permitted due to copyright "content-id" systems. && lastly mis-using browsers' addon capabilities to create alternative interfaces for cloud hosting sites like google drive that let u encrypt/decrypt files before/after storing them.