Join me for an art project/workshop at Conflux 2009!

If you're not doing anything this Saturday morning at 10am, come join myself and artist An Xiao (@thatwaszen) for our workshop/art project/research project at the Conflux 2009 festival.

The project, E-Dérive: Psychogeography and the Digitial Landscape, will focus on creating

anonymous data visualization "portraits" of the participants' wanderings online, which will then be displayed in an online gallery.

I've always been interested in the way people consume content online and navigate the abundance of information on the internet, but data visualization is a recent obsession I'm just beginning to explore. While I lack the technical skills to craft custom data visualization tools just yet, I am lucky enough to have talented friends. An and I were able to come up with a few crafty hacked solutions using free visualization tools, but interactive designer Kevin Sweeney took this project to a whole other level by offering to build a tool for us.

So, here's what we need from you:

- Your presence

- A wifi-ready laptop

- A week's worth of your browser history (don't worry, the final "portrait" will be anonymous and nobody will know it's you)

- A potential $5 donation to Conflux

Why should you come?

- Because sleeping in on a Saturday is overrated

- Because art projects are fun any time of the day

- Because if this thing is a complete disaster, you'll want to be there to witness it

- Because we'll be providing coffee and some breakfast type snacks to sweeten the deal

RSVP to the Facebook page so we know how much coffee to bring.

More details below:

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.

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.

...

Conflux Festival is the art and technology festival for the creative exploration of urban public space. Produced by Glowlab in New York since 2003. More info at http://confluxfestival.org.

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.


Special thanks to Kevin Sweeney for his interactive design skills!