My favorite email spam picture of the week! :))

I am excited to participate in the Eyebeam annual showcase, opening Thursday! They are moving from a twice a year open studios show to a once a year retrospective of the work of residents and fellows from the past year. It is a great group of artists and looks like it will be a fantastic show.

I will be showing the latest developments in my Stranger Visions project, unveiling the first portrait derived from found material as well as a video documenting the process.

I will also be joining Eyebeam fellow Mark Shepard and curator Deborah Fisher from A Blade of Grass in a conversation about art and politics, idealism and ideas of progress on a panel this Saturday.

Eyebeam Annual Showcase
Work of Eyebeam residents and fellows from 2012
Exhibit: Jan 17-26
Opening: This Thursday, Jan 17, 6-8pm
Panels: Saturday 1/19 starting at noon.

Here are all the details of both the show and panels:
http://www.eyebeam.org/events/2012-annual-showcase

“Click anywhere to begin! – or arambartholl.com is not my hompage but i saved the URL”
Aram Bartholl 2013

#SPEEDPROJECT of the day! feels like there is a series coming of this … :))

NEW WORK: Tanglr

en•tan•gle
/en’taNGgƏl/

VERB
1. Cause to become twisted together with or caught in.
2. Involve someone in difficulties or complicated circumstances.

Tan•glr
/taNGglƏr/

NOUN
1. An extension for Google Chrome which, when activated, anonymously links you with another person. When you browse, your partner is taken to the same urls. Likewise, when your partner browses, your browser changes to what they’re seeing. The two of you have to work it out together.

SYNONYMS
data privacy, quantum mechanics, relation in time, perfect lovers

Several forces colluded recently to get me to make work that functions online. It’s been been research about network surveillance I’ve been doing at Brown. It’s also been the unavoidable revelance of the gestures we make in front of a machine all day to my larger project about the construction of habit. And it’s been inspiration from my research group partners at RISD, particularly Elisa Giardina Papa, and our discussions about the public sphere.

After the fact, I realized that Eyebeamer Jonas Lund has been doing a lot in this space, so he’s retroactive inspiration. Jonas’s Public Access Me is an extension for Chrome that tracks his browser use and streams it online, as a kind of radical transparency. Which is great, but I was attracted to the idea of sharing not with the world, but with a specific, yet anonymous, individual. It’s meant as a bit of an inversion of the fact that we’re sharing everything we do online with Google and our ISPs, by making it personal. And by making it mutual, browsing becomes an intimate, communicative act. Like Chatroulette maybe, but we’re not seeing images, we’re sharing selves and exploring boundaries simply by the way we move through urls.

The backend to the extension is Python and Tornado — it works over websockets. (Note: I tried Heroku as a host, turns out they dont support websockets, so this is ec2).

Code is open source (GPL) on GitHub, where I’m beginning to migrate my projects.