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Areas of Focus
Artists
Edited: July 21, 2023
INFRA (With Ingrid Burrington & Surya Mattu)
Current location
NYC
Year(s) of residency and/or fellowship
2017–18, Trust Resident
Members
Ingrid Burrington, Surya Mattu

Surya Mattu (he/him) is a Brooklyn-based investigative data journalist, engineer, and artist who builds tools to investigate algorithmic systems and the societal harms they can cause. He leads the Digital Witness Lab at Princeton University.

At The Markup he created Blacklight, a real-time website privacy inspector, and led Citizen Browser, a first of its kind independent audit of Facebook’s recommendation algorithms. His work at The Markup has received public recognition including two Edward Murrow awards and an NABJ award. He was also a 2021 Knight Wallace fellow.

Previously, he was a contributing researcher at ProPublica, where he worked on Machine Bias, a series that aims to highlight how algorithmic systems can be biased and discriminate against people. Machine Bias was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for Explanatory Journalism.

His work has been exhibited at Somerset House, The Haus der Kulturen der Welt , The Whitney Museum, V&A Museum and Bitforms Gallery.

 

Ingrid Burrington (she/her) is a writer and artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She is interested in power, landscape, technology, and narratives constructed around all of the above.

Interview: Meet INFRA, Ingrid Burrington & Surya Mattu

INFRA – Ingrid Burrington and Surya Mattu
2017 – 2018
Trust Residents

Ingrid Burrington and Surya Mattu were the inaugural residents of the Eyebeam Center for the Future of Journalism (ECFJ) program, formerly known as the R&D Program for the Future of Journalism, a new pilot program that takes an artist-led approach to fighting misinformation and fake news funded in part by Craig Newmark.

Who are you?

Collectively, we are working as INFRA (Investigations, Near Futures, Research, and Art) a loosely associated organization/detective agency currently consisting of Ingrid Burrington and Surya Mattu. INFRA engages in projects, programs, and poetic gestures that support advocates, educators, and others in building arguments for substantive change and new narratives for the future of technology and society.

What are you working on?

Right now, we’re exploring different ways that large tech platforms can be understood as acting outside the law or never really answer to law through various approaches of sidestepping law–primarily settlement agreements, legal technicalities, and subcontracting. We’re still pretty early in this work but we’re interested in identifying these different legal loopholes and demonstrating the ways they might perpetuate systemic societal harms as a way to strengthen regulation proposals or find other loopholes that might make it easier to file legal claims against platforms.

What are you most excited about?

Creating actionable research for investigative reporting and making work that is useful to the range of communities that sit between journalism and other forms of investigation — such as, but not limited to labor organizing, policy advocacy, and art.

Surya Mattu and Ingrid Burrington are the inaugural residents for our R&D Program for the Future of Journalism, a new pilot program that takes an artist-led approach to fighting misinformation and fake news funded in part by Craig Newmark.

Eyebeam models a new approach to artist-led creation for the public good; we are a non-profit that provides significant professional support and money to exceptional artists for the realization of important ideas that wouldn’t exist otherwise. Nobody else is doing this.

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