Telematic Media Arts

presents

 
 
Caroline Sinders, Terms and Conditions, 2021

Caroline Sinders, Terms and Conditions, 2021

Architectures of Violence

An Expanded Documentary Exhibition

Caroline Sinders

May 15th - June 26th, 2021

 

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(To Attend, contact: info@tttelematiccc.com)

On-Line Exhibition Walk-Through #2, with Caroline Sinders
Saturday, June 18th, 2:30pm PST, 5:30pm EST, 11:30pm CET

Closing Reception
Saturday, June 26th, 2pm PST, 5pm EST, 11pm CET

 

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Exhibition Statement

Architectures of Violence is an expanded documentary exhibition by artist and human rights researcher Caroline Sinders, exploring the intersections of harrasment, white supremacy, authoritarian politics, mysogyny, and disinformation in digital culture. Drawing upon news media, tabloids, television, and journalism, she examines the role of Internet platforms in shaping contemporary discourse:   the disruption of journalistic standards and the dissemination of disinformation, the mysogynist culture of trolling, the racism of the algorithm, the subversion of democratic instituions, and the promotion of white supremicist ideology and violence.  Sinders approaches these as the architectures of contemporary experience, akin to physical architecture, and she sees physical architecture, on a continuum with digital structures, as itself marked by ideological inflections and everyday violence - up to and including the recently dismantled, racist monuments to the Confederacy.

For Sinders, expanded documentary is a practice of researching through interactive design and the construction of multi-nodal, experiential artifacts. She enters into into platforms, collecting and documenting content, like a photojournalist with a camera, documenting unfolding events.   In this show, Sinders specifically gathers materials from a loose nexus of contemporary cultural and social movements, which blend venom, cruelty, right-wing extremism, racism, misogyny, and fascist demagogery, with diverse forms of misinformation, disinformation and mal-information on the Internet. She draws connections between social movements typically held apart, providing an insightful, synaptic glimpse into contemporary political conditions and the current crisis of the Republic.  And she shows that the violence of the Internet does not lurk in its dark recesses, but rather in the structures of its leading search engines and social media.

 

Images from the Exhibition

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CAROLINE SINDERS TELEMATIC 06B MONUMENT.jpg
 

Artist Statement

This show is a compilation of research work, and artwork exploring online protest, online harassment, white supremacy, and digital violence. My hope and plan is that you will see all of these different pieces as interlocking together. Our online lives are as real as our offlines lives, and both are equally ‘designed’ spaces. Architecture, policy, governance systems, and social norms are designed- they have constraints to them, rules, and those constraints impact society and culture. To create art that explores the murkiness and violence within platforms, we cannot divorce the systemic inequality and inequity that exists in non-digital spaces. Technology is a mirror to the physical world. Technology, much like physical architecture, is built, coordinated and planned. Every button is accounted for, and every interaction a user can do online was meticulously designed. Platforms have inordinate amounts of control, money and influence, and while platforms can boost user bases larger than any country in current existence, they also create billions of dollars in profit. Meaning, any kind of harm incurred on a platform that platform does have the resources to fix should they choose to.

 

Since 2013, I have been studying online harassment, and looking at the harmful and violent corners of the internet. But most of the harm I saw happened on our ‘clearnet’, and mainstream areas of the Internet and major platforms, like Reddit, YouTube, 4chan, 8chan, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. As an artist, I’m interested in the world around me, including media consumption, world events, and journalism. I was originally trained as a photojournalist and photographer, and then got a masters in design and technology, but my background in journalism, and photography shapes how I approach technology based art, and research based storytelling.   By utilizing non-fiction elements as methods for artistic exploration, I aim to document, uncover, and comment on the white supremacists structures that are embedded and interwoven in our online and offline lives,technologies, and environments.

 

Works in the Show

Monument, video, 2021

For the past two years I’ve lived in Berlin, Germany. What’s important to realize about Berlin is how much the city itself is a monument and a physical archive to its and its citizen’s momentous, traumatic, and violent history. Almost every street has a form of monument or rembernance. Parts of former East Berlin still have specific architecture and crossing lights from the former Soviet era. The Berlin Wall still stands in some areas or is commeriated in sculptures, statues and bronze lines dotting the ground. Across the city stands different monuments erected towards victims of the Holocuast, such as the large scale “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe'' with large black rectangles and 2,711 slabs. But the city also has these small bronze plaques, ones that I only noticed once I moved. Walking along the cobblestones you can almost miss them, but they are there, dotted throughout the city. These bronze plaques are called Stolpersteine or stumbling blocks[1].  There’s about 70,000 stumbling blocks across 1,200 cities in Europe. There’s a kind of tension in these statues, monuments and museums to the past: it’s necessary to remember, and to never forget what happened. But this kind of blunt confrontation, of a refusal to forget- is necessary. The harmful parts of the past should not be forgotten but acknowledged. Can we remove the harm but acknowledge it as well? Growing up in New Orleans, Louisiana, I was well aware of the confederate statues across the city, and the streets named after Confederate soldiers and generals. These “tributes” sat as white supremacist structures designed to silence Black people, and serve as a reminder- the past was here. Recently, New Orleans and other cities across the United States removed these statues. These removal is necessary, and urgent-- but America likes to smoothe over tension, and harm, and erase it, to pretend it was never there. Monument is a piece I made to acknowledge and confront the racist past and false iconography of New Orleans while also uplifting the act of removal itself. Monument is a 3D animated painting of a Greco-Roman column that once served a plinth for a Robert E Lee statue in New Orleans. This leftover plinth is broken apart and made into a new statue with a new plaque reading “a monument for the monuments that should have been taken down and the ones that have” forcing an acknowledgment and remembrance of what has transpired. This new monument eventually breaks apart as well, turning into rumble.

 
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Discord Leaks Archive: Patriot Wave and the Boogaloo Bois, website, 2021. 

This is an interactive piece that offers a glimpse into two neo-nazi servers that were inflitrated and put online for journalists to use by the journalist collective, Unicorn Riot, as a part of their data project, the Discord Leaks. In recent years, the chat and video platform Discord has become popular amongst gamers, and now the far right. In 2020, Discord said they have removed over 2,000 far right, white suprmacists and extremist servers. Since 2016, Unicorn Riot has been investigating, infiltrating, and exposing these servers to de-platform nazis. To explore digital harm online and not shine a light on how much Discord is used by white supremacists group would be an oversight.

Over the past two years, I’ve been volunteering with the collective as a writer, researcher and designer. In this piece I wanted to explore friction as a storytelling method, and archives as forms of protest, as well as a form proof. This piece, out of all of the others, is the most ‘standard’ or ‘straight’ form of journalism. It utilizes design to help break down key points of the archive, while providing necessary friction and warning labels before accessing the content. This friction is key- should such content be so easily accessible, without warnings, without barriers? The content is still accessible, but slightly difficult to access. This ‘difficulty’ and friction stands directly in opposition to the design of major platforms, where this content is easy to find, and exists.

 
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Artist Sketchbook, paper collage, 2021

Since 2017, I’ve used maps, diagrams, and sketches as a way to situate myself in complex topics, difficult research, and systems design. Particularly in this kind of research, I use drawing as a form of wayfinding and hypothesis.While exploring the opacities of algorithms, the overlapping subcultures and groups of white nationalists, white supremacists and neo-nazis, and mapping out platforms and their policies, I needed visuals to help ground me and guide me in this murky and blurry territory. These sketches serve as hypothesises, suggestions, and experiments as I made my way through this research.

 
 

Within the Terms and Conditions, multi-channel video, 2021, co-commissioned with the Photographers Gallery.

This project explores the questions of what is allowed to be online, stay online and spread online. Equally important, it asks, who decides what is harmful, and when it is time for that content to go? This project explores harmful content, conspiracy theories, and videos on YouTube.

Compiled videos include:

Conspiracy Theory COVID: Seven videos, originally in Enlglish, two were removed and re-uploaded with names and information in Spanish. Most of these videos are from 2020 and 2021. None of these videos have been subsequently removed.

Anti-Vax: 5 videos, some are as old as 2017, and some are as new as March 2021. Some videos are short at a few minutes long but some are 2 hours long,  shot like a neutral talk show featuring well known anti-vaxers like Robert F. Kennedy. 3 videos have now been removed.  

Anti Anti Anti: anti-immigration, anti-Islam, anti-corona, and anti-big technology: 11 videos long, with AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) talking heads streaming from their homes and the Bundestag harmful talking points, of Fox News white people panic-inducing conservative rhetoric. Most of these videos are from 2020, with only one from 2018. None have been removed.

Conservative Conspiracy Theories: These 6 videos are still up, with theories about how the US election could be stolen, some taken on the day of the January 6 Washington DC coup,  and around governors and kidnapping plots. All of these videos are still on YouTube.

General Misinformation: 7 videos spanning Trumpisms, Bill Gates conspiracy theories, and misinformation weaponized around how COVID19 spreads. 2 videos are now private and 1 video has been removed. 

 White Supremacy: 11 videos, with only one taken down in February 2021. These videos have been made by known white supremacists, labeled as such by hate watch groups. YouTube has known, had known who they are and what their video links are. Only one creator had his work and videos suppressed and removed from YouTube's search, but his video collaborations with another creator are easily searchable and findable on YouTube. 1 video is now private and 3 videos have been removed.

Racialized Disinformation: These 9 videos were added in March 2021 after reading a report by Brandi-Collins Dexter and Joan Dononvan on a style of videos they found, named by them as 'racialized disinformation.' These videos feature misinformation and racist comments against journalists; these comments were often in response to the 1619 project by the New York Times, and supportive of the Trump Administration 1776 report. These 9 videos are still online.

 Gender Based Violence and Harassment: These 20 videos are as old as 2014 and as recent as February 2021, pulled from targeted harassment videos created to harm victims of Gamergate (and directly name those victims). Some of the creators of these videos are well known white nationalists and white supremacists who are monitored by hate watching groups. 1 video has been removed.

 
 

Artist Bio

Caroline Sinders is a critical designer and artist. For the past few years, she has been examining the intersections of artificial intelligence, abuse, and politics in digital conversational spaces. She has worked with the United Nations, Amnesty International, IBM Watson, the Wikimedia Foundation and others. Sinders has held fellowships with the Harvard Kennedy School, Google's PAIR (People and Artificial Intelligence Research group), the Mozilla Foundation, the Weizenbaum Institute Pioneer Works, Eyebeam, Ars Electronica, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Sci Art Resonances program with the European Commission, and the International Center of Photography. Some of her research fellowships and funded research work has focused on dark patterns, community health, online harassment, AI inequity, and the labor and systems in AI and platforms.Currently, she is a fellow with Ars Electronica AI Lab with the Edinburgh Futures Institute. Her work has been featured in the Tate Exchange in Tate Modern, Victoria and Albert Museum, MoMA PS1, LABoral, Wired, Slate, Quartz, the Channels Festival and others. Sinders holds a Masters from New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program. https://carolinesinders.com/