Perverse Affordances examines the political implications of human-computer interaction. Sarah Friend wrote an algorithm that crawled the ten most popular social media platforms worldwide and randomly took screenshots. She then used the prepared dataset of over 10,000 screen captures to train a generative adversarial neural network to produce new screenshots of possible interfaces. The resulting images speculate how the machine learning tools of big social media companies see their users all the time.
Surveilling thousands of personal pages all over the world, Friend emphasizes that design is never innocent. Contemporary citizens face hundreds of interfaces which, facilitating our activities in data-permeated urban habitats, also frame the set of possibilities for how they might be used by various parties.
Shown at Seasons of Media Arts – City of Participative Visions (2019).
Time: 08.08.2019 – 15.09.2019
Location: Citizen’s Office K8, Kaiserallee 8
