Incautious Porn: a voyage into privacy

Posted on March 17, 2013 by xDxD.vs.xDxD

Incautious Porn

“We searched for Porn.
We found you.

We captured more than 100,000 public comments on porn and sexually oriented websites in which users left their mobile phone number to male/female/transgender performers, where everyone could see it, and we turned them into a series of paintings which you can purchase.”

Incautious Porn

We access social networking websites every day.

We think they’re free, but what we really are doing is accessing services which we pay by granting access to our personal data to companies, organizations, institutions, aggregators, marketing firms etcetera.

And there’s more.

While we navigate these websites we tend to radically transform our perception of what is public and what is private.

We often engage messaging, chats, comments and content production without realizing that we’re saying and posting things in public, where anyone can see them, and use them.

Incautious Porn is about this.

It is about the transformation of the ways in which we perceive private and public spaces.

It is about being sold hundreds of times each day: our data, information, emotions, relations.

How is it done?

We harvested the content found on hundreds of thousands of porn or sexually oriented websites using freely accessible tools such as Google, various Web Scraping APIs, and the APIs which are made accessible by popular social networks service operators (such as Facebook and Twitter), to get as many naughty comments coming from all you boys and girls.

We searched among the comments to find the ones in which users left clear indication of their phone/mobile number to the sensual performer, and we put them in a database, along with a screensot of the page, its link and the date/time in which it was recorded.

incautious porn how-to

We developed a little software which takes one random comment/link out of the database and uses it to create a beautiful generative painting and originality certificate.

We set up this website to put the paintings on sale.

Note: all the content used in the process is freely available online, in public forums/blogs/webcam-shows/social networks/etc.

More info coming soon

Are You At Risk? Nuclear campaigning with Greenpeace

Posted on March 2, 2012 by xDxD.vs.xDxD

Are You at Risk?

Do you remember Nuclear Anxiety?

After one year from the Fukushima disaster we’ve teamed up with Greenpeace International to create an awareness and action campaign on the risks coming from nuclear energy.

Click HERE to start “Are You at Risk?”

The interactive map shows the locations of nuclear plants all over the world. By clicking on each one of them, detailed information pops up showing how many people live near the reactors and, thus, would find themselves in the same situations as the people who lived in Fukushima when the disaster took place.

(an enormous “thank you!” must be delivered to Declan Butler: he let us use a dataset he published, which was used as the foundation for this wonderful article on Nature.)

In the campaign we go a step further.

By using the map you can connect to Facebook and Twitter. If you do it, the software grabs the information about your friends/followers and actively searches for the ones who live near nuclear plants (e.g.: the distance of their home location is less than 300km from a reactor).

When it finds them, it alerts them on social networks by tagging them on an image, pointing out the risks of living near a nuclear plant, and inspiring them to go to check out the map.

When you do this, you can browse the map and see additional information appear: the images and names of your social network buddies appear next to each reactor, indicating the people you love who would suffer from an accident in that location.

And, so: Are you at risk?

credits:

Art is Open Source: concept, technologies

Salvatore Barbera (Greenpeace International): project management and creative direction

Andrea Pinchi: visual design

Aslihan Tumer and Jan Beránek (Greenpeace International): Nuclear Campaigners

some links:

Are You at Risk? on Repubblica