Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
PolicyViz Podcast Episode #6: DeepLab
152 Plays10 years ago
In the previous episode of the PolicyViz Podcast, I spoke with Maral Pourkazemi about the DeepLab project. That discussion was so interesting, we pulled in instigator Addie Wagenknecht to talk more about the project, its future, and what it means...
The post PolicyViz Podcast Episode #6: DeepLab appeared first on PolicyViz.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and DeepLab Origins
00:00:11
Speaker
This is the policy of his podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. In the previous episode of the podcast, I spoke with Moral Porcazemi about her work and her participation in the DeepLab project at Carnegie Mellon University. Our conversation was so interesting. I invited Moral back to talk a little bit more about the project, about DeepLab, and we are also joined by Adi
00:00:33
Speaker
while I connect the, let's say for the moment, the instigator of the collaborative. Adi's an artist who splits her time between New York City and Austria. Welcome both of you to the show. Thanks for having me back. Thanks for coming back.
DeepLab's Early Activities
00:00:48
Speaker
Unshort notice. So Adi, let's start with you. Can you maybe introduce yourself for the listeners and then maybe talk a little bit about DeepLab and why you got it started?
00:01:00
Speaker
Sure, so my name is, again, Addie Wagenknecht, and I'm an artist with Bitforms Gallery in New York City. I guess I'm the founder of DeepLab and a member of a few other collaboratives on top of that. So I guess DeepLab was really conceived in around 2013.
00:01:20
Speaker
I was approached by Golden Levin, who's the director at the Studio for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon, and he said, hey, you're doing a lot of projects with surveillance, you know, what do you have that's interesting right now? And I kind of threw some stuff I was doing, but it wasn't really the right fit. And I started thinking more kind of big picture on what's interesting and what's going on. So I proposed this idea of kind of having a Congress of
00:01:47
Speaker
researchers, artists, database people, engineers, cultural producers who are working in the themes of privacy and surveillance and social hacking and so forth. So we came together at Carnegie Mellon for a week under a Warhol Foundation grant to basically write a book, create some projects which we released publicly, and we kind of created a short-term film, a short documentary film.
Goals and Metaphors of DeepLab
00:02:14
Speaker
And, and so you had, so it was about 15 or 20 women altogether, right? For a week or so. Right. And it was about, yeah, I think we had actually more like 10 to 12 of us there. Cause there were a few people that unfortunately just couldn't make it for some reason. So, so it was the, was the stated goal to, um, was the outcome to say, we're going to create these, this documentary, we're going to create this, um, we're going to create this book. Or was there sort of a broader agenda you had in mind?
00:02:44
Speaker
I mean me specifically, or you mean in terms of the group? Yeah, in terms of the group. I guess thinking about kind of the notion or the idea of code and technology being this all-encompassing thing that we live within at this point and kind of approaching that idea and concept and
00:03:07
Speaker
I mean, I would almost go so far to say that hacking is almost this metaphor for living and it becomes really about how you can read and write and contribute to the world, because if you're not literate in code, you can't necessarily contribute to culture. So I was really almost thinking the initial Congress was like an experiment and we were gonna come together and kind of see what was gonna come out of that collaboratively.
00:03:32
Speaker
Right.
Cultural Impact and Female Dynamics in Tech
00:03:33
Speaker
Yeah, the term hacking is interesting because in my field of sort of research economics, when I say, you know, come to my hackathon or come to this event, a lot of researchers say, well, I don't, you know, I'm not going to go to a hackathon because that's going to be doing some illegal, some illegal work. It's sort of like this Edward Snowden thing. So is there, is there sort of this idea that we can we change that the connotation around the word hacker or hacking?
00:04:00
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think that's a bigger goal of the hacking communities in general is hacking has really been stigmatized culturally. And like when you search it on Google, you see these pictures of these guys with these black hoodies on and matrix code and everything looks very illegal.
00:04:17
Speaker
And so there's a stigma around the idea of hacking and I think to some extent encryption about being these things that like only illegal people do or people that are trying to hide illegal information from other people and it's just not the case at all. So kind of busting open those doors is an interesting thing to be working on. And you limited the group to just women. So what were the sort of advantages and disadvantages of doing that?
00:04:44
Speaker
Um, I mean, I have, I don't know. I don't, I think, well, maybe we can both agree on this Marla and myself, but I've primarily been working with men my whole life, like in doing things with computers and computer science. So first, to some extent, like that's the normal is a male dominated field. And so I was really interested in seeing, you know, what changes or how things change or how, how do we approach things if it's a quote unquote, like female only environment.
00:05:14
Speaker
Maral, you feel sort of the same way? I feel the same way. Get the men out of the room. Sometimes it can be really interesting. Get the men out of the room. Yeah. I mean, so there's always these sort of flare ups that occur, especially around these sort of hardcore tech conferences where you hear these stories about men acting
00:05:37
Speaker
you know, completely inappropriately around women at these conferences. Have either of you sort of, not to, you know, talk about specific examples or experiences, but have you sort of seen those situations occur and, you know, were you,
00:05:58
Speaker
During the project, did anyone sort of talk about those issues? Was that something that sort of came up or was it like, we're going to talk about privacy and security and we're going to be hacking and sort of the gender issues. We're not going to talk about the gender issues.
00:06:12
Speaker
Who's going to start? I mean, you can start with you if you want. Go for it. I think we talked a little bit about what it feels like being a woman in this scene or just generally being a woman in a
Collaborative Strength and Future Objectives
00:06:26
Speaker
male-dominated working environment.
00:06:32
Speaker
We didn't talk a lot about Addy just correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like we didn't talk too much It wasn't it wasn't the toner of the Gathering but we touched upon it and we sort of Talked about how men sometimes are or most of the time are really really confident about what they do Whether they've done it for whether they've done something for three weeks or three years. It doesn't really matter but
00:07:00
Speaker
women always doubting themselves whether they've done it for three years or three weeks, you know? So there's always this anxiety or you're unsure about your ability to create or you're not sure if you actually have the skills. This is a thing that I think women in particular struggle with, this feeling. There are not many who are
00:07:28
Speaker
tough up and basically go on stage without blinking ones and you know, just that sort of difference. And did you feel the same way? Was that part of your effort to bring this particular group together to have those conversations?
00:07:53
Speaker
I mean, my original attention wasn't for it to be a female-centric group. It just so happened that that was what it was kind of created and formed into because I was really interested in bringing in people who I thought were very good at what they were doing and thinking of us more as stronger as a group or a unit as we were as individuals and being able to kind of embrace and
00:08:20
Speaker
take that power of each of our own kind of niches and expertises and harvest that into something larger than what we could do on our own. Right, right. So in terms of the project itself, aside from the sort of the, well I guess in addition to the sort of tangible output of the documentary and the videos of the talks and the book itself, were there other actionable, were there actionable outcomes from the collaborative?
00:08:49
Speaker
that you would all say like we should be doing x, y, and z? You mean in terms of projects or a larger social? Well either one. Projects are larger social so we should be you know in terms of privacy and security like are there things that individuals or firms or governments should or should not be doing? Are there projects that came out of it that you know people were really excited about sort of investigating further or creating new things going down the line? Well
00:09:19
Speaker
I mean of course there's things that people should be doing and we had a lot of conversations about kind of the flaws and things like why are more people using encryption and why is it so hard to get people using it and kind of those sort of questions.
00:09:34
Speaker
Because it was initially the first kind of meeting, we were more interested in the output of like very short term projects, like kind of more speed projects that we could do during that week and kind of have something where we could use it that Congress as more of a starting point than an endpoint. And we know that, you know,
00:09:55
Speaker
I think the direction that we've been heading as a society the last few decades, you know, if we want to change that, we have to represent, we have to change kind of the representation or the people that are representing us as socially. And so doing, that's, you know, the people doing the work behind the computers, both and in front of the screens. Right. So you mentioned this was sort of the kickoff, the kickoff
00:10:21
Speaker
event. What are some of your longer term, do you have longer term goals? We're all set on last episode that there's going to be another one coming up. So do you have sort of a longer term goal, longer term agenda?
00:10:32
Speaker
I mean, we're meeting in a few weeks in New York at the New Museum at New Inc. to do, I think this next kind of residency, if you want to call it that, will be more based and focused around public outreach and public education and panels and those sort of things. And I think, you know, hopefully the longer term
00:10:55
Speaker
Or the longer term goal, I think, for everyone is to kind of look at the way things are being done and hopefully start changing that trajectory for society as a whole. So one of the things that Maral and I talked about last time was this idea of whether data visualization can affect the way people
00:11:14
Speaker
think about issues and ultimately act
Art, Data, and Public Engagement
00:11:16
Speaker
on issues. So when you bring this sort of group together and sort of one of the goals is let's educate and inform and show people what they should and should not be doing. What are the sort of things that you think people will pay attention to and actually will help them sort of change their behavior? I think that's different for each person.
00:11:37
Speaker
For me, when I see like database projects specifically where you can see, there was recently something I saw on Twitter that was like the pay scale differences in the US where every single basically state was pink for women being paid less than men.
00:11:56
Speaker
And seeing those sort of visualizations where it's like this very stark in your face difference. Those are very like I don't know to some extent like rage inducing which then causes me to Sometimes produce work of my own right and there's kind of this trickle-down effect right like you Do something that then might change someone else's idea and change someone else's idea and and that's you know ultimately how cultures created and
00:12:22
Speaker
Right, right. And is the work that you do, the work that you do, is that focus on data? Is it focused on blending data and art together?
00:12:33
Speaker
I would say I was so traditionally trained, quote unquote, like I went to the university for computer science and photography and physical computing, which is a weird mix. So I have my true artist friends who say I'm more of a hacker scientist, but then my science friends say I'm more of an artist. So I'm kind of this in between of the two. So you just have to pick your friends.
00:12:55
Speaker
Right. But I think I definitely, I think my work in general is definitely kind of about these notions within contemporary issues. So like the cloud is a physical object, for example, or manifestations of infrastructure, you know, how would I reinterpret a server closet, things like that. So it's very like conceptual, while still having this very literal concepts behind it. Right, right.
00:13:22
Speaker
So maybe we should turn back to this conversation that we started last time. And of course, we're not going to have time to finish it today. This sort of idea of
00:13:31
Speaker
You know, privacy and security and this comment you just made about, you know, I think people feel like the cloud is just like literally a cloud and it's not, right? But how do you get a bunch of people together to really pay attention? I feel like there was this flurry around security and privacy around the Edward Snowden story and then it sort of just trickled away again, but the issues haven't really changed or anything.
00:13:56
Speaker
How do you, even if you have a group of great people who are doing great work, how do you get people to sort of pay attention, just even to pay attention to the issues again? I'm American, so, and I love, you know, America's great, but there's, I would say the majority of Americans are pretty lazy, and they don't really necessarily have any interest in changing something that doesn't affect them financially.
00:14:22
Speaker
So, you know, the NSA might be reading all their Gmail, but they're not going to change that because Gmail is free. So a lot of times I think it takes affecting people in a way that personally affects them financially through something that happens to a family member for them to ultimately change. And that's kind of my jaded opinion. But there you go. Maral, what do you think? Do we just use DataViz to do it?
00:14:55
Speaker
That's actually an interesting thought. Of course, if it doesn't affect you personally, why would you care? Or why it's not immediate, it's not urgent enough to act on something.
00:15:12
Speaker
So yeah, I totally agree with that. In terms of dataviz, maybe that's completely transferable and the impact on dataviz too. Because will you share something that you're personally, do you have a personal interest in more than something that you don't have a personal interest in?
00:15:36
Speaker
I'm totally into all of the Middle East Eastern stuff. And I re-share and I share and I read and I make people read that stuff a lot more than I do other things. Because I have a personal connection to there. And I know people from there and I'm closer to that than to the same
00:16:05
Speaker
Chinese economic crisis or whatever. It's also important, but yeah, it takes a person to be pissed off about something to make a change or to start a change. Yeah, and like I said, with the Snowden thing, I felt like people got really pissed off for about a week.
00:16:26
Speaker
And then it sort of just disappeared. But nothing really changed aside from maybe some congressional hearings and some newspaper articles. And so I wonder, is the fact that you started this collaborative, is that sort of on the leading edge of
00:16:47
Speaker
an effort to sort of re-engage people and say this stuff hasn't, nothing, things haven't really changed. There are some important issues out there and the technology continues to move so fast that maybe we as a society and we as a, you know, and our governments aren't really keeping pace. Right. Or the government's, you know, it's not necessarily always in the government's interest to educate people about security and encryption because then they lose a lot of their ability to track people.
00:17:17
Speaker
So as you go forward with the DeepLab project, will you be pulling together data to highlight the various issues for people, or is it going to be more like data in terms of usage and NSA stats and privacy, whatever it is, or is it more on the technical aspects?
00:17:39
Speaker
people can get behind like such and such agency, you know, collects, you know, this much information as opposed to sort of, you know, describing the infrastructure of the cloud technology. Does that make sense? I think so. So as you go forward, sort of where where do you try to where are you going to try to sort of do that communication? I think it's going to be, I think it's going to be a mix where this is the
00:18:06
Speaker
I personally think it's the beauty of DeepLab that there's the space and the freedom to do whatever a member wants to do with something. There's this artistic freedom that you can just...
00:18:19
Speaker
take advantage of yeah so if somebody's if i'm i'd like working with data and information so i'll probably be the person who goes more into the database direction right somebody else likes to write uh... research about that that person is going to write about this is something that is interesting uh... so so the diversity of work that comes out of it is is the strength of it of that deeply by i would say
00:18:51
Speaker
Yeah, that's really interesting. I agree. Really interesting. Yeah, to have all these artists and engineers and data visitors and data scientists all together, yeah. Yeah, but I wouldn't, yeah, we're all like, every one of us has touched upon all of these points, but I don't think you can say that we're sort of a
00:19:12
Speaker
It's not that you pinpoint on one specific genre and then you say, we do data, we do data analysis, we do everything. And so saying that as a collaborative collective doing creative work, I think it's probably, I mean, in my opinion, probably the closest you can get in this, yeah. Yeah, in the field, yeah, absolutely.
00:19:38
Speaker
Cool. Great. Well, this has been really terrific. It's been really interesting. I'm excited to see what you guys come up with in the next several meetings. I hope there's several meetings and we all get to pay attention and see what's going on. So thanks to both of you for coming on. I appreciate it.
00:19:56
Speaker
Thank you, too. Thank you so much for having us. And thanks to everyone for listening. If you have questions or comments, send me a note or hit me up on Twitter or visit the website at policyvis.com. I'm John Schwabish, and this has been the Policy Vis Podcast. Thanks for listening.