Strange Bedfellows
Digital Humanities, Internet Art, and the Weird Internet
Kazemi will discuss the “Weird Internet,” a wildly popular creative internet-native subculture, and its intersections with Digital Humanities and Internet Art (in the fine arts tradition). The Big Data approach to analysis of texts is painfully limited in the knowledge it can produce. This talk will take Bruno Latour’s Compositionist Manifesto as well as the speaker’s personal history as a professional “online metrics” analyst as a jumping off point. We will look at the composition of autonomous agents and static texts alike, specifically the weird internet and internet art. We’ll see what these things do and discuss ways to send probes out into the world, and what can tell us that we can never gain through analysis of corpora.
Speakers
Darius Kazemi makes weird internet stuff. His best known work is the Random Shopper, a program that bought him random books, DVDs, and CDs from Amazon each month. He also has a small army of Twitter bots that he builds because they make him laugh. He works as an API Evangelist at Akamai in Boston. Before he moved into internet technology, he was a game developer for ten years.
Related Research
