Derek Curry and Jennifer Gradecki discuss their collaborative project, the Crowd-Sourced Intelligence Agency (CSIA), a creative research project, online app, and interactive installation that replicates and displays some of the techniques used by intelligence agencies to collect, process, and display publicly available information to produce open source intelligence (OSINT). In order to help the public understand the importance of training data in predictive policing classifiers, the CSIA presents users with results from multiple machine learning classifiers, each one trained on a different dataset. The goal of the project is to better facilitate discussions about Big Data intelligence analytics, specifically, how the public can have better oversight of the processes used, and to help create prototypes for counterveillance and sousveillance.
Derek Curry (US) is an artist-researcher whose work addresses spaces for intervention in automated decision making systems. His recent work has addressed automated decision-making processes used by automated stock trading systems and Open Source Intelligence gathering (OSINT). His artworks have replicated aspects of social media surveillance systems and communicated with algorithmic trading bots. Derek earned his MFA in New Genres from UCLA’s Department of Art in 2010 and his PhD from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is currently an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University in Boston.
Jennifer Gradecki is an artist-theorist who aims to facilitate a practice-based understanding of socio-technical systems that typically evade public scrutiny. Using methods from institutional critique, tactical media, and information activism, she investigates information as a source of power and resistance. Her artistic research has focused on Institutional Review Boards, financial instruments, intelligence agencies, and technologies of mass surveillance. She earned an MFA in New Genres from UCLA in 2010, is a PhD candidate in Visual Studies at SUNY Buffalo, and is an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University.