Rhizome — “emerging artistic practices that engage technology” — has been accepting proposals for unique projects that highlight intersections between art and the internet.
Artist Emily Martinez produced a very timely proposal that thoughtfully combines the 374 keywords actively used by The Department of Homeland Security to monitor your activity on social media and just about everything you’ve been doing on the internet. Martinez plans to develop “an open access, social media monitoring service” that uses these popular keywords in combination with the API of many social media platforms.
Essentially, Martinez is planning to start her own type of homeland security website that utilizes these readily available resources to let the public monitor itself, creating a large archive ideally available for anyone to order a print on demand version of these search terms at any time.
As much of today’s breaking news can be seen first on social media, this could provide intelligent insight and a coherent look into what we are saying collectively in today’s largely alarmest state.
In the artist’s own words:
While my project may amount to nothing more than a provocative gesture that may or may not get me into trouble (as one friend noted without hesitation,”You’re going to jail.”), one thing is certain: we live in a climate of fear, where we now openly acknowledge, without irony, that everything we do online is game for a system whose tactics for discerning an actual, immanent threat become increasingly indistinguishable and indefensible from the construction of one. homelandsecurityhearts.us is my way of allowing the public to construct their own in-/congruous narratives from this pre-filtered list of keywords that we already unwittingly supply to the watchful eye of government surveillance efforts for that very ambiguous purpose.
(Images: Emily Martinez)
