hi, i'm abram stern (aphid). here are some things i made (or helped make):
- oversight machines (works in progress, both in the sense that these are unfinished, but also in that they perform and produce work):
unburning a series of operative images that works to separate and decode burned-in metadata from FBI aerial surveillance of the 2015 Baltimore Uprising (prototype, firefox works better); featured at KQED arts;- smallest procedural utterance subtracts frames of videos, using thresholds of difference to find camera changes in hearings from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. These camera changes correspond to speaker changes, thus generating a temporal map of discourse.
- operational character rendition performs ocr (optical character recognition) as an apophenic (mis)reading of unsearchable, low resolution documents published by the SSCI.
- overhearing (working title) identifies silences, gaps, and murmurs in spoken testimony, affect not encoded in the text versions of prepared remarks and official transcripts.
- illegible.us, a web scraper for SSCI hearing media and metadata; (code)
recent-ish work
- gone gone gone a news performance, internet archive captions search, speech-to-text, html5 video, 2018
- rashomon project multi-perspective chronology for contested events with CITRIS Data and Democracy Initiative; demo; 02012+
- peer to pcast enables peer review of executive branch scientific testimony/presentations with Mark Deckert and Warren Sack; 02009-12
- metavid open archive of us legislative video with Michael Dale; 02005-11, see also
- ip collage additive IP address visualization (see also); 02002; 02009 (recode)
- charlie's ants participatory detournement; 02001 c/w: back in 2001 it was less obvious to me that if you asked internet strangers to contribute text to a project that much of that text would be really. horrible. these aren't my words, but i am still not feeling great about what's in here. i'm leaving it up for now, but may not maintain it the next time it breaks.
older work
recent public talks
- Seminar 4: Reimagining Protocols: Reclaiming, Challenging, and Queering Surveillance Feb 8 2021 at the Vera List Center, w/Margaret Laurena Kemp, Shaka McGlotten, and American Artist