“Although our study doesn’t present ways to mitigate negative hunger-induced emotions, research suggests that being able to label an emotion can help people to regulate it, such as by recognising that we feel angry simply because we are hungry. Therefore, greater awareness of being ‘hangry’ could reduce the likelihood that hunger results in negative emotions and behaviours in individuals.”
Web scraping describes techniques for automatically downloading and processing web content, or converting online text and other media into structured data that can then be used for various purposes. In short, the user writes a program to browse and analyze the web on their behalf, rather than doing so manually. This is a common practice in silicon valley, where open html pages are transformed into private property: Facebook began as a (horny) web scraping project, as did Google and all other search engines. Web scraping is also frequently used to acquire the massive datasets needed to train machine learning models, and has become an important research tool in fields such as journalism and sociology.
I define "scrapism" as the practice of web scraping for artistic, emotional, and critical ends. It combines aspects of data journalism, conceptual art, and hoarding, and offers a methodology to make sense of a world in which everything we do is mediated by internet companies. These companies surveill us, vacuum up every trace we leave behind, exploit our experiences and interject themselves into every possible moment. But in turn they also leave their own traces online, traces which when collected, filtered, and sorted can reveal (and possibly even alter) power relations. The premise of scrapism is that everything we need to know about power is online, hiding in plain sight.
This is a work-in-progress guide to web scraping as an artistic and critical practice, created by Sam Lavigne. I will be updating it over the coming months! I'll also be doing occasional live demos either on Twitch or YoutTube.
Satellite Collections
digital prints
2009-2011
You can see from pole to pole and across oceans and continents and you can watch it turn and there's no strings holding it up, and it's moving in a blackness that is almost beyond conception.
-Eugene Cernan, an astronaut on the Apollo 17, on seeing the Earth from space
In all of these prints, I collect things that I've cut out from Google Satellite View-- parking lots, silos, landfills, waste ponds. The view from a satellite is not a human one, nor is it one we were ever really meant to see. But it is precisely from this inhuman point of view that we are able to read our own humanity, in all of its tiny, repetitive marks upon the face of the earth. From this view, the lines that make up basketball courts and the scattered blue rectangles of swimming pools become like hieroglyphs that say: people were here.
The alienation provided by the satellite perspective reveals the things we take for granted to be strange, even absurd. Banal structures and locations can appear fantastical and newly intricate. Directing curiosity toward our own inimitably human landscape, we may find that those things that are most recognizably human (a tangle of carefully engineered water slides, for example) are also the most bizarre, the most unlikely, the most fragile.
Echo Nest Remix is the Internet Synthesizer. Make amazing things from music, automatically.
Turn any music or video into Python or JavaScript code.
Echo Nest Remix lets you remix, re-edit, and reimagine any piece of music and video, automatically and algorithmically.
Remix has done the following: played a song forever, walkenized and cowbellized hundreds of thousands of songs in a week, reversed basically everything, beat matched two songs, split apart DJ mixes by their individual tracks, made new kinds of video mashups, corrected sloppy drumming, synced video to a song, transitioned between multiple covers of the same song, made a cat play piano, and taught dogs to play dubstep. Check out all the examples here.
Remix is available as an open source SDK for you to use, for Mac, Linux, and Windows:
Install for Python: sudo pip install remix
. Full installation details, packages for Mac and Windows, and complete Python documentation are here.
Try JavaScript: Test out remix.js here.
Download JavaScript: remix.js. Full JavaScript install details and documentation are here.
Why are some ideas, processes and products (or, memes) popular, and others not? And - What is the unit of culture? For that matter: What is `Culture'? This short book synthesizes the Systems Model of Creativity (Csikszentmihalyi 1988, 2014) and Evolutionary Epistemology (Campbell 1974) to explain why some things are popular, and defines and describes the structure of the Meme, the unit of culture (Dawkins 1976).
Tausende Gangnam-Style- und Harlem-Shake-Videos auf Youtube sind der Beleg: Remix ist heute ein Massenphänomen. War das 20. Jahrhundert noch geprägt von zentralisierter Kulturproduktion, laden heute Computer, Videohandys und Internet zu kreativer und öffentlicher Interaktion mit Kulturgütern ein.
Viele der erfolgreichsten Videos auf Youtube und Facebook profitieren davon, dass andere NutzerInnen eigene Versionen von ihnen erstellen und so zur Bekanntheit des Originals beitragen. Die Bandbreite reicht dabei von verwackelten Handy-Videos bis hin zu aufwendigen Remixversionen. Sich für die Erstellung von Werken bei Vorhandenem zu bedienen, ist kein neues Phänomen. Der Blogger Malte Welding illustrierte diesen Umstand einmal unter Verweis auf Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, der Bach-Fugen bearbeitete und die den Fugen voranstehenden Präludien mit Eigenkompositionen ersetzte, die für Streicher geeignet waren: „Er remixte Bach. Er mashte ihn, er fledderte die toten Noten und schuf etwas Neues.“