RMeS Masterclass and Public Lecture: Not For You but For Them: Defusing and Reconfiguring TikTok’s Distortions of Time and Memory

with Ben Grosser (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

Date: 23 May 2024 (CHANGED DATE)
Time: 13.00-17.30 (see detailed programme below)
Venue: University of Amsterdam, BG 1 – Room 0.16 (E-lab), Turfdraagsterpad 9, Amsterdam
Organiser: Dr Alex Gekker (University of Amsterdam)
Credits: 1 ECTS (see assignment below)
For: PhD Candidates, RMa students and staff members.
Registration: You can register for the workshop via THIS LINK. PhD Candidates and RMa students who register for the masterclass, are automatically registered for the public lecture.

For attendance public lecture only, you can register via THIS LINK.

Masterclass

Why do we lose track of time when browsing TikTok’s For You page? What’s happening when users slip into a near trance state as they flip through TikTok’s endless video feed? Who most benefits from the argument that TikTok’s AI algorithm really getsyou, sees you, knows you? This masterclass, led by artist and professor Ben Grosser, will challenge the prevailing mythologies about TikTok’s famed algorithmic feed. After some theoretical foundations and an overview of related projects, attendees will engage in the most unusual of activities: 40 minutes of deliberate, purposeful, and skip-free watching of each and every video on their TikTok feed. This act of careful looking will defuse some of the app’s most pernicious effects so that the group can collectively examine just what TikTok really shows us and how the interface’s design intentionally shapes our perception of the feed. Each video watched will also serve as subjects for the composition of short textual responses based on a series of prompts. These texts will be collected and woven into an app-based artwork that (re)presents TikTok in a novel context, a project that employs the tactic of interface reduction to help others see and feel anew what TikTok is and how it works.

Public Lecture

From Forever More to Degrowth Aesthetics: Tactics of Bounding in the Digital Infinite

Despite their lofty mission statements, today’s leading social platforms primarily emphasize one singular concept: more. These capitalist software machines are designed to stoke an insatiable cycle of production and consumption in order to maximize corporate growth and profit. To achieve this, they leverage data and scale to produce signals and interface patterns that keep users engaged, promising connection and joy in exchange for growing shares of our time and attention. This talk presents a series of art projects that resist these accumulative logics, works that employ an aesthetics of degrowth that reconfigures and/or reimagines the social apps that aim to trap us in endless loops—until there’s no more time left to give.

Readings:

• On Reading and Being Read in the Pandemic: Software, Interface, and The Endless Doomscroller
• What Do Metrics Want? How Quantification Prescribes Social Interaction on Facebook
• Chapter 2 of Francois J Bonnet’s After Death

Assignment:

To receive the EC for the masterclass, please submit one of the short video textual responses you’ve written down as part of the activity. Reflect on why you have chosen this specifically, and how has the workshop changed your relationship with your feed. Please write 1-2 paragraphs and reference at least one of the three readings. Send your assignment to: a.gekker@uva.nl.

Programme:

13.00-14.45 – Masterclass

14.45-15.30 – Coffee break

15.30-16.30 – Public Lecture

Biography:

Ben Grosser creates interactive experiences, machines, and systems that examine the cultural, social, and political effects of software. Recent exhibitions include Centre Pompidou in Paris, The Barbican Centre and Somerset House in London, Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin, SXSW in Austin, and the Japan Media Arts Festival in Tokyo. His projects have been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Wired, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, El País, and Folha. His artworks are regularly cited in books investigating the cultural effects of technology, including The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, The Metainterface, and Investigative Aesthetics, as well as volumes centered on computational art practices such as Electronic Literature, The New Aesthetic and Art, and Digital Art. Grosser is Professor of New Media at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (USA), and a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.