Critical Data Overloads

This workshop introduces the students to scraping as a critical artistic practice. Scraping consists in designing and executing mass data gathering on the web, recombined and represented in a process of gestalt, in which the whole is more than the sum of its parts. What can we express through collecting every single review on Yelp? Every picture on Tumblr? Every statement from the Minister of Finances? Every apartment listing on wg-gesucht.de? Every picture from leading curator’s Instagram accounts? Every video posted by various telegram channels?

The Web is constantly flooded with data, both overwhelming us and invisible in whole. By learning how to extract such data, we will learn how to cast a different eye on the platforms which provide it, on the visual and lexical cultures to which they belong, and on the scale of media production in our era. We will be rooting this perspective in pre-digital practices, particulary in the collage and dérive of surrealists, but also come to see the digital in general, and the Web in particular, as a material which can be worked with in very specific ways.