rhythmanalysis

e-flux architecture Homophily: The Urban History of an Algorithm by Laura Kurgan, Dare Brawley, Brian House, Jia Zhang, and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun “What follows is a series of probes into the archives of Lazarsfeld and Merton to uncover the history of the concept of homophily and its influence on urbanism and network science.”

Homophily: The Urban History of an Algorithm will be on view at the Chicago Architecture Biennial from September 19, 2019 - January 5, 2020. An exhibit focusing on the urban origins of the term homophily, its formalization and proliferation through the algorithmic logics of online networks, and the risks we run when it becomes not just a descriptive model but a prescriptive rule for social life. The model of homophily was born in the larger context of midcentury urban struggles over race and space in the United States, and this installation by the Center for Spatial Research looks at its legacy, presenting data visualizations that show its contemporary applications. What began as a formal explanation of social life in a housing complex has today become an algorithm that shapes social dynamics in digital space, driving everything from targeted advertising to movie and book recommendations to predictive policing on the streets of Chicago. It perpetuates a social world in which positions are reinforced and concentrated rather than challenged or hybridized. Project Team: Laura Kurgan, Principal Investigator, and Director Dare Brawley, Assistant Director Brian House, Mellon Research Scholar Jia Zhang, Mellon Research Scholar In collaboration with: Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media and Professor of Communication, Simon Fraser University Graphic Design: Studio TheGreenEyl

I've published a chapter from my dissertation as an article for the Journal and Sonic Studies: Animas: Disaster, Data, and the Resonance of a River

My work with locative media and AI discussed in the Architecture League's Urban Omnibus, Stalking the Smart City: "A seamless and predictable urban experience is the promise of the smart city, but what does all this artificial intelligence add up to? Artist Brian House sent up the algorithmic view of the city in a seven-day performance “following” the trajectories of a “plausible yet non-existent New Yorker,” composed from the data of 1,000 anonymous residents. Here, he recounts his experiment, which reveals, and argues for, the persistence of unpredictability."

Creatures: When Species Meet Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center May 10 through August 18, 2019 Curated by Steven Matijcio ARTISTS: Komar & Melamid, Shimabuku, Rivane Neuenschwander & Cao Guimarães, Marina Abramovic, Doug Aitken, Pilar Albarracín, Francis Alÿs, Carla Bengtson, Hilary Berseth, Joseph Beuys, John Bock, Björn Braun, Miguel Calderón, Sophie Calle, Julian Charrière, Max Hooper Schneider, Brian House, Brian Jungen, Nina Katchadourian, Agnieszka Kurant, Duke Riley, Miguel Andre Ríos, Tomás Saraceno, Corinna Schnitt, Kunié Sugiura, William Wegman, Jeff Whetstone, Yukinori Yanagi Western civilization has long looked at the many living creatures outside of humankind as the subjects of dominion; as entities less than equals who serve a purpose rather than as peers. In this historically, almost exclusively one-sided arena, we have regarded the animal and insect kingdoms across a vast spectrum from ally to enemy, and everything in-between. Fauna and Insecta alike have served as avatars, aesthetics, metaphors, foils, and the fodder for food, clothing, shelter and endless anthropomorphic assignment. But there has been a pronounced push back against this hegemony, and a reconsideration of what equality means within the ecosystem. And whether such sentiment arose from power or pity, guilt or responsibility, the voice for animal rights has grown increasingly prominent for those who cannot speak for themselves – amplifying the value of intelligence, emotions and lives that we have habitually regarded as secondary. Accordingly, there have been numerous artworks and exhibitions that position animals and insects as subjects, but considerably fewer that enlist these same creatures as collaborators. What does it mean when an animal or insect has agency within the creative act? This exhibition brings together an international coterie of artists and academics that enlist this untamed, “wild” other as partners in the production of art. And while such an exchange can never truly be equal, and the human species endures as the initiator of such endeavors, this collection of works points to a place where the poles are less distant and shared efforts grow ever closer.

MediaLive: Subterranean Extraction of material resources on a mass scale, secretive government actions, and decisions made by Artificial Intelligence (AI) — we are immersed in a world of activities that take place undercover and underground. Technology inevitably makes its way into every part of this story, made of and disposed back into the earth, used to reveal and conceal. MediaLive: Subterranean will consider what technology buries and what it unearths, and will experiment with curatorial approaches that consider the role of earthly materials in the festival’s programming and process. Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art April 25 - May 27

Rat Radio in Create Digital Music

Rhythmanalysis of the Earth, the Animal, and the Machine Digital Culture speaker series Arts, Media, and Engineering at Arizona State University Brian House will cover artistic research that attempts to make “sense” of our more-than-human relationships. He will discuss how he has adopted Henri Lefebvre's "Rhythmanalysis" as an artistic methodology, and how he has used data, sound and performance as means of refiguring our participation in unexpected ensembles. Recent projects will take us from the subways of NYC to the Okavango Delta and will touch on neural networks, transduction and pulse-coupled oscillation. April 11th, 3pm Stauffer B-Wing Room B125

Just in time for World Rat Day (4/4), it's Rat Radio: This is a broadcast from a rat burrow in New York City's Lower East Side. Rats primarily speak above the threshold of human hearing (20khz), so this audio has been resampled and pitch-shifted down into a human-audible range. The broadcast is cached from the last 24-hours recorded and re-broadcast each day.

Data Publics and Public Data Brian House and Jia Zhang in conversation with Laura Kurgan, Shannon Mattern, Bill Rankin, and Jer Thorp This event will feature new work by Mellon Associate Research Scholars Brian House & Jia Zhang underway as part of their fellowships with the Center for Spatial Research in the 2018-2019 academic year. Brian House is developing a platform to collect geographic data through mobile devices using the distributed web. Jia Zhang is building an interactive atlas that bridges between large public datasets and everyday experiences of urban space. The discussion of both projects will center around the politics of personal data and its relationship to the development of urban policy and the built environment. Their projects point to forms of artistic, academic, and activist practices that might intervene or offer new possibilities in this fraught landscape. AVERY HALL THU, APR 4 6:30PM COLUMBIA GSAPP

Knifeandfork work is included in the Collective Action Archive: Redux show at Franklin Street Works. Brian House and Sue Huang will also be giving a talk about their collaborative practice at the exhibition space on the evening of March 9th.

This edition of Works in Progress brings together artists and researchers who deal with the visual cultures of extraction, writ large: from material harvesting to data extraction industries, from regimes of spatial imaging technologies to instruments of financial exaction… How does film, art practice, and architectural visualization critically ruminate upon, cross-examine, or contest the logics of removal? Aesthetics of Extraction hopes to offer new ways of “looking” at environmental, sociopolitical, and economic sites of extraction, the abstractions and realities they co-produce, and render visible latent or actual pressures, paradoxes and fissures imbricated in such fabrics. Featuring: Vikram Divecha Maria A. Linares Daryl Meador Brian House Thursday, February 7, 2019 at 6 PM – 8 PM GSAPP Incubator at New Inc, 231 Bowery Works in Progress (WiP) is an ongoing series of events that brings together graduate students and faculty in Columbia’s Visual Arts Program, Department of Art History and Archaeology, and the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. It is currently co-organized by Paula Kroll (MODA), Claire Shiying Li (MODA), Amelyn Ng (CCCP), Ayoung Yu (MFA), and Travis Fairclough (MFA).

Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practices We face an unparalleled historical situation of global multispecies suffering, variously known as the Anthropocene, or the New Climatic Regime, and signalled by alarming states of exposure and precarity in more-than-human worlds. The question of how to nurture liveable futures for 'us' – while also asking who and what might be included in this 'us' and with what consequences – depends on our abilities and willingness to re-negotiate means of entering into relations and, indeed, conversations with nonhumans, be they other species, microbes or machines. Hosted by the Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies, at Linneaus University, Sweden. Växjö, January 23-25, 2019.

Field recordings from the Tambopata Nature Reserve in Peru—a research trip and my first to the rainforest. This is just a handheld Tascam but plenty of noise reduction in post-processing.

Code Ecologies is an open forum to explore the environmental impact of computation. This public event is organized by a group of faculty and alumni from the School for Poetic Computation who are passionate about environmental justice. Through presentations and discussions, we will explore the negative influence of computational technologies and network infrastructure on the natural environment, and the precarious conditions they create for the habitat we share among various species. December 15, 2018. 1~6pm School for Poetic Computation and the Michelson Studio, 155 Bank St, NYC Free event. Registration is full with a waitlist, Limited seating Real Time Captioning, disability and access needs will be supported A portion of the event will be live-streamed and open for remote participation

Executing Practices This collection brings together artists, curators, programmers, theorists and heavy internet browsers whose practices make critical intervention into the broad concept of execution. It draws attention to their political strategies, asking: who and what is involved with those practices, and for whom or what are these practices performed, and how? From the contestable politics of emoji modifier mechanisms and micro-temporalities of computational processes to genomic exploitation and the curating of digital content, the chapters account for gendered, racialised, spatial, violent, erotic, artistic and other embedded forms of execution. Together they highlight a range of ways in which execution emerges and how it participates within networked forms of liveliness.

My rat recordings in today's New York Times Magazine! It's a special issue devoted to sound. Rats primarily communicate above the human range of hearing, and they do so richly—they even laugh with one another. For the last couple years I've been recording them with a ultrasonic microphone and lowering the pitch to hear it. Urban rats demonstrate the complexity of our ecological entanglements in so many ways, and I couldn't be more happy to have them in the magazine and thankful they've been willing to try such an experimental thing. Thanks to audio producer Kara Oehler, photographer Dina Litovsky, and editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein. Check out the issue at http://nytimes.com/voyages