The Artist Exposing the Data We Leave Online

Before social networks became the de facto place to document the mundane moments of our lives, Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch included a feature that allowed users to send captured footage directly to YouTube. All uploaded archives are assigned the same common archive name – IMG_0000, IMG_0001, IMG_0002, etc. The production of multimedia online has led to the proliferation of self-documentation. Millions of early cellphone videos are still as easily accessible on YouTube as digital fossils of life were a decade ago, if you know how to search. A trembling man films a conversation with a dog owner (IMG_0907); a washing machine makes a violent rattling sound (IMG_0006); a child plays with a toy fire truck at a restaurant table (IMG_0129); fish float peacefully in an aquarium, glass You can see the reflection of the phone in (IMG_0116). These clips may have been uploaded to YouTube for the benefit of some family members, or in some cases may have been accidentally sent there. Many of them have accumulated only a handful of views; some have not been viewed at all.

Riley Walz is a 22-year-old artist and programmer from San Francisco who passed a blog post Written by engineer Ben Wallace, who is addicted to watching them. “I thought maybe one out of ten would be funny, but they’re all funny,” Walz told me recently. In this day and age of branded YouTube channels and professionalized TikTok personas, the amateurish, serendipitous nature of the film seems poetic. They don’t exist to pander to their followers or gain virality; They are private notes from a less public time. “They feel like memories,” Walz said. In November, as an online discovery video installation, he decided to create a website dedicated to collecting videos. Titled “IMG_0001,” it’s formatted to look like a TV screen with an image of a remote control that you can click to open the lens. A box at the bottom of the screen lets you click forward to view the next clip. In the past month, over 600,000 visitors have viewed over 6 million videos.

It might be surprising that a project that capitalizes on nostalgia for the early days of the internet is coming from someone who belongs squarely in Generation Z. child”. Doing TikTok or whatever all day long. Instead, he has a digital native version of entrepreneurship. At the age of twelve, he started selling his services as a voice actor through the performance marketplace Fiverr, and within a few years, he completed more than 500 orders. He then used his earnings to His parents were “a little worried” about lending money through the Borrow subreddit, an informal peer-to-peer lending forum, but approved of his activities in the name of self-education. Hang out on Twitter and connect with a community of programmers, who sometimes call themselves makers or solopreneurs, who work together to hack custom websites offering specific services for fun or profit. To kill boredom during training, he programmed a website called Routeshuffle, which used an open-source mapping tool to generate random jogging routes. It was his first success—to this day, about a hundred people pay. Subscribe to this widget – the first in a series of playful digital projects (he thinks the word art is “too pretentious”). In 2020, he created a Twitter account for a fake Republican congressional candidate named Andrew Walz, using an AI-generated likeness, a fake website and fake listings on the candidate directory Ballotpedia , successfully verified the account with a blue check.

Waltz may have the soul of a hacker rather than that of an artist, but his work exists in the lineage of prank art, using the internet as both a medium and a place. Beginning in 2010, German artist Aram Bartholl created a series of “Dead drop“, a USB flash drive embedded in the city wall from which curious visitors can download files. In 2016, a project called ” MSCHF began creating provocative spectacles that circulated online, including an interactive robot dog equipped with a paintball gun and giant red boots that appeared to be based on the cartoon Astro Boy, which were sold as luxury fashion. Waltz even interned MSCHF In New York, he placed a newspaper box with his resume in front of their office—and obtained the appropriate city permits, which, he said, were easy to obtain.

Waltz’s work relies on manipulating online databases, but, as MSCHFhis smartest project blends into the real world. In 2023, while taking business classes at Baruch College, Walz and his roommate, who loved to cook, joked that their Hacker House apartment was a steakhouse. One day, a friend listed the address on Google Maps, and over time, others added fake positive reviews. They then turned the joke into a one-night-only pop-up steakhouse with a legal temporary alcohol license and entertained people who might not have realized they were enjoying a dinner cooked by a group of young amateurs of diners. this era The prank was deliberately glossed over with the headline “New York’s Hottest Steakhouse Is Fake.” Earlier this year, Walz, who was taking a break from college to work with friends at an artificial intelligence startup, installed an Android phone on a pole in San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood that picked up traffic from passing pedestrians and cars. sound. The phone runs Shazam continuously, trying to identify any detectable songs and uploading the noisy clips to the website. Walz named it the “Bop Spotter,” after the ShotSpotter, a city microphone used (occasionally) to monitor gunfire. “This is cultural surveillance,” he wrote on the page.

Walz’s interventions resonated strongly because they drew attention to the hidden, instantaneous profiles that power our daily lives in the age of the iPhone, whether we’re asking for driving directions or searching for news on Google The event is still looking for restaurant recommendations. Where you are, what you are watching, what you like are tracked more or less constantly – either by you voluntarily to yourself, such as taking a video with your phone and posting it online, or by corporate entities is doing it for you. A few months ago, Walz noticed that New York City’s Citi Bike system provided an API, a software interface from which he could get real-time data on which bikes in the city’s more than 30,000-strong city fleet were being ridden and how they were used. Where did it end up. He envisioned a project to determine which bike traveled the fastest or furthest on a given day, so he set up repeated downloads of the data. He thought the results would only amuse New York locals. Then, on Dec. 4, UnitedHealthcare’s CEO Shot to death in downtown Manhattanrumors spread claiming that the gunman (later identified as Luigi Mangione) Escape the scene using a Citi Bike. Walz realized he had downloaded system data from the time of the crime, so he carefully searched and matched a trip that ended near Central Park shortly after the shooting. After unsuccessful attempts to contact reporters, Walz posted it on X.

His message was met with vitriol and threats, partly out of sympathy for the shooter who had become a famous populist incident, and partly because Walz’s post was a reminder of a fact — perhaps obvious in retrospect — that Citi The bike is being tracked. If Walz could roughly estimate the shooter’s whereabouts, could he track anyone’s car? (In the end, Mangione never used Citi Bike at all.) In response to the outcry, Citi Bike changed its API so that the data could no longer be accessed instantly. Waltz destroyed his own access to raw materials, but his project has succeeded, as art often does, in drawing attention to the neglected. ❖