Virtual Reality Experience, 2020
These days, we find the content we receive online is filtered for us by algorithms. On the one hand this is convenient, but on the other it creates interesting and troubling echo chambers for information.
In 2020, I worked on a research project at Baltan Laboratories in Eindhoven with 4 other artists, designers, and researchers where we had the opportunity to research more on this topic around algorithmic filter bubbles. We wanted to explore how synthetic media might continue to exacerbate the problems we see with information silos online. Together, we created new social media personas for ourselves and trained social media algorithms across Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok to show us content outside our usual media sphere. We then scraped the video, photo, and comment data from these accounts and ran the data through different machine learning algorithms to explore the types of visual content that would emerge. There was a stark contrast across the visual imagery that we brought to life in virtual reality.
