CRAWLERS is an anonymous collective of social bots crawling user data and establishing an uncanny parallel social network of warped truths and stolen personal information.
The army of disguised fake identities acts like human profiles in order to scrape text, data and information from the befriended user accounts. They interact with their friends, send requests, comments and thus slowly build up a growing network. They gather information and images from the friend profiles which are then immediately transformed, altered and manipulated.
Based on this transformed data a new mirror website of the social profiles is created step by step. On this page all accounts for the crawled profiles of real humans will be recreated in a modified, strangely alienated format. Everybody who has been crawled by the bot group is from that moment on represented in the uncanny mirror network. A link will be send to each human profile with an invitation to examine their alter ego online.
The resulting mirror representations feel close to reality but slightly off. No information is correct anymore and everything has been renamed and tempered with. Artificial intelligences are incorporated to alter, modify and enhance the information of the user profiles. Context sensitive deep-learned models are able to create half-truths and seemingly coherent alternative worlds.
The concept behind it deals with the ubiquitous behavior of undercover bot agents and the sensation of stolen personal data. The altered site is like a dark mirror site of yourself, where your identity, data and social network have been transferred to a suspicious new location. It’s a digital parallel world, a dark illegal space of uncanny parallels.
The piece runs continuously on several servers and can be visited online. Resulting profiles and the active bots are displayed in an installation format. All processes (crawling, data transformation and assembly) are completely automated without any manual interaction whatsoever. No human is responsible for any of the content.
The work is part of the project »The Intelligent Museum« and is funded by the »Kultur Digital« program of the German Federal Cultural Foundation.
Commissioned ZKM | Karlsruhe and Deutsche Museum
All information on the project can be found here: http://www.alexanderschubert.net/works/Crawlers.php
