Avant-Garde Procedural Art Final: Divided

Divided is a two-laptop installation that explores the online dimension of our current political divide. Inspired by Nam June Paik’s prepared television pieces, I wanted to simulate the browsing experience of two different users across the political spectrum. I wrote two bots using the Selenium automation framework (link to liberal bot, link to conservative bot). Each bot opens a Chrome browser, and then proceeds to read news articles and watch YouTube videos matching the bot’s ideology, ad infinitum.

I see at least 3 different ways to view this work:

(1) It makes a comment on the way we have become prisoners of own filter bubbles, robotically consuming content that is algorithmically served to us based on the content that we have consumed before.

(2) It shows the potential of using browser automation to obfuscate our browsing activity and confuse the myriad of data collection systems on the web, which seems increasingly useful as Congress is taking away more and more privacy protections from us.

(3) It might serve as a good tool for people to immerse themselves in the digital life of someone whose ideology they might not share. Given that our lives are ever-increasingly mediated through screens, building ways of simulating other people’s screens could be a very effective way of building empathy for them.