database politics and social simulations
  Technically, Natalie Jeremijenko is a conceptual artist. However she has worked in research and development of new technology at Xerox PARC, the Advanced Computer Graphics Center, and is currently an engineer at Stanford University.
In this talk, Jeremijenko will examine some technicalities of the 'information age' specifically addressing the biases implicit in rendering the world as digital information - the Database Politics. Encyclopedic data-collection projects, from the Human Genome project to marketing demographics serve both to define database fields and to impose conceptual divisions. These divisions in turn predetermine public understanding of information. Jeremijenko will use her recent projects, and those of the Bureau of Inverse Technology, to illustrate how information can be used to restrict or prescribe representation. Discussion of the new economic indicator launched by the Bureau, the Despondency Index, will be included.


BUREAU OF INVERSE TECHNOLOGY