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Derek Curry, Assistant Professor (Art + Design), and Jennifer Gradecki, Assistant Professor (Game Design + Media Arts), will be featured artists at the NeMe Art Centre in Cyprus this month, as part of the exhibition Self as Actor: Colonising Identity. Curry and Gradecki’s project, entitled the Crowd-Sourced Intelligence Agency (CSIA), is a creative research project that partially replicates an open-source intelligence (OSINT) surveillance system. It allows users to see how their Twitter posts would look to an intelligence agent through an OSINT interface. Read more about the research project here.

The upcoming exhibition at the NeMe Arts Centre will be on February 15, and Curry and Gradecki will be presenting alongside an impressive group of relevant participating artist.

“We are excited about this exhibition because of the past exhibitions in the NeMe Art Centre, an organization that is committed to promoting art works that are interdisciplinary and research-focused,” they described. “We have exhibited with two of the other artists in the show in the past and have affinities with their work. This cohort of presenting artists is a group of people we are excited to have the opportunity to connect with.”

The NeMe Arts Centre (NAC) is NeMe’s permanent physical space, which aims to promote a critical and interdisciplinary approach to the arts that is focused on research and cultural production. The centre supports and encourages initiatives and dialogue that involve institutions, collectives, artists, and scholars from the local and international communities.

Recent innovations to Curry and Gradecki’s CSIA project have included adding two new machine-learning classifiers, one trained on posts made from Twitter accounts of known terrorist organizations (including ISIS and Boko Haram) and the other trained on the Twitter accounts of intelligence agencies (including the FBI, CIA, and Government Communications Headquarters).

“This means that now, users can see how similar a Twitter post is to those made by terrorists and intelligence agents – interestingly, some tweets are similar to both,” explained Curry.

They also recently translated the project into Spanish for an exhibition at the Spanish Cultural Center in Mexico City, and for that exhibition, made a watchlist that included Mexican politicians, companies, and drug cartels. The project will also be featured in a book chapter that Curry and Gradecki co-authored.

We look forward to continuing to see how the project grows and unfolds. For more information about the NeMe Arts Centre, click here.