Socio-political Change of Taste

By Jonas Mindaugas Paberzis

In an age of voluntary personal and invasive capitalistic archiving, seemingly unassuming collections of online data determine a new kind of individual: defined by collective keywords and guidelines; in-between that of a mirror reflection and a three-year-old’s doodle of what a person should look like. But the deeper such odd and non-existent (yet registered) individuals sink into the uncanny valley, the more they reflect incredibly accurate or true representations of what they copy and collect.

The video work Socio-political Change of Taste is a tool for evaluating and reproaching these notions by the artist. The work explores the data collected online by companies such as Spotify, Google and Facebook and tries to find a coherent representation of one separate individual amongst the piles of digital debris. In this work Jonas Mindaugas Paberzis traces how their socio-political mentalities developed over the past five years as portrayed in relation to their musical taste over time.

Research

The initial development process was based off of collecting notation of auditory data from different companies, that have archived absurd amounts of personal information from the artist, that would coincide within the last half decade, such as Youtube's search and watch histories over multiple accounts, Google book research over multiple accounts too, Facebook's interested events connecting with music and/or books, Spotify's podcast and song listen history, their yearly "Personal Top Songs" recap playlists, as well as, their artists sorted by added date, and lastly, the torrent, computer and phone backup folders.

The idea for the work started simply with a question of how does these data clumps represent an individual and what is being sought out in that representation? In this case specifically, is it even possible to notice the author's socio-political mindset development of the past five years?

Sources

[1] Kaltmeier Olaf, Raussert Wilfried (2019) Sonic Politics: Music and Social Movements in the Americas. Oxfordshire: Routledge Press.

[2] Schreiber Brad (2019) Music is Power: Popular Songs, Social Justice, and the Will to Change. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.

[3] Thomson Rex (2016) The Intertwined Relationship Between Music And Politics. Available from https://liveforlivemusic.com/features/the-intertwined-relationship-between-music-and-politics/ (accessed 10 February 2021).

[4]Morvaridi Lexy (2021) Music and Politics: an Introduction. Available from http://lonelytable.net/features-1/2016/music-and-politics-an-introduction (accessed 10 February 2021).

Data

The data used in this project was collected from requesting Facebook, Spotify and Google to release what information they have been storing so far on me, such as: likes, events, locations, google searches, messages, played videos, music, podcasts, books, personal notes and comments.

Prototypes & Experiments

Through the whole process an idea of digitality within the visuals stayed prominent and quite early on it manifested itself as using code for certain visualisations and/or animation.

Though fairly consistent, the making of the video did hit a few roadblocks of wanting to create something that would be truly impressive but then would be re-planned due to numerous computer issues and a rather prominent time constraint.