1772 Artefacts of Extraction

I developed this podcast player + mini game for an exhibition at De Fabriek in Eindhoven. Built with matter.js and p5.js, it was used to host a podcast about my research into the problematics of the targeted advertising business model.

Here is a working version of the player, it works on desktop as well as mobile. The podcast audio itself is currently not online.

Interesting ad interests

The core concept of the site lies in the black projectiles, each of which contain a term. These terms are my so-called “ad-interests”.

What that is? Well, in short, it is what all the companies shown — Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Apple, Google, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Twitter — collectively assume I am interested in. Each term is an algorithmic conclusion about my behaviour and is used to target me with ads.

I was able to get access to this data thanks to the GDPR, the EU’s landmark privacy regulation, which grants all EU residents a “right to be informed”. Practically this means anyone can ask an organisation for access to all data they have collected about them. Since its passing, the companies mentioned above have created interfaces to download one’s data. It basically contains a lot of folders with .csv or .html files. Skimming through them, I noticed the ad interests, and was immediately intrigued. How well do they know me after all? Well enough for it to be disturbing.

Poetic payback

Adding all my ad terms from the different companies together makes for 1772 of them. The mini game turns each into a projectile that can be fired at logos representing the companies which extracted data from me. With each hit, the logos become smaller and smaller.

This stands for my frustration and anger over my lack of choice when it comes to these companies, the invasiveness of their tracking and analysis of my life, the non-transparency over what they collect about me, all resulting in a deliberately uninformed non-consent between me and them. My experience with them is far from unique, it is what its like to be a user of their platforms and services.

With each projectile fired, one can give space to ones anger by striking back at them with what they take from us every day: our data.

Setup and functionality

The podcast player features a 15-second rewind, a play/pause and a start-over button. It also has a timing indicator and progress bar. The mini game’s aiming mechanism is responsive; it works by scrolling on desktop and by tap-and-drag on mobile.

The project is mainly coded in JavaScript, the physics run on matter.js while the rendering is done with p5.js. The projectiles are first drawn in p5, and its dimensions are passed to matter, which creates bodies according to each projectiles size. Each bodies’ position is then passed back to p5, which updates the projectiles accordingly. All other bodies are created in p5 and matter simultaneously, with p5 using the matter coordinates to update the drawing continuously.