Tim Schwartz: Recent Episodes
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A solo exhibition at the Center for Book Arts in New York City. April 21 – June 25, 2022 Read my conversation with Kristine Khouri about this body of work. Resistant Systems is a Los Angeles–based, digital-focused wellness brand. We have products to purify your digital life — not simply your body and mind. Originally […]
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For the exhibition Resistant Systems: Spring 2022 at the Center for Book Arts in April 2022, Kristine Khouri was nice enough to sit down with me for an afternoon to discuss this body of work. Kristine Khouri is a researcher whose interests span the history of art collecting, exhibiting, and infrastructure of the Middle East […]
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A collection of tools for manifesting strong passphrases while helping you release the toxins of your past security habits. Through a process of focused meditation, dice rolling, and memorization mantras, you will cleanse your security. A collaboration with Demerritt Pauwels Editions. Handmade paper by Heather Peters. Kit includes Word List, five red dice, custom brass […]
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Coin Collector helps you on your journey of giving up on desires associated with money. Find freedom in the release of your associations with paper money, fiat currency, government control, and even precious metals. Once you start your crypto collection, you will see economic value and exchange through a whole new lens. The materiality of […]
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In 2020 there were a tremendous number of tips that came to newsrooms directly from whistleblowers. From the FinCen files, Trump’s taxes, continued revelations of sexual harrasment, discrimination and unequitable treatment within organizations, and many in the healthcare fields speaking up. But, how can a newsroom make sure that they are the one that a source turns […]
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As protesters continue to occupy the streets around the U.S., many are filming police brutality. If you are in a situation with the cops or witnessing one that has the potential to turn violent, whether at a protest or simply while out in your community, you should be prepared to take video and document events […]
The post How to Protect Yourself From Retaliation When Filming Police Brutality appeared first on Tim Schwartz.
In January 2020, my book A Public Service: Whistleblowing, Disclosure, and Anonymity was released. It was published by OR Books and edited by Tim Harper with a great deal of help by Margaret Schneider. You can buy it right now at OR’s site or on Amazon. This is a book for anyone who has thought about disclosing information, those who are interested in protecting their […]
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Today is Veterans Day in the United States and as the nation honors its veterans, it is important to remember that whistleblowing is a public service and one that can be a catalyst for change to better protect individuals and families that have served their country. In 2014, a number of whistleblowers began disclosing to the press […]
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A solo show at The Muted Horn gallery in Cleveland, OHDecember 1, 2018 – January 3, 2019 Resistant Systems: Welcome is the launch of a new digital-focused wellness lifestyle brand. RS provides the tools, books, products, and looks needed to become secure. This unveiling includes the release of the Digital Resistance Kit and the Manual […]
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Digital Resistance Kit provides you with the tools for a true identity detox. Let go of your digital profile and find clarity in anonymously browsing the web and pseudonymously communicating with others. Everyone knows who you are online — release your true inner strength through anonymity. A collaboration with Demerritt Pauwels Editions. Kit includes the […]
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This piece simply documents a moment. Hillary Clinton speaks to a nation and concedes victory to Donald Trump. At the same time Americans — or at least identities on social media — activate the digital moment around her.
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I had the good fortune of doing a residency at SPACES in Cleveland, OH in the summer of 2016. During my 6 weeks at SPACES, I helped protesters at the RNC protect themselves against cellphone tracking, led a dark web treasure hunt, and made two new artworks: Echoings and Data Transmissions. Below is a video […]
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The LA Crypto Crew wrote a new article for Hyperallergic. The guide goes after some low hanging fruit with locking down your phone, but really dives into setting up an alternative identity and dropping off the digital norm grid.
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Data Transmissions is a series of letterpress prints of cell-phone screenshots, collected through an open call on social media, that reflects on the value of data and its processing. A selection of the submitted screenshots were translated into letterpress through a physical process of hand-setting metal type, cutting linoleum blocks, and using a Vandercook mechanical […]
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Society has reached a new plateau in the continuous snowballing of technological progress; we stand at a place where we need devices on our bodies or in our homes. The Echo is an internet-connected device produced by Amazon to be a voice-first virtual assistant that lives in your home, much like Siri on an iPhone. […]
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I am going to be at SPACES in Cleveland representing the LA Cryptoparty Crew. I’ll be helping activists, protestors, and anyone that wants to protect their digital devices and digital footprint during the Republican National Convention. I’ll be holding office hours from 1-4pm Monday, July 18 – Wednesday, July 20. More info on protecting your […]
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An installation shown at Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art from May 16 to May 22, 2016. The text below is by Mardee Goff, Curator of BMoCA. CryptoTherapy is an installation by Los Angeles-based artist Tim Schwartz that utilizes the front windows of BMoCA. Covering each windowpane with a white sheet, Schwartz has created an opaque layer […]
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Solo exhibition at Leon Gallery in Denver, CO, March 12th – April 24th, 2016. Escapism explores the spaces between worlds. It asks us, as viewers, to place ourselves somewhere between the analogue and the digital, between the physical and the virtual, challenging us to consider the ways in which these seemingly disparate worlds interact and overlap. […]
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This post was written with Willow Brugh to summarize our advice for coders wanting to create a new reunification application. When a disaster occurs, whether fast like an earthquake or slow like a drought or war, people go missing. As outsiders wishing to contribute to restoring the stability of our worlds, the desire to reunite […]
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A show at the Visual Arts Gallery at the University of California, San Diego. Shown from December 2014 – January 2015.
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While at a residency at Provisions Library, I built a system for analyzing the United States patent database. Basically creating a system where I can create a family tree of patents either starting with a recent patent or a historical one. I used this software and combined it with a new drawing technique, one where I […]
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Based on other books that I had encountered in the Reanimation Library, I expected Gerald S. Snyder’s The Right to Be Let Alone: Privacy in the United States, to be an off-the-grid, back-to-nature, survivalists musings on privacy, brimming with paranoid attitudes such as “get off my land” and “don’t trust the banks.” To my surprise The Right […]
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A two person show with Brigita Ozolins at the SASA Gallery in Adelaide, Australia. The show was curated by Daniel Chaffee and Jennifer Rutherford. I had two pieces in the show: Playing the Library and eScape 50. Book Futures Catalog Text by Jennifer Rutherford Run your finger down a spine and remember where you were when you first touched that body. What desire kindled in […]
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Installed at the SASA Gallery in Adelaide, Australia for the show Book Futures. The piece Playing the Library attempts to actively document how people browse library books, where the library is treated as an instrument that can be played. A custom book scanner was built that could be moved around and deployed at a library quickly, this gives performers complete […]
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On Friday, October 24th I hosted (along with a few others) LA’s first Cryptoparty in my trailer STAT-US. The event brought together individuals with various backgrounds to learn how to browse the web anonymously and send encrypted email. After such a successful event we will try to host one every few months with some more […]
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For the last two years I have been experimenting with eInk screens, you might have seen these screens in a Kindle. They are matte, grey-scale, and interestingly only require power to change the image on the screen. For the show Book Futures in Australia I created a new piece comprised of fifty of these screens. […]
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An edition of 16 books created for the show Pulp Atlas, which brought together 12 artists to each create a new book for the show. Because I did not know most of the other artists, I decided to use their names as the starting point for my piece. I did basic internet searches on their […]
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I have a two person show titled Book Futures, opening in September in Adelaide, Australia at the SASA gallery at the University of South Australia with Brigita Ozolins. As a lead up I have been preparing my exhibition statement and images for the catalog. As a preview, here is the text and images. The two […]
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Playing the Library documents and remixes the experience of browsing a library through performances with a book scanner. A scanning system is being created that will digitize books on the fly and simultaneously create print-on-demand books, ebooks, and online editions. Artists, researchers, librarians, collectors, and library patrons will be asked to perform the scanning system […]
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So let me begin by saying, I have largely cut Google out of my life, but I can’t get that last 1-2% out! It is really, really hard! I started out this series of posts called Getting Out of Google knowing that it would be technically possible and that it would just be a matter of […]
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I’ve been pretty happy with Google Chrome for the last year, but with this project I thought I should reevaluate my browser and extensions. The one thing I am excited to get away from is Chrome’s Google account integration, which synchronizes your bookmarks, history, and settings among multiple Chrome instances on different devices. This inherently […]
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This blog post was supposed to be really inspiring about email encryption and would help people realize why it is important to be able to send encrypted messages whenever they wanted. It would also have simple and friendly tutorials that would show people how easy it is to get encryption setup for their emails. Even […]
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So last we spoke I had chosen to use Neomailbox.com as my new email host. It was a snap to setup my email address with them: I simply had to change two IP addresses where I bought timschwartz.org and the folks at Neomailbox took care of the rest. They have a nice webmail client and […]
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Today I stumbled on a list of privacy and security conscious email hosting providers. It seems to be up-to-date and well maintained (Lavabit and Silent Circle are gone). I ordered the list by which providers would allow me to host my own domain name and then started removing providers that wouldn’t work for me for […]
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To better understand what the heck I’m getting into with migrating away from Gmail, I spent a few days doing research, reading posts on the interweb, and discussing some technical things with my technical friends. It is now clear to me that if I really wanted the highest degree of privacy and control over my […]
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I have been thinking about this for a long time and have finally decided I need to extract myself and my data from Google. This includes: gmail, google analytics, google drive, google chat, google search, google maps, google chrome, and maybe even google calendar (though my wife might not like this one), youtube, and google […]
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One of my projects Commodify.us is in a show in D.C.: Cyber in Securities.
Also, Marc Garrett wrote a nice write up about the project on furtherfield.
This is a cultural shift that demonstrates how contemporary Hacktivists are developing software that promises to start to offer realistic service infrastructures. When I interviewed Charlie Gere in 2012[8] he said that these artists “are not part of the restricted economy of exchange, profit, and return that is at the heart of capitalism, and to which everything else ends up being subordinated and subsumed. Thus they find an enclave away from total subsumption not outside of the market, but at its technical core.” For me, this kind of work is of central importance to the contemporary era, and it only occurs where artists cross over into territories where their knowledge of networks directly contributes to the building of alternative structures of social independence.
The Penrose Library at Denver University was recently renovated and now a majority of DU’s books are stored offsite. To checkout a book now, one goes to the library, finds the book on a computer, requests it, and then waits a few days to receive it. Along with this move to offsite storage, the university […]
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Blank pages were removed from the 400+ used books purchased for the show Materials On Reserve. This included colored endsheets, pages stamped “Discarded”, and original checkout card pages. From these pages eight books were created. Each book is unique and is bound to the smallest page in the book, allowing the larger pages to protrude […]
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By sifting through the digital Google versions of the 400+ books that were purchased for the show Materials On Reserve, I found four pages that depict anomalies or errors in the scanning and digitization of books into ebooks. The prints are complemented by physical copies of the scanned books.
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A barcode scanner is attached to two receipt printers. The books in the exhibition Materials On Reserve can be scanned and two receipts are printed. Each receipt contains information on the book and a QR code links to the digital version of the book. One receipt is for the viewer, while the others pile up […]
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Sam Spina made a comic about my installation at Denver University, Materials On Reserve. I really love it. It is awesome not only to see yourself in comic form, but to have someone really understand and enjoy your art and then go even further and make a comic about it. Thanks Sam! There is only […]
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UPDATE: I’ve updated the software and it should be much easier to install and use on any Raspberry PI. It does NOT have a GUI interface any more, but is easier to just plug and play. It is now hosted on github and all updates will be pushed there. https://github.com/timatron/videolooper-raspbian For a show I did in Japan […]
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A collaboration with Birgit Bachler, Walter Langelar, and Owen Mundy. Created during a _moddr residency @ WORM in Rotterdam, The Netherlands Commodify.us is a web application that allows people to visualize and license their Facebook data directly to marketers. After exporting their data from Facebook and uploading it to commodify.us, users can choose to license […]
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I recently finished a paper discussing my last series of works in the context of melancholy in the digital age. The abstract is below and the entire paper is available as a pdf: Loss, Meaning, and Melancholy in the Digital Age Abstract As society has absorbed the cornucopia of digital technologies of the late twentieth and […]
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A series of 11 prints derived from loss in the digitization process of the famous “The Temple of Flora.” In1799 Robert John Thornton released the first installment of the book, it was the first large color floral volume ever produced. Inspired by Linnaeus, the founder of modern botany, Thornton set out to represent the newly […]
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In 1865 Wild Bill killed Dave Tutt in the town square in Springfield, MO. This quick-draw style duel was recorded and portrayed to the public in a Harper’s Monthly article in 1867. Full of tall tales straight from Wild Bill’s mouth, this article played into the creation of the mythology of the wild west, specifically […]
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Limited edition book. 6 copies. Includes digital offset book and Amazon Kindle, both hand bound and in slipcase. Theodore Low De Vinne is one of the fathers of book publishing in America. He was one of the nine founders of the Grolier Club, the commissioner of the font Century, and the most prolific writer on book […]
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In 2010, I spent six months traveling the United States in a mobile research lab, visiting over fifty libraries, museums, and archives investigating what is being lost as these institutions transition into collecting and storing digital artifacts. Out of this research I created three new artworks (Botanical Loss, Modern Methods of Book Composition, and Reimagining Wild Bill) and […]
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Dripping directly out of the structure of the building, this piece is in a continuous state of oxidation. Nozzles at the top of the sculpture spray salt water onto the sculpture which in turn rusts the iron. The piece was first installed at the Oceanside Museum of Art and then shown at compactspace gallery in Los […]
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World Conspiracy represents an individual’s conception of the world. This piece was constructed through the analysis of over 10,000 documents saved by an anonymous conspiracy theorist from September 19, 2001 to January 15, 2009. The frequency with which a country is mentioned in these documents dictates the size of that country. For example, Israel and […]
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At the Teen Studio in the New Children’s Museum, visitors participated in “America’s View of the World” by tearing out newspaper articles and pasting them on a map of the world – the resulting mass of pasted articles created a topography that represents which countries and places the news media are writing about. The installation […]
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Click here to go to the Data Graphing Interface Last year I wrote a data mining application that can automatically gather term usage data from the New York Times website. I used this data for a number of my projects including Geohistoriography and Command Center. I have just released a public version of the graphing interface […]
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This show captures how America views the world as seen through the lens of the American media. All data was collected from the New York Times, namely the number of articles written about a certain country for each year. The two wall drawings are representations of the 2008 state of America’s view of the world. […]
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Command Center replays the last 150 years of history, by showing the frequency of terms used in the New York Times. Over a four minute period, the four digit LED display counts the years from 1851 to 2008. At the same time the gauges move to their respective values, each of which represents the number of articles containing a that term in the New York Times. This slow pace of information transmission allows the viewer enough time to register the state of each year while still witnessing the trends in changes over multiple years. As the forward procession reaches 2008, the gauges pause and the present state of history is shown, giving the viewer enough time to reflect on this information. In a final gesture, the years recede as the last 158 years are played backwards in 30 seconds. This change in cadence serves to set up a different reading of time. The 158 years go by quickly enough that individual data points are impossible to read, but peaks can be observed and processed.
A card catalog designed to hold all of the songs on my iPod, 7,390 songs. Each song is cataloged on a single card. The cards are organized in reverse chronological order, that is the songs I listened to most recently are in the front of the catalog, and the songs I haven’t listened to in two years exist at the back. The piece is seven feet long when closed and just under fourteen feet when opened.
Like an insect trapped in amber or a museum jewel trapped behind glass, an orange was traped in a cube of resin. Unlike the former, this hermetically sealed container has a hole in it, allowing the orange to decompose.
The piece is attached via a network cable to the internet where it monitors news and search results for “paris hilton” and “paris france” and displays an average result in real-time.