The “open source” model initially emerged as a way for programmers to collaborate on efforts to build and share code, but has since evolved to embody an ethos of sharing and cooperation that pervades software development as a whole. As many technologists have seen, however, a philosophy of openness can leave them vulnerable to attempts by large corporations to use the norms of open source communities for their own benefits. This article examines the breach of social trust that occurs when companies do not fulfill expectations of reciprocity in their relationships with open source communities, and instead attempt to co-opt their work for monetary gain. Through analysis of three case studies, I seek to emphasize the often misleading nature of these processes and show that they are directly incorporated into the business models of large corporations, even if they are not openly acknowledged as such.

In 2016 I created an installation entitled #Bellwether, which was a visual exploration of social media content surrounding the 2016 United States presidential primaries, focused specifically on voters in Ohio. Over the course of a year, I collected more than 14 million public Twitter posts that referenced the candidates by name, and repurposed the design of their campaign merchandise to reflect voter sentiment, replacing the curated messaging that they were pushing into the political sphere. After the election, I collected public data from Trump’s administration—including tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account, executive orders and memoranda and transcripts of interviews and news conferences—and edited the text of the US Constitution from his perspective, using the data to justify changes I made to the original text. I presented the final work in the form of a Presidential Executive Order, mirroring everything from typography to paper choices to the leather holders in which Executive Orders are publicly presented after signing. This creative study explores the lessons learned from these two projects; specifically, I examine the appropriation of political design and its signifiers. I argue that by manipulating and subverting this visual language, the work attempts to counter monolithic narratives perpetuated by dominant political systems, while illuminating the effects of media, technology and the Internet on our perceptions of the government and those who serve in it. By employing alternate historical narratives, the speculative nature of these works also offers a way of imagining a more nuanced approach to current political analysis and meaning-making.

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New media artists—and, more broadly, those who consider themselves to be “creative” technologists—increasingly find themselves questioning whether or not to use tools that are owned or administered by companies that engage in activity that they consider to be problematic, such as surveillance, cooperation with discriminatory law enforcement practices, or toxic work cultures. However, it is difficult to conceive of a tech-based art practice that functions without utilizing $2 of the dominant technologies that we find ourselves surrounded by on a regular basis. As a result, artists who work with technology are inevitably thrust into perpetually shifting situations or environments, controlled by the tech industry, which then directly impact the creation of their work; its longevity; and, often, their own perceptions of it. This paper represents the beginnings of an investigation into the relationships between new media artists, the tools they use for their work (including data sources and APIs, hardware and software, operating systems, and project storage), and those who control these technologies. I seek to portray this creative community as one that exists in a state of constant uncertainty, and that finds itself in this position at the behest of the interests of the tech industry—which both uses artists’ work as a way of positioning itself as cutting-edge and original, and as a means of locating potential sites of intentional misuse and subversion. Artists are thus forced to constantly adapt their processes to the demands of those who control the technology, ultimately reinforcing the authority of these dominant systems.

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