Web Scraping as Critical and Artistic Intervention with Liat Berdugo
Saturday, August 29, 1-3pm
Free or $10 suggested donation; open to ages 16+.
Limited seats available; register below.
How might artists critically intervene on the web by “scraping”, or automating the downloading of text, images, and other data, from the web? The goal of the workshop is to introduce both the concept and practice of web scraping to participants, and get them thinking about its artistic possibilities as a critical practice.
Participants will learn what web scraping is, how it is used by tech corporations all around us, and the critical and artistic possibilities of scraping the web, themselves. Then, using Craigslist Buffalo as an example web source, participants will learn the basics of how websites are structured in HTML, and how to scrape web content using the Python programming language and the library “Beautiful Soup” (which has special functions to automate web scraping).
Attendees: Though there is no technical knowledge set that is required, participants must be comfortable working on a computer (they should know how to open applications, and find files using Finder). Participants who already know basic HTML & CSS (the languages websites are written in) will have an easier time, but this workshop will be accessible to those who don’t.
Funding for this session of Squeaky Wheel’s Workspace Residency is provided by the Teiger Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Special thank you to the panelists of this session of the residency: Ibrahim Kane, Carra Stratton, and Kathryn Ramey. Learn more about the program here.
Biography of the artist
Liat Berdugo is an American-Israeli media artist and writer whose work investigates embodiment, labor, ecology and militarization in relation to capitalism, technological utopianism, and the Middle East. Lately, her work has focused on image archives and the violent greenwashing of settler-colonialism in Israel/Palestine. Her work has been shown at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), MoMA PS1 (New York), and Transmediale (Berlin), among others, and her writing appears in Rhizome, Temporary Art Review, Real Life, Places, and The Institute for Network Cultures, and various academic and open access presses. Along with Emily Martinez, she is one half of the art collective, Anxious to Make, and is the co-founder of the Living Room Light Exchange, a monthly new media art series in the San Francisco Bay Area. Berdugo received an MFA from RISD and a BA from Brown University, and is an associate professor of Art + Architecture at the University of San Francisco.
