Admittedly, this week became sidetracked by the deep freezes and power outages in Texas. Regardless, I would still like to use this entry to talk about the progress I have made conceptually as well as one experiment I was able to try.

Is This A Tool Or A Performance?

It was very helpful to meet with Andrew to discuss this persistent question. As I mentioned last week, I am a bit concerned that I will get bogged down in the technical aspects of my project and never spend time testing it with stories/performance generation. He suggested that I look at Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information as a source of formal inspiration. This reminded me of a show I worked on my senior year of high school, The Neo-Futurists’ Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, in which random chance determines the progression of the performance from a roster of 40 short plays. I think that this would be a fantastic way to proceed, to develop short performances based on the technical aspects I am trying to work on. I think that this would strike a nice balance altogether and allow me to put together a collection of material by the end of the semester. If possible, I would love to have a few projects by the end of our 12 weeks, leaving the option to put together a larger performance over the summer.

Technical Progress

This week, I had a few goals for technical experimentation. 1. I wanted to reproduce Surya Mattu’s method for monitoring HTTP/HTTPS traffic for his project with Kashmir Hill. 2. I wanted to set up a Zigbee traffic monitor based on the documentation from the zigbee2mqtt github. 3. I wanted to apply both these methods to the Amazon Echo I purchased this week (obviously delivery was delayed due to weather). I ended up completing only the first of these goals and I was unable to reproduce Surya’s project. I believe that his tutorial may have been a bit out of date and there were some broken links in his documentation. I ended up finding this tutorial using mitmproxy software on my Raspberry Pi. After configuring, once I connected to the Pi with my phone and downloaded a certificate, I could see all requests I made in my search browser. I was most interested to find that auto-filled suggestion also send data to their respective sites. As we were discussing issues of consent in Roopa’s Local Data class, this experiment made me think about all of the ways companies assume our consent to send data. Steven’s comment about “asking questions for us” was very impactful and directly related to these search query findings.

Next Steps

Moving forward, I would like to look finish the traffic monitoring projects I had planned and look into the Alexa SDK. Ideally, by next week, I would love to have some short performance with my Echo (if it arrives).