Scraping Art - Mapping the Neuland

Marlene Ronstedt, Ahmed Alsharif Web scraping is a technique to
algorithmically scavenge websites for information, images and
videos. The place where this data harvest is taking part is the
stack, or the internet. The Stack has become a new site of power, a
transnational layer of control. Internet infrastructures allow for
new modes of control which act outside of the realm of nation
states. Due to its planetary scale infrastructure the Stack holds a
governing function. Web scraping can be used as a tool to visualize
the constantly changing present of this new territory or the
“Neuland,” as Angela Merkel has called it. The “Neuland” is more
familiar to us than to conservative politicians beyond 50, but its
constant way of updating itself and extending makes it a territory
which can never be fully grasped. New technologies, new ways of
encryption, faster chips render the old ones obsolete and
constantly change the political playing field. The answer to the
question of who governs and controls, who sits in the center of the
panopticon changes with every new feature. The Internet is no
longer an anarchist playground, but it is also still far away from
being a unison virtual shopping mall. Scraping a fraction of it to
expose its infrastructures shows us the messiness of online power
struggles. On the more technical side we will explain how we are
using scrapers to get live data, streams and simulations. Here the
dinosaur brain of a C programmer meets the simplicity of Python. We
will talk about why giving up on the ego-shot you get doing
everything yourself C-style is the way forward and how to hack your
way into video streaming and using Selenium, an ugly solution
rendered beautifully with Open GL.