“Starting with the Antidatamining series in 2005, the collective has focused on the developments of data mining and Big Data, undertaking the task of meticulously deconstructing the methods of algorithmic trading in order to display them in a kind of cabinet of curiosities. This examination of contemporary economic structures was furthered in their 2017 documentary piece The Great Offshore, which deals with the normalized networks of offshore finance and, inter alia, the automated methods that have emerged in the field of asset management and optimization. Lastly, with Human Computers, an ongoing study initiated in 2015, the collective has concerned itself with the microwork market, a place where algorithms and Artificial Intelligence are trained and developed—a laboratory for methods of extreme erasure, outsourcing, and the rational organization of human labour.
Each of these projects is based on meticulous mediarchaeological investigations, bringing about new historical and technological genealogies and shedding light on the undeniable global governance-by-numbers currently underway. These studies are built on a large corpus of archives, patents, news articles, scientific papers, scientific popularisation books, technical objects, computer codes, etc. The cross-analysis of these documents is the foundation of these artistic experimentations, which, by transmuting analysis into aesthetic experience, allows us to understand what lies beneath the consecutive layers and generations of technological innovation—Big Data, algorithms, Artificial Intelligence.”
“RYBN.ORG is a platform for artistic, experimental and independent research created in 1999 and based in Paris. The collective follows an “extra-disciplinary” research methodology, on the functioning of complex and esoteric phenomena and systems – high-frequency trading algorithms, architecture of the offshore economy, structure of financial markets, hermeneutics of Kabbalah, communication network management protocols, computer viruses, etc. – that are the subject of a number of research projects. On the basis of these investigations, RYBN.ORG produces devices, which evolve beyond the artistic field alone, based on processes of intrusion and contamination, in order to integrate environments and terrains where these objects are able to generate particular resonances: social networks, financial markets, patents, radio-electromagnetic spectrum.”
