[ISEA2020] Poster: Janna Ahrndt — #MFGA: Make Floors Great Again

Abstract

Keywords: Internet of Things, Twitter, Activism, IFTTT, Applet, Critical Making, Tactical Gizmology

Using an applet created with the IFTTT platform, The Resistance Roomba reacts to Donald Trump’s twitter feed. Each time Trump tweets, the Roomba begins a cleaning cycle.
MFGA (Make Floors Great Again) is a robotic performance piece currently taking place on makefloorsgreatagain.online. Using an applet created with the IFTTT plat-form, The Resistance Roomba reacts to Donald Trump’s twitter feed. Each time Trump tweets, the Roomba begins a cleaning cycle and sends him a thank you tweet. The more the US President tweets the cleaner the floors be-come. With the passing of the impeachment inquiry in the House of Representatives and the upcoming election, I expect the floors will be cleaner than ever. The Roomba, lovingly named Rupert Murdock, is gilded in faux gold leaf giving it a kitsch aesthetic worthy of Trump Tower.
Platforms such as IFTTT, designed to increase usefulness of IOT technologies, can be a way for tactical media artists to create tools in the form of applets that push the critical potential of this interconnectedness outside and beyond the systems and corporations that created them.

  • Janna Ahrndt received her MFA in Electronic and Time Based Art from Purdue University and is currently the Visiting Assistant Professor of Digital art at Indiana University (USA). She is a part of a wave of new media artists rejecting the notion that craft and technology are directly opposed. Her work explores how deconstructing everyday technologies can be used to question larger oppressive systems and create a space for participatory political action. Her activist and social art practice seeks to blur the lines between the materiality of craft and the digital realm of new media technologies to create socio-political interventions. She has presented research on the use of DIY electronics as a medium for participatory political art at ISEA 2019 in Gwangju South Korea and facilitated workshops in collaboration with the Science Gallery in Melbourne Australia, the Science Gallery in Dublin Ireland and the NEoN Re@ct festival.