Andreas Zingerle, from the University of Linz, visited Digital Culture at the University of Bergen on an Erasmus teacher exchange in week 8 of 2015. Zingerle presented his research on February 16 and also gave a workshop on February 18.

Zingerle writes:

My work focuses on human computer and computer mediated human-human interaction with a special interest in transmedia and interactive storytelling. Since 2010 I collaborate with Linda Kronman as the artist group 'kairus.org'. We have worked with the thematic of internet fraud and online scams, constantly shifting our focus and therefore approaching the theme from a number of perspectives like: data security, ethics of vigilante communities, narratives of scam e-mails, scam & technologies. Research subjects are online scammers, vigilante communities of scambaiters and their use of storytelling and technology.

The practice based research is closely intertwined with the artistic production. We adopt methodologies, used by anthropologists and sociologist, therefore our artworks are often informed by archival research (scambaiter forums, archives of fake websites and scam e-mail correspondence), content analysis (narratives of correspondences between scambaiters and scammers), participation observations (self exploration of scambaiting tactics, ‘419 fiction’ workshops) and field research (artist in residence program in Ghana). Besides the artworks we publish academic research papers related to our projects and through workshops we contextualize our quite focused research topics of the artworks to wider discourses like data privacy, activism and hacking culture, ethics of vigilante online communities and disruptive art practices. In our workshops we also explore how scambaiting skills and tools can be used more generally in media competence trainings or in production of disruptive digital fiction.

(Source: UiB)

Trust, representation and use of storytelling in online scams

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Other Works

Their Angelic Understanding

Ishmael