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Josh Begley

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Nationality
  
American

Known for
  
Digital Art


Name
  
Josh Begley

Role
  
Artist

Josh Begley joshbegleycomjoshbegleyjpg

Born
  
1984 (age 30–31)
San Francisco, California

Profiles

Btv josh begley interview


Josh Begley (born 1984) is an American digital artist known for his data visualizations. He is the creator of Metadata+, an iPhone app that tracks every reported United States drone strike. He is based in Brooklyn, New York.

Contents

Dronestream every us drone strike josh begley


History

Begley was born in San Francisco, California in 1984. He is a graduate of University of California, Berkeley and New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.

In July 2012, Begley developed an iPhone application that would send a push notification every time there was a US drone strike in Pakistan, Yemen, or Somalia. Apple rejected the app three times, calling its content "crude and objectionable". Begley then created Dronestream, a Twitter account chronicling every reported US drone strike (since the first one in 2002), for Douglas Rushkoff's Narrative Lab. It gained 16,000 followers in the first week.

In June 2012, Begley and two other New York University graduate students, Mehan Jayasuriya and James Borda, received a cease and desist letter from Invisible Children for their Kony 2012 parody website, Kickstriker.

In 2014, after five rejections, Apple accepted Begley's iPhone app. It was then approved as Metadata+, before once again being removed by Apple, bringing the total number of rejections to 12.

Begley is the director of Best of Luck with the Wall (2016), a documentary short about the geography of the U.S.-Mexico border. It was made with 200,000 satellite images downloaded from Google Maps. He works at The Intercept with journalists Jeremy Scahill, Glenn Greenwald, and Laura Poitras.

As of 2017, Begley is represented by The Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco.

Work

  • "Dronestream", a Twitter account posting every reported United States drone strike
  • "Officer Involved", a photographic project on police violence, with an introduction by the novelist Teju Cole
  • "Prison Map", a site using aerial photography to provide a visual representation of the US prison system
  • "Redlining", an archive of redlining maps overlaid on California cities
  • "Kickstriker", a parody site purporting to crowdfund military interventions in global conflicts
  • "The Listserve", a listserv-like email list where one randomly selected list member per day can send an email to the entire list
  • "Subject of the Dream", a collage of excerpts from the work of Toni Morrison
  • "Racebox", a website showing the race section of the United States Census through history
  • "Empire.is", an interactive map showing the location of known United States military installations around the world
  • "Profiling.is", a visual representation of the Associated Press's probe into the New York Police Department's post-9/11 Muslim surveillance program
  • "Archives + Absences", an iPhone app that notifies users every time the police end someone's life in the United States
  • "The News is Breaking," a visualization of every New York Times front page since 1852
  • "Best of Luck with the Wall," a short film about the geography of the U.S.-Mexico Border
  • References

    Josh Begley Wikipedia