GENDr is a quasi-absurdist work of art and digital tool to help you understand, manage, and accurately perform your gender identity.

It is as much about performing gender identity in a capitalist society through consumer choices, as much as it is about visualizing digital surveillance techniques, often used in online marketing campaigns.

The application is a response to digital surveillance techniques used by online marketers – yes, those that result in personalized browser advertisements. And, yes, this type of surveillance results in lots of personal information about the browsing consumer.

One way these algorithmic models make sense (and value) out of all that information are through extensive user classification systems that transform seemingly meaningless sets of data – like a consumer's browsing habits – into inferred catogories – like a consumers income, age, and, of course, their gender.


We first read about these techniques in John Cheney-Lippold’s 2011 article “A New Algorithmic Identity: Soft Biopolitics and the Modulation of Control.” In it Lippold relates the loss of privacy to notions of Foucauldian power: how algorithmically defined categories, determined by online marketers, “softly persuade users towards models of normalized behavior and identity...”

For Lippold, the algorithms offer marketers the power to tell “us who we are, what we want, and who we should be” (177).

“So what? We live in a post-Snowden era! To digital privacy,” we say, as we toast our artisanal beers.

How does this power of persuasion actually work? Do users of digital interfaces truly become slaves to the power of algorithmic inference? What does it mean when a system declares your gender? How does it inform how you behave, and how others treat you?

GENDr aims to answer these questions. It reduces gender identification into a branded shopping experience; it exposes algorithmic models of marketing analysis in the form of seductive and glance-able data visualizations. It transforms data-based surveillance into a digital, interactive, and, most importantly, personal experience. Thus, issues of algorithmic control and concerns about privacy can be acted out through engagement with GENDr.

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