Something that always troubles me – and it has troubled me for as long as I can remember – is this idea of misinformation that causes people to do bad things. We can go back to World War II, we can look at the 1990s and the Balkan Wars. Emotionally, these drive me very much, this idea of how the Balkans split apart. I’m very interested in that time. And then look at America post 9/11 with this whole anti-Muslim movement and this complete misinformation. And it’s not necessarily because somebody thought, “I’m going to be evil and go out and lie.” They really believe what they are saying, and the people listening to them want to believe what they’re hearing. So this idea that the Quran is all about terror and violence makes me go like, “Wait. Look at the Old Testament. Look at Deuteronomy. It says you can stone your wife.” Our religious texts in the Western world are extremely violent, as well.
~ Excerpt from the Substratum Series Interview with Wesley Grubbs, Founder of Pitch Interactive
Take a look at Pitch Interactive data visualization of the Bible and the Quran here.
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Dorothy R. Santos
Dorothy R. Santos (she/they) is a Filipino American writer, artist, and educator whose academic and research interests include feminist media histories, computational media, critical medical anthropology, technology, race, and ethics. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz as a Eugene V. Cota-Robles fellow. She received her Master’s degree in Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts and holds Bachelor’s degrees in Philosophy and Psychology from the University of San Francisco. Her work as been exhibited at Ars Electronica, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the GLBT Historical Society.
Her writing appears in art21, Art in America, Ars Technica, Hyperallergic, Rhizome, Vice Motherboard, and SF MOMA’s Open Space. Her essay “Materiality to Machines: Manufacturing the Organic and Hypotheses for Future Imaginings,” was published in The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture. She is a co-founder of REFRESH, a politically-engaged art and curatorial collective and serves as the Executive Director for the Processing Foundation. She is an advisor for Brooklyn-based arts and tech organization POWRPLNT and Bay Area-based arts organization slash arts.
dorothy r. santos 
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