Josh Begley
Josh Begley (born 1984) is an American digital artist known for his data visualizations. He is the creator of Metadata+, an iPhone app that tracked every reported United States drone strike. Begley is the director of two short films, "Best of Luck with the Wall" (2016) and "Concussion Protocol" (2018), both produced by Academy Award-winning director Laura Poitras. He is based in Brooklyn, New York. History. Begley was born in San Francisco, California in 1984. He is a graduate of University of California, Berkeley and the Interactive Telecommunications Program at 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 in the months following its release, calling its content "crude and objectionable". Begley then created Dronestream, a Twitter account chronicling every reported US drone strike, for Douglas Rushkoff's Narrative Lab. It gained 15,000 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. He works at The Intercept with journalists Jeremy Scahill, Glenn Greenwald, and Laura Poitras. Career. 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. It received Honorary Mention at 2017 Prix Ars Electronica and was nominated for  an ICP Infinity Award. In 2018, Begley released his second short film, "Concussion Protocol" (2018), produced by Academy Award-winning director Laura Poitras. "The New Yorker" called it "a chasteningly gorgeous accounting of each concussion reported during the current N.F.L. season." He co-taught a class at Columbia Law School in Fall of 2018.