TWO LOCATIONS – URBAN AND RURAL / RESIDENCY PROGRAMS – EUROPEAN MEDIA ART, NORDIC-BALTIC, INTERNATIONAL / RIXC OPEN AiR – APPLY ALL YEAR ROUND
Pablo DE SOTO. From the Sputnik to the Stack: Radical Cartography in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism
From the Soviet Sputnik to Benjamin Bratton’s proposition of the Stack, planetary-scale networked infrastructures have become a global architecture of computer mediation which produces a distributed and largely uncontested new expression of power (Zubofff 2016). As Edward Snowden and others have disclosed, the online world, which used to be kind of our world, is now where surveillance and capitalism are developing in new ways by data gathering, thus generating intense concentrations of wealth over extraction and threatening core values such as freedom and privacy.
Dr Pablo DeSoto is an architect, scholar, artist and educator with a singular and iconoclastic experience across geographic and disciplinary borders. He holds a Master Degree in Architecture from the Royal Institute of Technology of Stockholm and a PhD in Communication & Culture from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He is the editor of three books: Fadaiat, freedom of movement and Freedom of knowledge, Situation Room: Designing a prototype of citizen situation room and After.Video Assemblages; and coauthor of the Critical Cartography of the Straits of Gibraltar, exhibited worldwide. In the 2000s he was a co-founder of hackitectura.net a group of architects, computer specialists and activists. http://pablodesoto.org
Maciej OŻÓG. Media Art as a Critical Analysis of Surveillance in Hybrid Space
In the paper several examples of mobile media art are presented and interpreted as a form of subversion and activist interventions that address and critically analyze social, cultural and political implication of pervasive use of surveillance technologies in hybrid space. Artistic practices such as reverse engineering, tactical re-use and hardware/software hacking allows for unauthorized and sometimes barely legal appropriation of various surveillance technologies (from GPS and mobile phones to RFID). In this way artists like Mark Shepard, Julian Oliver, Danja Vasiliev, Gordan Savičić and many others disrupt an invisible ubiquitous “digital enclosure” we live in today due to the extensive use of mobile media. They initiate open, critical debate on mobile media surveillance while offering at the same time numerous technology-based, grassroots tactics that can be used to oppose a constantly growing network of surveillance in technologically augmented space of everyday life.
Conor MCGARRIGLE. The Data Pharmakon
This text offers case-studies of the development of critical data art works that explore data as material and artistic medium that not only offers new methods to produce new hitherto unachievable work but additionally adds a critical voice that not only opens the black box of data assemblages but suggests alternative understandings of data usage beyond those of surveillance capitalism.
It draws on three data-driven artistic interdisciplinary collaborative research projects by this author: an EU-funded multi-national project that re-frames Smart City practices to benefit local communities; a role as artist-in-residence at Dublin City Data Dashboard working with data scientists to develop strategies to re-connect city inhabitants with their data through AR-based data narratives that (re)materialize data in the space of the city; and a commission for the Science Gallery in Detroit that uses social media data to train an AI Twitter Bot that embodies the spirit of 24/7 precarious capitalism.
Together these works propose that in the era of big data and algorithmic governmentality true criticality comes from an engagement that reveals the workings and processes of data, machine learning and algorithms. Data, after Bernard Stiegler, is understood as Pharmakon simultaneously poison and cure; and art practice it is suggested has a role to play in our data futures.
Conor McGarrigle is an artist and researcher. He is a lecturer in Fine Art at the Dublin School of Creative Arts DIT, and a research fellow at the Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media Dublin.
His practice is characterised by urban interventions mediated through digital technologies, and data-driven explorations of networked social practices.
He has exhibited extensively internationally including the 2011 Venice Biennale, the Saint-Étienne Biennale, the Science Gallery Lab Detroit, SIGGRAPH, FILE São Paulo, SITE Santa Fe as well as EVA International Biennial, and the Science Gallery Dublin.
Pascal GLISSMANN. Observational Practices and Global Control: Object America
Since the election of Donald J. Trump it has become increasingly clear that Americans “see” America in hugely divergent ways. In this polarized environment, it is crucial to try to understand how those unlike oneself perceive the world — to do so necessitates an understanding of one’s own, often unconscious, practices of seeing.
The Observational Practices Lab, Parsons School of Design, aims to provoke dialogue and instigate critical reflection about the very nature of observation across disciplinary boundaries. Observation is fundamental to ways of knowing, yet it is rarely investigated as a set of comparative methods and contingent practices. We aim to foster a non-hierarchical engagement with diverse modes of observation in order to investigate it’s past effects, present consequences and potential in creating the future.
As a response to recent changes in the US political landscape, the Observational Practices Lab, initiated the transdisciplinary research project OBJECT AMERICA to explore the idea of “America” through everyday objects. We invited Ellen Lupton, Senior Curator at Cooper Hewitt, to choose an object which she believed would represent “America” into the future. Thirteen researchers from very different disciplinary backgrounds, from climate science to poetry, investigated this object. The observational methods that emerged will be disseminated publicly to not only inspire new ways of seeing but also contribute to the vital conversation about who and what defines “America”. http://www.objectamerica.org
Pascal Glissmann is a media designer, artist, educator and founder of the studio subcologne, he holds an MFA in Media Arts/Media Design from the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and is currently Assistant Professor of Communication Design at Parsons.
Selena Kimball is a visual artist whose work investigates visual perceptions of history, she is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art Practice at Parsons.
Monica TOLIA. Technologies of Lived Abstraction: Future Present
This paper takes the practice of choreography and its principles, analysing how urban environments are now becoming immersive sites through various sensing technologies, and their role in the organisation of bodies in space. With enormous sensing, tracking and motion capture capabilities, and the data accumulated on subjects and how it is deployed towards them, my enquiry is how much does the algorithmic drive movement. Digital architectures are creating new ecologies of experience in the intertwinement of human-machine processes that raise important questions about bodily affects, perception and agency. As a condition of contemporary subjecthood where to participate in the world means (in)voluntary surrender of ones’ data to the algorithmic, what are the implications of these various abstractions? How are “data-self” and “real-world” subjects mutually constructed? What affects do they produce and how is this impacting human agency? What indeterminacies arise from this complex intertwinement of human and machine? This will be addressed with specificity to my recent performance work “Technologies of Lived Abstraction: Future Present”, which incorporates sensing technologies and machine learning algorithms, asking questions about the moving body in these immersive spaces.
Monica Tolia is an interdisciplinary artist working across choreography, dance and score, computation, installation, sculpture and sound. She has recently graduated from the MFA Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. Thinking through Brian Massumi’s notion of “lived abstraction” (Semblance and Event), I am interested in how abstract systems of power operate upon bodies in the neoliberal environment through various forms of spatialisation. Drawing upon already existing principles in choreographic practice and my background as a dancer, I think through how various power dynamics (the social, the institutional, the state, the financial, the computational) altered by the algorithmic are influencing patterns of movement, shaping subjectivity and creating probabilistic determinisms that influence our present. I call my analysis of this process and its real-world effects the “choreography of power”.
Varvara GULJAJEVA. The Age Of Surveillance Capitalism And Dataveillance
The paper focuses on the paradigms of the surveillance and dataveillance age, where we are trapped in the panopticon machine and followed by an inescapable digital gaze. Being under a constant control is a part of post-digital age. The surveillance has gone further than a camera gaze; it is much more complex and diverse. Physical surveillance has been transformed into the data tracking. Echoing Boris Groys (2013): “[t]he internet is by its essence a machine of surveillance. [—] The internet registers every moment when a certain piece of data is clicked, liked, un-liked, transferred, or transformed.”
The industry driven datafication is described as surveillance capitalism (Shoshana Zuboff 2015), which underlines the ongoing and expanding monetisation of big data. We have reached the age of surveillance economy where profit is earned by surveilling the customers.
The problematics of today are addressed through several art projects and it is investigated how issues of monitoring resonate in the contemporary art practices. In other words, the article introduces critical voices of artists regarding surveillance capitalism and dataveillance.