Server Farms as Sites of Participatory Power
Category Archive: privacy
The ubiquity of access to information has lulled us into complacency with its flipside: ever more highly technologized forms of surveillance and the overexposure of our personal data
The artist’s critical approach to technology can be found in works such as an orchestra of musical instruments that mine for Bitcoins, a 3D printable kit to cut undersea internet cables, a Bitcoin mining machine that claims to be worst in the world, etc.
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Within computer vision and AI systems, forms of measurement turn into moral judgments. Could these judgements in turn influence our own behaviour, our vision of the world and the individuals who inhabit it?
Photographer Salvatore Vitale explores Switzerland’s security measures by focusing on “matter-of-fact” types of instructions, protocols, bureaucracies and clear-cut solutions which he visualizes in photographs, diagrams, and graphical illustrations
Artist Mark Farid put his social, financial and mental well-being at risk in order to expose the damages of a carefree attitude towards our own digital footprint
social
Surveillance and censorship are mutually dependent; they cannot be viewed separately
The book documents creative strategies by artists, fashion designers and other media users to become virtually faceless for aesthetic, fetishist or resistance purposes
The book portrays the routine cruelties of the twenty-first century through a series of detailed non-fictional graphic illustrations. None of these cruelties represent extraordinary violence – they reflect day-to-day implementation of laws and regulations around the globe
For their “Forensic Fantasies” trilogy, KairUs (Linda Kronman and Andreas Zingerle) used data recovered from hard-drives dumped in Agbogbloshie, Ghana to develop works that investigate the issue of data breaches of private information and ask: What happens to our data when we send a computer, an hard disk or any kind of other storage device to the garbage?
An exhibition at BOZAR in Brussels explores the intersection between photography and surveillance. Employing a dynamic range of approaches—from documentary to conceptual practice, from appropriation to street art—these 10 artists provide a satellite-to-street view of the ways in which surveillance culture blurs the boundaries between the private and public realm
Exploitation Forensics is a collection of maps and documents created as a result of investigations conducted in the last few years by the SHARE Lab. The maps will help visitors explore the invisible layers of contemporary technological black boxes and their fractal supply chains, exposing various forms of hidden labour and the exploitation of material resources and data
The conference brought together leading artists and thinkers from the world of art, technology, science and documentary. The food was a bit revolting. Everything else was amazing
Creditworthy highlights the leading role that commercial surveillance has played—ahead of state surveillance systems—in monitoring the economic lives of Americans. Lauer charts how credit reporting grew from an industry that relied on personal knowledge of consumers to one that employs sophisticated algorithms to determine a person’s trustworthiness
Joana is an artist and a researcher whose work critically explores the way post-capitalist narratives affect the alphabetization of machines, humans and ecosystems. Her main research topics include Internet materiality, surveillance, online tracking, critical interfaces and language
By obfuscating the limited number of emotions offered to you by Facebook, this plug-in allows you to fool the platform algorithms, perturb its data collection practices and appear as someone whose feelings are emotionally “balanced”
At a time when the death of privacy is widely proclaimed, historian David Vincent, describes the evolution of the concept and practice of privacy from the Middle Ages to the present controversy over digital communication and state surveillance provoked by the revelations of Edward Snowden
Designers have to start thinking about transparency and accessibility in the design of privacy-sensitive products and services. This book offers the designer guidance, in the form of eight design principles, that help with designing products and services
Everyone knows about cybercrime and how owning networked computers and mobile devices makes you a potential victim of bank fraud, identity theft, extortion, theft of confidential information, etc. Data stored on your computer is never safe and its ghosts can come back and haunt you long after you’ve discarded your electronic device, long after even you’ve erased the data it contained
In a world where scientific rationalism rules, interest is on the rise for alternative forms of relating to the world and to others.
The objects, books, artifacts, gadgets and artworks offer a contemplation on autonomy as a disappearing modus operandi of political action, while workshops, discussions and demos focus on the devices we use every day: How do they work? What individual data traces do they capture? Where do these go, and what kind of control can one regain?
Authors Brunton and Nissenbaum provide tools and a rationale for evasion, noncompliance, refusal, even sabotage—especially for average users, those of us not in a position to opt out or exert control over data about ourselves. Obfuscation will teach users to push back, software developers to keep their user data safe, and policy makers to gather data without misusing it
Visit the scene of a crime by live webcam or inform the police of an offense. In Sheriff Software, media artist Dries Depoorter allows us to peer over the police’s shoulder – or even play traffic cop ourselves
Annie Machon is an intelligence expert and author who worked for 6 years as an intelligence officer for MI5, the UK domestic counter-intelligence and security agency. Together with her ex-partner, David Shayler, she resigned in the late 1990s to blow the whistle on the spies’ incompetence and crimes
Next week, NOME, one of those too rare galleries exploring art, politics, and technology, is going to open Jacob Appelbaum’s first solo show in Germany. There will be stuffed pandas, portraits of political dissidents and far too many secrets
Drone crews, analysts, intelligence officials and military commanders all speak frankly to the author about how armed drones revolutionized warfare–and the unexpected costs to some of those involved
Two of the presentations i enjoyed covered the representation of intelligence agencies in films and tv fiction, another was about the influence that new forms of surveillance are having on the rise of home-grown (‘home’ being the U.S.A., the symposium was organised by the Institute of North American Studies) white extremist groups. And a fourth talk commented on the delusory quest to control State information
In the wake of the Snowden revelations about the surveillance capabilities of intelligence agencies, this interdisciplinary symposium gathers experts to discuss the place and implications of secrecy in contemporary culture and politics
With his public intervention Overexposed, artist Paolo Cirio disseminates unauthorized pictures of high-ranking U.S. intelligence officials throughout major cities. Cirio obtained snapshots of NSA, CIA, and FBI officers through social media hacks. Then, using his HD Stencils graffiti technique, he spray-paints high-resolution reproductions of the misappropriated photos onto public walls
The practice of targeted killing by drones raises many questions: “How many civilians have been killed as collateral damage during these strikes?” “And even if we’re talking about militants, how can the killings be justified when there has been judicial supervision? “If these drones can reach their targets anywhere, then how is the battlefield defined?” “Right now, only 3 countries use drones for targeted killings: the U.S., Israel and the UK. Where will this stop?” “And if these targeted killings are illegal, why does Europe keep silent?”
Christoph Wachter & Mathias Jud have installed WLAN / WiFi mesh network with can antennas on the roofs of the Academy of Arts and the Swiss Embassy, both located in the heart of “NSA’s Secret Spy Hub in Berlin.” The particularity of the network is that it is open and at the disposal of passersby to communicate anonymously and even send messages to operatives of the NSA and GCHQ intelligence who might lurk inside the nearby British Embassy and Embassy of the United States
The exhibition zooms in on the shock and awe of drone warfare, and addresses the ethical and legal ambiguity of drones, mass surveillance and war at a distance. It presents the work of contemporary artists who are critiquing the way in which military technology and networks can obscure, conceal and distance us from the political and social reality of warfare today
The machine prints self destructing documents. The documents merge images and texts extracted from Cold War fictions with excerpts from current secret documents, resulting in an amalgam that blurs the line between present reality and past fiction. A short amount of time after leaving the machine the documents burst into fire and their content is forever erased as the flames consume the paper
Ghostradio deploys feedback and quantum effects to create random numbers from the boundaries of reality and beyond. Ghostradio publishes the resulting random number datastream for the generation of cryptographic keys. This will release the public from the current state of surveillance
Jennifer Lyn Morone has turned herself into a corporation and collection of marketable goods and services. Everything she is biologically and intellectually, everything she does, learns and creates has the potential to be turned into profits. Jennifer Lyn Morone™ Inc is a graduation project in Design Interactions but as Jennifer underlines, this is not a speculative project
Inspired by the work of J.G. Ballard, our story looks to the bleak, man-made landscapes of the future and asks: What happens when virtual environments become indistinguishable from reality? Will our global culture allow us to choose where to live, and who will stop us? What will we do with knowledge that becomes freely available to all?
Critical Exploits showed how a new generation of artists, designers and engineers are taking a highly critical approach to the development and use of the engineered systems and infrastructures that we increasingly rely on for daily life
Much of Treister’s recent work maps ways that human intelligence and military intelligence currently interact and work on each other. She explores how in a world increasingly determined by pervasive technologies and the demands of the military and security arms of government and state, new relations between the observer and the observed have been established and new subjectivities formed
As one surfs the net, data packets are sent from the user’s computer to the target server. The data packets go on a journey hopping from server to server potentially crossing multiple countries until the packets reach the desired website. In each of the countries that are passed different laws and practices can apply to the data, influencing whether or not authorities can inspect, store or modify that data
Conducted and presented as a scientific experiment TNM challenges the participants to consider the outrageous proposition of algorithmic prejudice. The responses range from fear and outrage to laughter and ridicule, and finally to the alarming realization that we are set on a path towards wide systemic prejudice ironically initiated by its victim, Turing