Value is classically said to stem from human labour, and money to represent this value. Does the idea still hold true today? Can we create an alternative cryptocurrency based on laziness? Can we turn Bitcoin into a stable currency ?
Category Archive: security
Investigating everything from historical mugshots to Instagram posts, Helfand examines how the face has been perceived and represented over time; how it has been instrumentalized by others; and how we have reclaimed it for our own purposes
A journey into the dark side of computing illustrates the beauty and sophistication of some viruses, highlighting the creativity behind their methods of disruption
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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 Dani Ploeger has been looking at the new fences built to toughen “Fortress Europe.” In particular the ones that use heat sensors, sophisticated cameras and other so-called ‘smart’ technologies to shut off “illegal immigrants”
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
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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?
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
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
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
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
Formerly secret, highly official photographs show officers and employees putting on professional uniforms, gluing on fake beards, or signaling to each other with their hands. Today, the sight of them is almost ridiculous, although the laughter sticks in the viewer’s throat. This publication can be regarded as a visual processing of German history and an examination of current surveillance issues, yet it is extremely amusing at the same time
I’m sure many of you have heard of James Bridle. Either because he coined and formulated the concept of New Aesthetic. Or because you’re interested in drone warfare. A few months ago, Bridle launched Dronestagram which uses Google Earth images and data collected by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism to document systematically the locations of deadly U.S. drone strikes. Bridle has also been traveling from Istanbul to Brighton to Washington DC to paint crime scene-style outlines of UAVs
My guest tomorrow will be Ilona Gaynor and she’ll be talking to us about forensic science, police reconstructions and the not so technically sophisticated (but very smart) way to rob a bank in broad day light on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles
‘HMPark Life’ is a prison located in Brockwell Park, South London. It questions this drive to turn a prison population into a cheap labour force – one that works not just to provide skills to inmates in the name of ‘rehabilitation’ but forces offenders to be both visibly productive and punished to quench the public’s ever-present blood thirst for justice
Architecture of Fear explores how feelings of fear pervade daily life in the contemporary media society. The cause of fear seems interchangeable and constantly fluctuating. Shifting from one thing to the next, often relating to invisible or indirect phenomena’s (terrorism, viral diseases, pollution, financial crisis), anything has the ability to become a potential threat. Rather than an immediate emotional strategy for survival fear is becoming a constant low level feeling in the background that gives rise to a new global infrastructure based on security, prevention and risk-management
Z33 in Hasselt, Belgium, has just opened an exhibition with a very promising title. Architecture of Fear explores how feelings of fear pervade daily life in the contemporary media society.
I’m going to visit it on Thursday but in the meantime i thought i’d ask one of the participating artists, Jill Magid, to tell us about the work she is showing at Z33 and more generally about her experience with impersonal power structures (police, intelligence agencies, security systems, etc.) which, whether they contribute to it or fight it, are part of this ‘architecture of fear.’
One of the installations that made me keep coming back to it over and over again last night is the Physiognomic Scrutinizer by Marnix de Nijs who, as usual, is using humour to reflect on some of the key issues of our society. In this case, the role biometric systems play in present our public space
The photo exhibition explores how our perception is mediated by and eventually adapts to the images coming from inquisitive medias such as satellites and security cameras. Everywhere around us, screens are showering our retina with information most of us hardly ever take the trouble to cross check. We tend to forget that these images are not first-hand, they are mediated, selected and distributed by media, political or scientific authorities
Overseen by two Berlin curators Dr. Matthias Harder (Helmut Newton Stifftung) and Félix Hoffmann (C/O Berlin), this exhibition is small, impeccably curated and it is also the one that follows most punctiliously the main theme of the exhibition: control and its antithesis
10 maps and 10 essays about social issues from globalization to garbage; surveillance to extraordinary rendition; statelessness to visibility; deportation to migration
Marei Wollersberger was showing two projects at the Great Exhibition. The first one was a development of the […]
Paul Shambroom‘s Security series examines issues of fear, safety and liberty in post-9/11 America. The photographer documents training […]
The way to make firearms really safe, says Hebert Meyerle, is to password-protect the ammunition itself. The German […]
Nicoline van Harskamp has done an extensive research on both public and private security guards and police forces […]
Fabian Winkler‘s PI (personal interpreters) is a set of small robotic devices, which deconstruct TV broadcasts’ audio signals. […]
A journalist from The Guardian picked up a British Airways boarding-pass stub, the one you probably throw away […]
Surveillance cameras are not only said to make people feel better, they might one day be able to […]
SVEN – Surveillance Video Entertainment Network, aka “AI to the People,” is a real-time video performance system that […]
The hi-tech prison in Lelystad (The Netherlands) opens, and locks, its doors to low-risk inmates this week. In […]
Germany’s first gated community is ready and desperately waiting for the well-off to move in. Located in Potsdam […]
Scientists at a Georgia laboratory have developed trained wasps that could check for hidden explosives at airports and […]
General Electric merged computer and scanning technologies into a remotely-monitored system that promises to get airport passengers through […]
BlastWrap is a blast-dampening material made out of volcanic glass and sealed in food-packaging plastic. The material already […]
The i-garment project aims to develop smart garments for for the Portuguese Civil Protection. The suits will be […]
The Homeland Security Advisory System is a color-coded terrorism threat advisory scale. The different levels trigger specific actions […]
A new walk-through airport lie detector developed by Israeli firm Nemesysco is claimed to be able to detect […]