The photo festival looked at topics that ranged from ufology to gender transition, from family abuse to Albania’s search for a new identity, from gay porn magazines to environmental crisis
Category Archive: sousveillance
I interviewed artist and geographer Trevor Paglen about suspicious activities in the night sky, classified programmes and the weaponisation of human perception in the context of military and civilian influence operations
How do you document, with honesty and integrity, a country where the wrong colour combination or the wrong friends can get you into trouble?
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Over the past few years, Vladan Joler has been collaborating with data analysts, media theorists and cyber forensic experts to bring to light some of the hidden layers of digital infrastructures
the research project explores the affective meanings and implications of drone technologies on warfare, surveillance and protest
The parallel the artists make between Russian imperialism and demonology is that, in stories of possession, a demon takes control of the body from within. It acts as a parasite that enters a body and gradually consumes all its resources from within…
social
Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s installation explores the concept of atmospheric violence, offering a historical and political reflection on the use of noise as a tool for oppression and control
Being human “in a time when human life is becoming more and more integrated into – if not inseparable – from contexts and processes that are both other-than-human and larger-than-human”
But what are the wider effects of whistleblowing as an act of dissent on politics, society, and the arts? How does it contribute to new courses of action, digital tools, and contents?
This guide provides conceptual tools for decoding tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. In doing so, it challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold but also the ones we ourselves manufacture
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
Teresa Dillon’s practice involves a performance inspired by women working in ammunition factories during WW1, cardboard structures that explore the affects surveillance architectures have on non-human animals, collective bike rides for energy harvesting, talks & workshops that probe into the mechanisms governing urban life, etc.
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”
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
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
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
Finding the Operator presents the documentation of a series of attempts to find out who the operator(s) of a specific government owned CCTV camera is, initially through freedom of information requests and later through the construction of an electronic device that broadcasts messages that can only be read using a CCTV camera
Artist Daniel Mayrit (famous for a photo series which presents the portraits of the most powerful people in the City of London as if they were delinquents caught up on CCTV cameras) demonstrates the absurdity of Spain’s gag laws
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?
Every single day and every single night, rain or shine, the movements of people living in Kabul and Kandahar in Afghanistan, are watched over by huge surveillance balloons. The U.S. army calls them aerostat or Persistent Threat Detection System
The artist’s work investigates issues as different from each other as perception, international power networks, religion, changes in the human condition through technology, surveillance and electronic and physical warfare
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
Simon Farid is a visual artist interested in the relationship between administrative identity and the body it purports to codify and represent. In practice, this means that the artist is ‘squatting’ identities that have been constructed by other people for surveillance, marketing or institutional purposes and then discarded.
He notoriously ‘inhabited’ the identity of an undercover police officer and the one of a politician who moonlighted as a web marketing guru
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
James Bridle’s exhibition presents a series of works that use computer code, investigative journalism, and visualization to explore hidden spaces and classified information
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 work of Mishka Henner might evoke the one of Edward Burtynsky, Trevor Paglen, Omer Fast, Michael Wolf and Jon Rafman. Yet, comparing his work to the one of some of the artists i admire the most is pointless. Henner is his own man slash artist. He uses contemporary technology to give a new twist on artistic appropriation and redefines the role of the photographer, the meaning of the photography medium and the representation of the landscape. Without ever using a photo camera
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?
Flone is a drone (an unmanned aerial vehicle) which uses a smartphone as a flight controller and explores novel ways to “occupy” public space, in particular the air and claim the right to use it before legislation makes it illegal