Proposal for Dublin talks
De Libre y Abierto
Personal Identity Surveillance - Lack of critical response
The continuing wholesale harvest of personal data as natural capital is at the heart of a new set of debates in which consumer rights advocates and civil liberties groups find themselves at odds with the information industry and government. New and insightful art projects must emerge from the cultural front to focus critical attention on these issues.
The rise of invisible, digital monitoring of consumers by profit-driven enterprises greatly concerns both scholars and artists, as demonstrated by the considerable amount of academic and artistic projects that interrogate contemporary surveillance technologies such as closed-circuit television, satellite photography, wiretapping, and dataveillance. But more insidious, equally alarming, and entirely understudied is the trend towards completely consensual, voluntary personal self-surveillance, as encouraged by user-contributed content sites and personal technology devices.
The contemporary practice of appropriation, subversion and intervention of surveillance technology by a subculture of artists who are also programmers, engineers, hacktivists, or otherwise clever users has been linked to the concept of détournement and the situationist art movement of the 1960's. Since that era a growing archive of work cites art's continuing role as a stimulus for critical thinking towards the politics and practice of surveillance. Even as the nature and technology of surveillance has evolved from simple eavesdropping and closed circuit television cameras to massive dataveillance and facial recognition, artists have been quick to engage these new developments.
However, there is little work on the recent move towards user-contributed internet content such as videos, data mashups, online profiles and self-monitoring web applications. Despite the consensual, even enthusiastic participation of users in such activities, they are subject to the same imperceptible processes of monitoring and tracking.
For the information industry, the extraction of value from the personal data of individuals has become a common and lucrative business model. Internet services like Google, Yahoo and Amazon depend on user data as an essential resource for improving their products. By convincing consumers to readily surrender their personal data in exchange for services like web searching, email and online shopping they gain access to a continually renewable natural resource. These information resources are then mined, processed and refined into a commodity tradable for advertising or sales revenue.
Today’s internet user is urged to create data streams of consumption, ranging from music listened to and products recently purchased to foods consumed and calories burned. Users are encouraged to publish and publicize personal information placed on homepages, blogs, social networking sites and desktops. This data, however, is not meant for individual, private contemplation. It is designed and collected to be broadcasted to the world, and is increasingly viewed as a standard part of online self-presentation and identity performance.
Increasingly, this self-surveillance is located in the physical, rather than virtual, body. Apple and Nike’s iPod + iTunes collaboration, for example, maps users’ physical movement through space, which is tracked through community websites and used to sell mp3s, sneakers, and workout gear. Software for calorie tracking and fitness progress is widely available for personal digital assistants and cellphones. “Mood-o-meters” encourage people to keep track of their dispositions. The promise of such experiences is deeply related to the embodiment of technology, the performance of identity through increasingly detailed data streams, and the move from terminal-driven internet access to light, mobile, wearable devices.
Common to these emergent trends are the ideas of consent and participation: where can we locate the user within online environments in which surveillance is promoted as a beneficial practice? Moreover, how do we locate resistance?
