privacy

Nothing captures the experience of 2020's pandemic like making a video conference call. Be it for work or personal reasons, most of us opened our domestic life to the online world via these platforms; Zoom probably rising to the top of the list. Personal space became public in our desire or requirement to connect, and these platforms became a new room in most of our homes. This piece, Room #3, engages these ideas by presenting a peculiar Zoom call by me and a set of copies of myself to question these kinds of connections: always alone in the physical space, but always connected in unexpected ways to a multitude of known interlocutors and unknown human and non-human agents.

Room #3 is a cross-over piece between two projects, The Offline Website Project (TWOP) and Corporate Poetry. Originally an HTML website meant to never leave my home computer, it now circulates as a video documenting the experience of one of my interactions with my own website. Thematically, as part of the larger Corporate Poetry, it explores how corporate language relates to that other corpora that is our bodies. The piece includes a short 40-second introduction to TOWP and then it moves to a Zoom conversation between 4 replicas of me who experience traditional Zoom issues such as audio problems, turned off cameras and so on. This goes on loop for a bit, until the supposedly private conversation with myself expands onto the realization that this conversation, like millions of others (also depicted into new screens with violent and uncensored content), is being recorded, and all their information analyzed to serve Zoom’s unselective data gathering purposes.

(Source: Author's description)

Originally commissioned by New Media Scotland as part of their Alt-W Cycle 9, Leishman’s latest work Front is a pre-programmed Facebook parody that addresses the major issues of social media—privacy and voyeurism. Front’s interface whilst mimicking the immersive, interaction rich promise of social media, instead reminds us of where the power structures lie, and what is often freely given up by the user/viewer. A contemporary retelling of the Apollo and Daphne myth, Daphne, our protagonist shares her predilections, thoughts and meticulously crafted “selfies”—she has excellent taste (her Front friends tell her so), but all is not as it seems. The narrative moves towards a climax that presents the perils of misrepresentation with the darker side of self-presentation.
Front contains a faux IM chat facility that intrudes on the viewer’s passive reading of the interaction dead “timeline”, upsetting the expected sense of presence and time within the project. Set up as a cautionary tale, the project further re-mixes familiar social media practices via a linked Twitter feed that extends the mediation of Daphne’s character whilst infusing the project with another level of “real” contexts (in the form of supportive specialist web links, and project documentation).

(source: ELO 2015 catalog)

Douglas Rushkoff, author of Program or Be Programmed, quit Facebook in 2013 because “it does things on our behalf when we’re not even there. It actively misrepresents us to our friends, and worse misrepresents those who have befriended us to still others.” Using MySocialBook – an online platform that allows to print books from both personal Facebook profiles and the ones of friends and pages – I made a book out of the fan page that Rushkoff abandoned in 2013, selecting the period of time in which he was actively using it. (Source: http://silviolorusso.com/douglas-rushkoffs-new-book/ )

According to researches: a) search is the 2nd most used service on the web; b) people are using web search more and more and they trust their results, and c) people rarely read beyond the 2nd page of search results. These facts reflect the enormous power and influence the search engines (like Google, Yahoo, etc.) exert over us. This work intends to cause awareness about the issues related to the use of search engines on the web—many times not known by the search engine users—like privacy, control, data manipulation, source and reliability of data, top 10 dictatorship, among others

In January 2001 we started sharing our personal computer through our website. Everything was visible: texts, photos, music, videos, software, operating system, bank statements and even our private email. People could take anything they wanted, including the system itself, since we were using only free software. It was not a normal website, you were entering the computer in our apartment, seeing everything live. It was a sort of endurance performance that lasted 3 years, 24/7. Previously we were re-using and mixing other people’s work, while now we were sharing everything with everybody. Working with a computer on a daily basis, over the years you will share most of your time, your culture, your relationships, your memories, ideas and future projects. With the passing of time a computer starts resembling its owner's brain. So we felt that sharing our computer was more than sharing a desktop or a book, more than File Sharing, something we called Life Sharing. No social network existed at the time, and Life Sharing felt rather absurd, if not plain wrong. (Source: http://0100101110101101.org/home/lifesharing/index.html)