surveillance

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)

The Singularity is a web-based AI narrative system that demonstrates the ethical issues, hidden biases and misbehavior of emerging technologies such as machine learning, face tracking and big data. The system tracks users' eye positions through a webcam, and continuously feeds users directly into their eyes with infinite Reddit posts containing the latest progress in AI along with random news and ads. By visualizing eye trajectories over time, it suggests possible misuses and dangers of all-pervasive data tracking. The near-invisible operations underpinning the technologies could bring visible and fundamental changes to the society, leading the world to a "technological singularity" in which technology governs all aspects of human society. This work consists of three sub-systems: 

1. Infinite news feed system: The system continually scrapes article titles of latest posts about artificial intelligence and technological singularity from subreddit r/singularity (https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/ and r/artificial (https://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/). The seemingly uni-directional information flow of news feed is actually bi-directional - user activities are fed back to the machine like in an echo room. Two parallel streams of texts on the screen marks the co-evolution of users and machine systems driven by day-to-day browsing activities.
2. Face-tracking surveillance system: Real-time face tracking algorithm is implemented with ml5js (https://ml5js.org/), a machine learning library that runs in the browser. The face position and the degree that the face turns from the webcam are tracked. The direction of floating sentences always points towards users' eyes. When the user looks away by turning the head, the texts will twist and wiggle as if responding to and disobeying user movement. Such suspicious interaction signifies the disobedience of machines and behavior manipulation by malicious algorithms.
3. Data collection and replay system: User's face movement is also recorded, reshaped and replayed by the system. The trajectory of user interaction is visually represented by intertwining curves drawn on top of the texts. When user is absent from the webcam, the visual artifacts become fully visible and reveal those data that have been secretly collected in the background, arousing concerns of user privacy violation in insecure web systems.

Source: https://projects.cah.ucf.edu/mediaartsexhibits/uncontinuity/Wang/wang.h…

The Ring™ Camera Pandemic Log is an experiment in speculative surveillance, imagining what Amazon's smart doorbell cams see during the novel coronavirus lockdown, from the camera's glitchy perspective.

Ring™ Log is an experiment in speculative surveillance.

Amazon's Ring™ doorbells are motion-activated high definition surveillance cameras. Once triggered, Ring™ cameras transmit video to the Ring™ app and Ring™ servers, where the video footage is preserved for future viewing.

What happens when Amazon begins using AI object detection to identify, categorize, and report what the Ring™ camera sees?

Imagine a year from now, Halloween night, October 31, 2020. What would Ring™ see? What would Ring™ report? And what happens when the program fails, as programs always do?

The Listeners is a linguistic performance, installation, and Amazon-distributed third-party app or skill – transacted between speakers or speaker-visitors and an Amazon Echo. The Echo embodies a voice-transactive Artificial Intelligence and domestic robot, that is named for its wake-word, Alexa. The Listeners is a custom software skill built on top of this infrastructure. The Listeners have their own interaction model. They listen and speak in their own way – as designed and scripted by the artist – using the distributed, cloud-based voice recognition and synthetic speech of Alexa and her services.

(Source: shadoof.net)

Ian Hatcher’s online and kinetic poem ⌰ [Total Runout] (2015) critiques corporate and governmental black boxing, at the level of its code, text, visual output and live sound performance. The poem is part of the series Drone Pilot, and it is presented in different versions: a Web-based work, a sound piece and a performance. It remixes appropriated text from a WikiLeaked manual by the UK Ministry of Defense, essays on artificial intelligence, and Hatcher’s own text. The overall versions of the work, understood as variable events, boldly problematize communication and cognitive processes in networks—whether they are implemented in computer systems by secret agencies or corporations. Hatcher’s critique to black boxes entails recreating issues of security, control and surveillance, as controlled systems are increasingly paving the way for less privacy and less knowledge about their inner workings. As a result, the poem questions the essence of privacy, redaction, and systemic violence, when access is a privileged asset of agents with security clearances or those with a deep knowledge of programming.

(Source: Álvaro Seiça)

MathX (Metadata-Eye) is an audiovisual software program with an infinite duration that is built using the open source processing programming environment. It is a navigator in a meta-symbolic space, that travels a 3D network of codes and text contents.

A collaborative piece by André Sier and Álvaro Seiça, MathX (Metadata-Eye) was developed for Sier's solo exhitibition 02016.41312785388128 at Ocupart Chiado, Lisboa, from May 19 to June 4, 2016. The navigator presents a poem by Álvaro Seiça made as an invitation to create a text based on the philosophical-archaic-metaphysical references of André Sier's work.

Sier's initial navigator, MathX, was developed in 2010.

Seiça's text departs from Sier's works, MathX Java code, Dziga Vertov's Kino-Eye (1924), and Ted Rall's Snowden (2015).

The collaboration branched out into sound, text, and visual pieces.

(Source: Adapted text from https://thenewartfestival.wordpress.com/catalogue/)

Although This work was presented by Scott as being located in the library at the opening of the End(s) of Electronic Literature Festival Exhibition at The Arts Library. Its was in fact not a part of the official Electronic Literature Organization 2015: The End(s) of Electronic Literature festival, and yet it was there.
The meta-story of this "space-hack" should be seen in relation to the history of the physical object itself (TV), (Taroko-remix),e-poetry as well as Foucault work Discipline and Punish, Panopticism and the power institutions.

The digita part of the Take Gonzo was hosted on the secret sub folder together with to the rest of the digital works presented in the End(s) of Electronic Literature Festival Exhibition Kiosk.