Art and surveillance: Exposing and resisting social control systems
“Any power or structure that seeks to maintain full control and is not open in any way to loosening its power eventually makes itself ridiculous.” [1] –Ai Weiwei
Behavioural modernity, or what historian Yuval Noah Harari refers to as The Cognitive Revolution [2], is marked by the emergency of fictive language. Unique to humans, the development of abstract social contracts has been a key instrument in the control of material and intellectual resources. In order to control these resources, the control of social behaviours has become necessary. Codified rewards and punishments span a long history, and like all aspects of the human experience, they keep getting more sophisticated and automated. This means they have become more operationalized, internalized and invisible.
Art production is another expression of fictive language, and while it often serves the hegemonic powers, it has also evolved as a tool to oppose them. As surveillance capitalism operationalizes a distributed modality of social control, art can be used to expose and resist its most pernicious effects. In order to be effective at that task, artists must develop works that properly reflect the complexities and mechanisms of what Shoshana Zuboff refers to as behavioural surplus [3], which is data reserves that are more than what is required for a product or service to operate and implement improvements. The surveillance economy generates its wealth from the predictive potential of behavioural surplus.
Understandably, the visual arts have focused mostly on the visible manifestations of surveillance capitalism, such as the ubiquity of security cameras. But the camera itself, with its ability to capture human activity, is a technology that dates back to the 1800s. There are multiple reasons, besides visibility, why the eye and the camera have become iconic of surveillance capitalism. One of the most powerful reasons deals with its historical precedents. From the Egyptian Eye of Horus to the Christian Eye of Providence, the idea of an ever-watchful entity that continuously evaluates us is deeply ingrained in our culture. These icons create a hierarchical structure in favour of those who claim to be behind them. Long before security cameras were implemented in prisons, rendering the panopticon unnecessary, cameras had
already created hierarchical structures as well. For example, the invisible anthropologist documenting tribal cultures was assumed to be superior to them. While the panopticon as a physical structure was rendered unnecessary by security cameras, Foucault was successful in reframing it as an abstracted model of internalized control systems, which has also turned it into an iconic sign for artists.
The use of culturally resonant symbols is necessary to communicate resistance to the mechanisms they represent, but they can also become conceptually inaccurate as these mechanisms evolve. According to Canadian artist Emily Rosamond, that is what has happened in regards to art and surveillance capitalism. [4] While eyes and cameras are publicly perceived as representative of our new surveillance economy, the process driving it are mostly invisible. As Rosamond explains, “online users’ data may be directly operationalized (by a company’s proprietary machine-learning algorithm, seeking to infer gender from online activity, for example), without ever having become ‘visible’ to any sort of watcher (whether human or machine).” [5] This reality not only renders the popular resistance symbols inaccurate, but it poses questions about what could effectively replace or complement them.
Considering that the defining aspect of surveillance capitalism is the behavioural surplus generated by invisibly operationalized processes, the challenge to visually critique is significant. As artists tackle this challenge, new nouns, verbs and grammars are emerging and embedding themselves in popular culture. One way in which this is accomplished is by appropriating and reorganizing corporate symbols and rhetoric in order to challenge their discourse. This approach has generated artworks like Ai Weiwei’s The Animal That Looks Like a Llama (But is Really an Alpaca) in which he makes personal references about how celebrity relates to surveillance and oppression. In this monumental wallpaper, he masterly links elements such as handcuffs, security cameras and the Twitter logo. Appropriating and reframing corporate symbols has become a common and effective artistic practice. Since this symbols have already been propagated and popularized by the corporations themselves, it is only necessary to subvert them in order to reach a large audience.
Subversion of corporate symbols and discourse can be effective and visually appealing, but it still does not fully address the operational aspect of surveillance capitalism. In that respect, computer code may be the best tool to expose systems that depend on it. Requiring skills more closely identified with sciences and engineering than with the humanities, it is not surprising that few traditional artists have been able to engage in this practice. This is the reason why some of the most enlightening artifacts dealing with surveillance capitalism are not artworks per se. For example, online tracking visualizers such as
Lightbeam was created for research purposes. [6] This Chrome extension allows users to generate interactive visual records of third party trackers as they browse the internet. Unlike the monumental work by Ai Weiwei, these maps feel generic and lack the intimate and dramatic qualities associated with art, but they succeed in communicating the concept of behavioural surplus as proposed by Zukoff. By visually exposing the large amount of data being collected without a users consent, Lightbeam is able to generate awareness, but fails to do so in an emotional manner.
It may be that to effectively create an artistic critique of surveillance capitalism, artists must get involved in computational sciences or, more likely, collaborate with engineers and programmers. If effective artistic critiques of control systems which targeted specific individuals could come from individual artists, it may be that effective critiques of distributed control systems should be addressed by collective efforts. This efforts would not only assume the collaboration of artists, programers and scientists, but would require users to implement them. It may be that operational and automated control systems should be exposed and resisted through operational and automated artworks.
It is important to point out that the different approaches mentioned in this article are not at odds or mutually exclusive. There is much value in culturally resonant symbols such as the Eye of Providence, as well as in the subversion of corporate discourse. The point is not to completely do away with the visual grammar that already exists, but to incorporate it with the powerful language of computer code. Code, in its broader definition, is the fiction that allows us to organize in large societies. From the the laws of Hammurabi, which in 1750 BC already prescribed rewards and punishments [7], to Facebook’s terms of use contract, which automatically imposes them, code is used to generate control systems. From honorific titles to lashings, and from digital badges to posting restrictions, art has dealt with the impositions of code in different ways. Code attempts to standardized behaviour, while art attempts to disrupt standardization.
[1] Kirby, Simon. "Truth to Power." Index on Censorship 37:2 (May 2008), 20–34 [2] Harari, Yuval. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Reprint, Harper
Perennial; Reprint edition, 2018.
[2] “Shoshana Zuboff on Surveillance Capitalism | VPRO Documentary.” YouTube, uploaded by vpro documentary, 21 Dec. 2019, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=hIXhnWUmMvw.
[4] Vermeir & Heiremans, et al. A Modest Proposal. Jubilee vzw., 2018 pp. 31-35. Crossref, ISBN: 9789082966206
[5] idem
[6] Hu, Xuehui, and Nishanth Sastry. “Thunderbeam-Lightbeam for Chrome.” King’s College London, 2019, nms.kcl.ac.uk/netsys/datasets/tracking-the- trackers-papers.
[7] Hammurabi, and C. Johns. The Code of Hammurabi. Independently published, 2019.