digitalworlds

-> Following the 9/11 attacks, in response the United States passed the Patriot Act, a one hundred and thirty page series of laws that enabled the US to develop new programs of domestic surveillance and allowed agencies broader access to citizen's personal records.

-> In 2002, DARPA proposed a new program called Total Information Awareness (TIA) to create systems for detecting, classifying and identifying foreign terrorists. This program involved accessing federal, state and local government databases and corporate databases--many of which relied on the infrastructure of the net to trace so called “enemies of the state.”

-> In addition to the global militarism, the war on terror was an information war. The Patriot Act and various efforts of Homeland Security created an infrastructure of domestic surveillance to protect the priorities of the state, and corporations cooperated with these efforts.

Five Eyes + the Snowden disclosures

Another of the NSA slides exposed in the Snowden files, illustrating two different databases to use for querying in signals intelligence using the surveillance programs PRISM and Upstream.

-> In May of 2013, Edward Snowden, an intelligance contractor for the NSA, leaked thousands of classified documents to a small group of reporters. These leaks uncovered the use of global surveillance software by the NSA and CIA to monitor citizen’s activities and internet use. The leaks proved the existence of massive databases of information collected from internet communications, and how these databases could be cross referenced between allies from the Five Eyes: so, the NSA could cross reference US data mining with the data of citizens in the UK, Canada, Asia and Europe.

-> Within the NSA CIA, and Canada’s CSE (Communications Security Establishment), the GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters (thats the UK security agency that monitors signals intelligence), these agencies control intercept stations, they use satellites to track mobile phones, and monitored the flow of information through the physical infrastructure of the web. In traffic analysis, or data mining, metadata was collected and cross referenced to analyze a vast flow of digital information.

Still image from Laura Poitras' documentary Citizenfour, that chronicles the Snowden disclosures.

Ai Weiwei and Jacob Applebaum Panda to Panda, 2015.

-> Ai Weiwei is a Chinese contemporary artist, documentarian and activist. He is often referred to as the architect of Chinese modernism, and has created many political sculptures, photographs and public artworks. In his work he has also been deeply interested in the mediums of architecture.

-> In his work, he has been actively critical of the Chinese government: including its stance on democracy and human rights. In his documentary work he has investigated government corruption and the censorship of its citizens. In 2011, he was arrested by the Chinese government for “economic crimes,” and detained for 81 days.

-> In 2005, Weiwei used the platform Sina Weibo, a microblogging platform, to consistently share social commentary, thoughts on art and architecture, and an autobiographical account of his life. Through thousands of uploads, blogging became a performance through the medium of the Internet. His blog was shut down in 2009.

-> Jacob Applebaum is an American journalist, computer security researcher and hacker. Applebaum is a past contributor and collaborator of Wikileaks, and wrote a number of journal articles analyzing the NSA documents leaked by Snowden. His hacker name is “ioerror” and he is a member of the Cult of the Dead Cow hacker collective and founder of the Noisebridge hackerspace.

-> Panda to Panda addresses issues of privacy in the digital age. Weiwei and Applebaum's collaboration was documented by Laura Poitras, one of the journalists and documentarian who was first contacted by Snowden. In the piece, Weiwei and Applebaum shred NSA documents that were given to Poitras by Snowden in 2013, and stuff toy pandas with the obscured files. In each stuffed panda the artists placed a memory card with the full archive of leaked documents.

Screenshot of Ai Weiwei's blog, that was shut down in 2009.

Portrait of Weiwei with his cat, http://blogs.artinfo.com.

Portrait of Jacob Applebaum, photo by Peter Yang.

Ai Weiwei and Jacob Applebaum, Panda to Panda, 2015. Still image from Laura Poitras' short film Art of Disent, New York Times youtube.

Trevor Paglen + Jacob Applebaum Autonomy Cube, 2016.

Trevor Paglen and Jacob Applebaum, Autonomy Cube, 2016. Image from Paglen's website, https://paglen.studio/2020/04/09/autonomy-cube/.

-> Trevor Paglen is a geographer and artist whose work spans photography, sculpture and investigative journalism. His body of work seeks to uncover issues of mass surveillance and data collection, and he has created a number of large scales works documenting covert satellites, drones, undersea fibre-optic cables, and other infrastructures of data collection.

-> The sculpture was designed for art museums and civic spaces, and is composed of a series of Internet-connected computers that create a Wifi hotspot that routes all of its wifi traffic through the Tor network.

-> Makes visible the infrastructure of the Internet

Image of an example onion, HANtwister via Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_routing#/media/File:Onion_diagram.svg.

Counter-Surveillance: Paul Kneale's Cryptogif, 2013.

-> What is encryption?

-> Paul Kneale is a London-based artist, but was born in Toronto, Ca. His practice explores the impacts of digital technology on the perception of reality and art. He holds an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art in the UK.

-> In a series of animated gifs, Kneale creates works that cannot be read through automation. “in the thin grey area between what a human could read but a machine could not, there was room for disruption.”

-> A gif image with a busy background and animated handwritten text on top, made the image very difficult to be read by automated software, because the sentence runs across multiple frames. The artist compares it to an advanced CAPTCHA image, that proves the viewer is human.

Data, Data Everywhere

-> Tor was developed by computer scientists at the United States Naval Research Laboratory in the 1990s, and used what is called onion routing to encrypt application layers of a communication protocol stack. In 2004, the government released the code for Tor, and since then this open source software has been maintained by over seven thousand volunteers, including Applebaum.

-> Through Tor, it is very difficult to track a user’s internet activity. Autonomy Cube utilized the Tor network in order to question the social contracts we take for granted when accessing mainstream digital infrastructures.

Architectures of Control

Jeremy Bentham's panopticon prison was drawn by Willey Reveley in 1791.

"Each individual, in his place, is securely confined to a cell from which he is seen from the front by the supervisor; but the side walls prevent him from coming into contact with his companions. He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication. The arrangement of his room, opposite the central tower, imposes on him an axial visibility; but the divisions of the ring, those separated cells, imply a lateral invisibility. And this invisibility is a guarantee of order. (emphasis added)

Michel Foucault, “Panopticism” from Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the
Prison, 5.

In 2001, Richard Clarke Special Advisor to the President for Cyber Security said: “There is a parellel between terrorism and information security [...]. We need to create islands – islands in the Internet, if you will – where when you land on those islands you have to show some identification.”

"The NSA has said in 2011 that a major concern in their work is how to analyze the massive amounts of data that they are collecting: 'It’s not about the data or even access to the data. It’s about getting information from the truckloads of data ... Developers, please help! We’re drowning (not waving) in a sea of data—with data, data everywhere, but not a drop of information.'"
Hito Steyerl, Duty Free Art, 48.

"We are drowning in material," Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks.
Interview in De Stiegel with Michael Sontheimer.

"'They park stuff in storage in the hopes that they will eventually have time to get to it,' said James Lewis, a cyberexpert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, 'or that they'll find something that they need to go back and look for in the masses of data.' But, he added, "most of it sits and is never looked at by anyone.'"
Scott Shane and David E. Sanger, New York Times.

Photograph of the NSA's Utah Data Center, taken by an employee of the Electronic Frontier Foundation during an airship flight. Image from Wikipedia.

& Hito Steyerl How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013.

-> Steyerl we are familiar with already from In Defence of the Poor Image!

-> -Hito Steyerl is an essay documentarian, writer and video artist based in Germany. Her areas of interest includes affects of globalization, media, technology and the circulation of digital images. She holds a PhD in Philosophy from the Academu of Fine Arts Vienna, and attended the Japan Institute of Moving Images. She is a vital contributor to contemporary media theory and critical theory.

-> A vital work of Post-Internet art, Steyerl’s visual language follows a trajectory of artists working in Internet Art from the era of Web 2.0: Steyerl’s video essays create disparate environments by stringing together wideranging anecdotes and historical events, drawn towards one another by puns and coincidence, to lay bare unsettling intersections in the real world.

Being Seen: Facial Recognition + Policing American Artists's Security Theatre, 2023.

-> Security Theatre is a 2023 installation which opened in the Guggenheim Museum. In the centre of the gallery’s rotunda, hangs a black orb. The orb contains CCTV cameras. In a different section of the museum, visitors can enter a small room featuring live surveillance which is taking place in the museum, tagging visitors as “HUMAN."

-> Artist created this work to speak to the abundance of carceral technologies that have infiltrated everyday life in the US, and how the physical infrastructures of surveillance conspicuously draw attention to themselves, but banal and threatening.

Forensic Architecture + Investigative Aesthetics

American Artist, Security Theatre. Image from American Artists' website, https://americanartist.us/works/security-theater.

Paul Kneale, Cryptogif, 2013. Image from Medium.com.

Hito Steyerl, How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013. Link from Artforum.

Forensic Architecture, Cloud Studies installation, 2021. Image by Michael Pollard.

-> “Those delivering violence have recourse to higher-resolution sensors: cameras on drones, planes, and satellites to record clashes from multiple perspectives. Their overwhelming power relies on weapons, but also on access to information – gathered as floods of data, using AI for interpretation and prediction. While massive collection takes place, such violence also consists of a simultaneous attempt to impose on those experiencing the attack a uniform and impenetrable block of information, one that reads as information from one side and as noise on the other.”

Eyal Weizman and Matthew Fuller, Investigative Aesthetics, 2.

Next Week: Resistance through World-Building

Quinn Hopkins, Woodland Be[AR], 2022.

Waylon Wilson, Čá··hu video game, 2021.

Surveillance Frontierism + Shaheer Tarar's THE JACK PINE, 2019.

“surveillance in and of black life as a fact of blackness.”
Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness

"The algorithm, as a finite process of steps embedded in code, is every bit as human as physical observation. It is laden with beliefs, assumptions, prejudices, and opinions (just as physical observation is) but it masquerades as objective.”
Douglas Thomas, No Internet, No Art, 139.

American Artist, Security Theatre. Image from American Artists' website, https://americanartist.us/works/security-theater.

Shaheer Tarar, THE JACK PINE, 2019. Image from Tarar' website, https://www.shaheer.info/index.html.

-> Tarar is an artist and geographer based in London, and a current PhD candidate at the University of Toronto, where he is investigating Internet geographies. His practice ranges from documentary film, game design and new media installation, and often explores transformations of environment by AI and surveillance infrastructures.

-> Tarar was inspired to complete this piece based on another section of the Snowden disclosures, which revealed that Canada’s Communications and Security Establishment used airport Wifi hotspots to surveil passengers and track them after they left the airport. Because the agency used AI backend methods for this operation, the number of individuals surveilled is unknown even to the CSE.