Participatory (Counter-)Surveillance and the Internet

(Long paper)

Keywords: Internet, Internet art, surveillance, participatory, countersurveillance, detournement, humor, hacking

This is a text about Internet art projects dealing with Internet surveillance. In the paragraphs below, I will describe a web service that floods the Internet with fake websites, another web project that allows users to create email accounts in the names of villains that send conspiratorial emails to each other, and a solar‐powered disco ball on which YouTube dance videos are projected. What connects these seemingly disparate projects? It may sound absurd, but these projects may help us understand our complicated existence as surveillant and surveillee within networked communications. Since the projects described in the text were made over more than a decade, the article may also reveal some aspects of how the Internet has changed over time.