Pushing the Boundaries Between the Digital Publics and Privates In the City-Surveillance Matrix
Symposium:
Session Title:
- The Art of Software Cities
Presentation Title:
- Pushing the Boundaries Between the Digital Publics and Privates In the City-Surveillance Matrix
Presenter(s):
Venue(s):
Abstract:
Panel: The Art of Software Cities
Digital and mobile technologies create a sparkling blanket of diodes, silicon and lenses over cities, reconfiguring understandings of both physical and digital space. While the interfaces of this diverse set of technologies, from cctv cameras to smart phones, are layered with active-matrices that are sensitive to our actions and/or desires, they also become the entry points into a matrix of databases that are just as actively used to re-organize public and private life. As Christian Andersen notes “public participation in the city as software is mostly characterized by either surveillance or configuration”, suggesting that these configurations cannot be accounted for without addressing the surveillance aspects and vice versa. Computer scientists, companies and artists have tackled this underlying city-surveillance matrix in different ways. The objective of this talk is to explore some of the different approaches to engaging or disengaging with this city-surveillance matrix. We will start our investigation with an analysis of the construction of the surveillance and location privacy problem in computer science. Researchers of privacy and surveillance have dug into methods for making individual’s traces in the city invisible or anonymous in response to the matrix of surveillance. In doing so, they render the digital public as a risky place full of “powerful and strategic adversaries”. They put their focus into creating an invisible or unidentifiable private space in the public, imagined as something separate from the public that this private is disentangled from. A similar desire to create anonymity or unidentifiability is seen in the work called I.-R.A.S.C. of U.R.A./FILOART, an infra-red DIY device which protects against infra-red cameras.
As the city-surveillance matrix is used more and more by companies as a one-to-one representation of our actions and desires and of mechanisms of discipline, these privacy technologies make sense and are indispensable. However, as David Phillips underlines, “location privacy” “may be an inadequate frame through which to understand these issues and to fashion appropriate responses.” Instead, he sees the problem in the creation of a digital public which is dominated by commercial activity and general privatization. The location privacy approach favors disengagement, leaving the public up for grabs. Here, Michelle Teran’s work ‘Buscando al Sr. Goodbar’ provides an alteranative strategy to collectively narrate digital cities, questioning the use of the city-surveillance matrix to re-create private and public absolutes and to claim that the only public is the one that is commercial or privatized. Finally, we will look at eye’em, a mobile application for bringing “together mobile photographers from all over the world to create a stream of mutual inspiration and creative expression”. We will look at the way in which this application blurs the lines between the public and private. The application allows its community of users to collectively create a new semantics, questioning our conception of an “event” in the city, expanding it from its classical description as a crossing point of place and time. We will analyze eye’em’s conception of participation, as well as its relation to labour and privatization in the city-surveillance matrix.
