This page will gather research around the topic of Surveillance, which is the topic for our Manifesto project. I would like to study more about the subject before coming up with an idea with the execution from books, articles, films or videos.

Articles from the Internet

Edward Snowden

Source : https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jun/04/edward-snowden-people-still-powerless-but-aware

I got interested in knowing more about Edward Snowden from an introduction of the book, Astro Noise A Survival Guide For Living Under Total Surveillance by Laura Poitras. The article talks Snowden having no regrets for the historical NSA leaks. He told that the most important change was about ‘public awareness’ saying that the government and the corporate sector preyed on our ignorance.

For me personally, I also don’t feel much of an issue with Surveillance since I have as well become too familiar with my data being asked here and there on the Internet. ‘Awareness’ and ‘Ignorance’ are two keywords I’m interested in for my artworks.

I might create some narrative works showing how ignorant we are with our daily life data being monitored by someone we don’t know. Or even further, we might know we are being watched, but we don’t care enough to take any actions on it.

One more notion is about the impact afterwards from the leak onto the message service like Whatsapp that began having this popping up yellow bubbles at the beginning of a conversation window telling that messages to the chat and calls are now secured with end-to-end encryption.

The encryption of data is what interests me in terms of how the corporate manage to protect their users’ privacy with technology. I might come up with a story of people communicating with each other in a way only two people can understand each other.

I think my intention is for people to become more aware of how they expose their privacy and data onto the world outside and on the online world in particular. I don’t think we can choose not to expose our data completely at all in order to function properly in this modern age, but I feel more of how could we balance it well between connectivity and privacy.

Books

Liquid Surveillance

by Zygmunt Bauman and David Lyon published in 2013 by Polity Press

I would like to take notes from what I got from this book as bullets below

• surveillance is about monitoring, tracking, tracing, sorting, checking and systematic watching.
• since 9/11, there is not only passport control but also body scanners and biometric checks.
• there are other kinds of surveillance such as online purchase, social media participation.
• what is the affect of surveillance socially, culturally and politically?
• surveillance is a central dimension of modernity, but modernity does not stand still.
• surveillance grows less like a tree and more like creeping weeds – Gilles Deleuze

• Bauman said in today’s world, it is post-panoptical, in a way that the inspector at the center of the panopticon can slip away into unreachable realms.
• software designers say they’re simply ‘dealing with data’, so their role is ‘morally neutral’
• questions not only about the appropriate analysis of surveillance, is it liquid? what difference does this make? but also about ethical challenges accompanying such analysis.

Loving Big Brother

by John E. Mcgrath published on 30 January 2014 by Routledge

• ‘Specifically, discussion of surveillance is almost always framed in terms of issues of crime prevention (now very much extended to terrorism prevention) and privacy rights.’ – author (p.2)
• ‘As a different way in to thinking about surveillance, I have developed the idea of ‘surveillance space’. Drawing on a range of thinkers including Foucault, but as diverse as Kant, Lefebvre, Benjamin and Butler, I have focused on the lived experience of surveillance and the cultural products that reveal our lives under surveillance to us. I hope that this different approach to thinking about surveillance may help us to deal in new and complex ways with the fact that the relevant question about surveillance today is not whether we should live in a surveillance society, but how.’ – author (p.2)

Films & Documentaries

The Great Hack

A documentary film from Netflix about a data hack scandal. The film shows the threat or the downside of Surveillance being misused by organisations. Although I would like to stress on the positive side of Surveillance, it is also good to consider it from many angles.