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This website was archived on July 20, 2019. It is frozen in time on that date.
Exolymph creator Sonya Mann's active website is Sonya, Supposedly.

April 17, 2016

We’re All Watching, But Why?

“In order to protect Melbourne’s reputation as Australia’s street art capital, CCTV cameras have been installed in areas deemed to be urban art hotpots. These cameras will serve a dual purpose, firstly to ensure that culturally significant works are protected for future generations to enjoy, and secondly, to be used as evidence against the artists should their work turn out to have no cultural significance.”

Posted by @kivikakk on Twitter.

There is something on-the-money about that poster. Surveillance has become so normal — you’re being watched constantly, all the time. Watched and recorded. It’s mundane. No one pays attention to most of the footage, but your presence and your actions are preserved. So many ambient cameras, loosely intended for security, are mounted on buildings. They absorb audiovisual data 24-7. The files are archived — deleted periodically, but available for at least thirty days. Friends’ smartphones and strangers’ smartphones capture your image. Your face is disseminated on Instagram and through Snapchat.

There’s always a good reason for these activities, right? No one is conducting surveillance for surveillance’s sake (except maybe the NSA). It’s to prevent shoplifting. It’s to express love via Facebook tagging. In fact, the latter type of recording wouldn’t usually be described as surveillance. But let’s look at the dictionary definition: surveillance is “the act of carefully watching someone or something especially in order to prevent or detect a crime”. So surveillance usually pertains to illegal behavior, sure, but it doesn’t have to. Surveillance is systematic watching and recording. If that doesn’t describe how teenagers use Snapchat, I don’t know what does.

Like most technologies that become integrated into everyday life, surveillance cameras are inherently political. But they don’t necessarily support one side or the other. However, the data they capture is almost always deployed to reinforce the state’s authority. Citizen recordings of police brutality provide a notable exception, but even then the framework of laws and judgment is inescapable.

March 26, 2016

Surveillance Status Quo

“Every country knows [that telecoms networks are] vulnerable, but no one wants to fix the problem — because they exploit that vulnerability, too.” — Robert Kolker in a Bloomberg article about StingRays

Here we’re confronted with the problem of incentives. Police are incentivized to spy on citizens, whether innocent or guilty. The success of law enforcement is measured by arrests, not by the population’s peace and happiness. Definitely not by how well civil liberties have been protected. None of that fits in a spreadsheet! Nation-states are incentivized to spy on each other, for the sake of regular ol’ espionage as well as obtaining commercial secrets. It’s desirable to keep an eye on the neighbors. What are they up to? When and where are they going to sell their newest invention?

Photo via Thierry Ehrmann.

Maybe this sounds paranoid, but it’s not. The US increasingly relies on its information economy, which means that data and insight are both especially valuable. Other developed countries are similarly beholden to ideas and intellectual property. One of the profound dangers posed by China is its disregard for patents and copyrights, and its subsequent explosion of innovation. Being surpassed is America’s direst fear. We need to make ourselves great again, right?!

I’ve written about apathy before. It’s the enemy of the entrepreneur and the activist. In a world full or products and causes, it’s tough to cajole someone into caring. Who has the time? And, more crucially, who has the correct incentive structure? Mister Average Joe doesn’t need to worry about surveillance — it doesn’t impact him immediately or concretely — and consequently he simply doesn’t bother himself with the subject.

Every time I say something like this, I’m accused on complacency. And I guess that’s fair. I’m resigned to reality, and I don’t try to agitate against the status quo. Selfishness makes me more interested in surviving and excelling than in overturning power structures.

“I said yes to the mandatory government implants […] because I, like everybody else, just wanted to be safe.” — short story by Maverix75

February 10, 2016

Expose Yourself / Still Trying To Hide

Sometimes I like to string quotes together to indicate a point. It’s akin to writing a very short essay using other people’s words.

“What makes crowdfunding possible now is the emergence of new communication platforms. The Internet allows us to surface niche communities that weren’t so obvious beforehand.” — Ellen Chisa, a former Kickstarter product manager

Image via Alan O’Rourke. Get that money.

Image via Alan O’Rourke. Gettin’ that guac.

“In some ways, we’re lucky that the first two decades involving the advent of the commercial Internet were largely a positive-sum game. The creation of digital space for self-expression, at near-zero cost, does not necessarily challenge or erode someone else’s right to space or resources.” — Kim-Mai Cutler on California’s housing and development problems [not necessarily — note that]

“Now, as the stars begin to dim and humans dip and swerve in flocks of social media ephemera, responses are instantaneous and direct and physical, our nascent haptic helpers tugging gently at our sleeves to let us know that someone, somewhere, has had an opinion at us. […] I’ve started thinking of this as an attention lens: small, human amounts of individual attention are refracted through social media to converge on a single person, producing the effect of infinite attention at the focal point.” — Coda Hale on Twitter and related social dilemmas

Image by HowToStartABlogOnline.net via Flickr.

“the world today is like living in a big field that is more illuminated than ever before” — Joseph Nye, quoted on government surveillance

There are pros and cons to being a figment of the open web. The freely visible web. The semi-universally accessible web. For my purposes, the pros outweigh the cons. But like most choices, it’s worth considering! How much do you want to participate?

February 1, 2016

The Surveillance Paradigm

According to her website, “Addie Wagenknecht is an American artist based in Austria, whose work explores the tension between expression and technology. She seeks to blend conceptual work with traditional forms of hacking and sculpture.” She succeeds in this endeavor. I asked Addie some questions about her artistic philosophy.

Artwork by Addie Wagenknecht.

Exolymph: Much of your body of work deals with surveillance, but I would go farther and say that you deal with the power differentials highlighted by acts of witnessing. Do you agree with that, or is it pseudo-intellectual bullshit? Either way, how do you feel about being watched?

Wagenknecht: Yes, I agree with that statement entirely.

Regarding being seen, being watched, there is a trauma to not being seen, as much as one exists for those being watched. Who is allowed in to the public sphere? Who is allowed to be visible? I have been reading a lot of research and papers on the implications of race/sex/religion within the canon of surveillance, as these factors serve as both a discursive and material practice of sociopolitical norms. Crypto is an inherently elitist technology; it is simply not available to people who are not highly fluent in their hardware and software bases. The more people outside of the hacker scene I teach these tools to, the more I believe how insanely secretive and elitist these so-called open protocols are.

Here is the thing: “public” has a reliance on the notion of a binary between private and public, visible and invisible space. This implies that we have spaces which are not part of this surveillance paradigm, but with the nature of smartphones being on everyone, everywhere, I am no longer convinced that this binary exists. “The personal is political” can also be read as saying, “The private is political.” Because everything we do in private is political: who we have sex with, what we eat, who does the cleaning, and so on…

Exolymph: How do you see your work evolving over time? What new themes interest you now?

Wagenknecht: I’d like to do more collaborative longer-term projects. I’ve started working with Peter Sunde on some small works which I hope we can release in the coming months, and also Quayola on interpretation of code as a visual entity.

My research in the last two months has been primarily about living in entirely man-made environments and the Internet of Things. The genesis of matter, the history of the earth, and how they are being reinterpreted as a form of speculated geology by the human race and the machines which we version-control that control us. I am also researching mineral composites, which would otherwise not be found in nature, to challenge definitions of “real”. I’m looking at how to play homage to the Western valuation of hyper-optimization by maximizing the believed properties of various specimens.

Exolymph: In general, what draws you to conceptual art? Why sculpture in particular? It’s interesting that you address digital realities in corporeal forms.

Wagenknecht: As artists, our role is to take complex ideas and encapsulate them in a way that society can parse. I want to subvert systems and objects in ways which people can hopefully better understand and reflect on why we need them at all.

Exolymph: What are you interested in building that you haven’t had a chance to do yet? What if you had unlimited resources?

Wagenknecht: I’d do more physical works that rely on fabricating with robotics and robotic arms, large-scale pieces, in materials like stone and metals. I also have some large-scale installations that I’ve been wanting to do forever and I’d get that list of works complete.

Exolymph: What have you downloaded that did get you in trouble? [I was referencing a piece that involves the sentence “I will not download things that get me in trouble” scrawled repeatedly across a wall.]

Wagenknecht: Ha! I’d prefer not to answer that.

Ways to get in touch with Addie Wagenknecht, as well as more examples of her artwork, are listed on her website.

January 12, 2016

Keep Your Head Down

Reading about operational security has turned my mind toward privacy rights. Opsec tactics are concerned with shielding information from enemy access — mostly through rigorous, consistent caution. As the Animal Liberation Front put it in one of their direct action guides, “True security culture requires a clear head, a rational mind, and personal self-control.” The assumption made by savvy opsec practitioners is that all data will be compromised eventually. Therefore, they aim to minimize the inevitable consequences.

I used to disregard privacy. My attitude was a classic: “If you’re not doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to hide!” (a viewpoint refuted very well by Robin Doherty). The problem is that even people who are acting ethically can run afoul of the law or be persecuted by the authorities. Consider how the FBI treated civil rights activists in the 1960s. Current mass surveillance by the NSA and similar government bodies is equally worrisome, as is the treatment of whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning. I’m not naive enough to think that this behavior will stop. People do anything that they are physically or technically capable of doing in order to access power — especially state agents.

Portrait of Edward Snowden by John Meyer of The Spilt Ink; $130.79 on Etsy.

I’m still not convinced that privacy should be a guaranteed legal right, or if so, to what extent. The best way to restrict your own information is simply to be secretive — stay quiet and maintain the impression of insignificance. After all, the vast majority of day-to-day privacy compromises are self-inflicted, simply because most people don’t care. That’s how Facebook and other social networks manage to compile detailed dossiers on their users.

So, what’s the essential takeaway here? I’m not sure. It’s interesting to ponder the consequences of a post-privacy society, until you realize that we already live in one. The results are quite mundane. Feels normal, right?

December 15, 2015

The Bot Tries Not to Surveil Humans

Is the computer watching you? It’s hard to tell. You can’t make up your mind. The computer’s attention skips from eye to eye. It has so many, and you wonder how it chooses where to settle its sight. What does the computer see, really? Numbers? In a way, humans see numbers too — light wavelengths can be measured, and that’s basically what eyes do — but we translate them into very different artifacts.

Of course, saying “the computer” is a simplification. It’s not a single entity, but rather a series of commands, of instructions. The program follows the rules that were set up for it, and it follows those rules through many different machines.

Minnesota programmer Derek Arnold made a bot called @FFD8FFDB that tweets color-processed stills from obscure security cameras. He summarized it beautifully in an essay on the project:

My script captures a frame, and gums it up with an Imagemagick script. I modify the colors in the YUV colorspace, crop out identifying information provided in the margins, and ensure the images are consistent. I use Wordnik to generate accompanying text and replace some characters with graphics characters. This is just for effect. @ffd8ffdb’s goal is superficial; I just like the way the tweets look. I enjoy that strangers find it unsettling, amusing, or even uninteresting. Like other Twitter bots, its unending tenacity is part of its charm. Many cameras go dark at night, most not having enough illumination to provide images. The bot doesn’t care and keeps stealing shots.

I wasn’t initially sure from this description, but Derek confirmed to me that @FFD8FFDB is fully automated. You could say the bot has a life of its own — albeit one completely defined by its human creator. And yet @FFD8FFDB keeps going regardless of whether Derek participates. As he said, “I had the initial control of it…”

The bot’s feed contains very few images of people. When I scroll through it, I feel ennui. The world looks abandoned. Derek told me that this sense of melancholy emerged unintentionally. He avoided using cameras that would show humans — even now, if a face appears too clearly, he’ll delete the post — because he didn’t want @FFD8FFDB to be invasive, exploitative, or titillating. Derek searched for image sources in “subsections of the business-class internet” specifically to avoid even the most banal intimacy.

He said as much in his essay, but I was surprised by how straightforward Derek’s artistic goals were. He told me, “[The bot] was a thing that I did that I wasn’t thinking too hard about at first.” He became interested in generative art, inspired by numerous other #botALLYs, and simply acted on his impulses. Scratching this itch involved significant effort: Derek estimated that he’s put in twenty-to-forty hours of work on @FFD8FFDB over the past year. “It took a lot of trial and error to get the look I wanted out of it.”

This project is clearly “of the internet”, as they say. On the phone, Derek and I both stumbled over the bot’s name. He told me, “If I ever thought I’d be saying this out loud, I might have named it differently.” Derek was initially surprised by @FFD8FFDB’s popularity — the account now has more followers than his personal Twitter. He added, “I follow the account myself — I don’t follow all of the stuff that I’ve made — and I like it because it surprises me on a consistent basis.”

My favorite discovery from this conversation is that other Twitter users respond to @FFD8FFDB — literally respond. Derek laughed, “People reply to the bot all the time, and it’s set up to send another image.” Those threads are ready to be explored.

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