[-empyre-] Thoughts on the topic

[brooke singer <brooke@bsing.net>]

Hello wider world of -empyre-,

Thanks for the intro, Tim and Renate, and for organizing this month's
discussion. I am new to the list, although searching the archives I saw many
familiar "faces."

The work I have been doing the past 7+ years on my own and with my group
Preemptive Media generally fits into this theme of terrors + technologies.
This "speaking back" to security interests by appropriating many of the same
technologies for political and artistic action (as Tim and Renate write in
their intro) has been one of the main missions of Preemptive Media (which
includes Beatriz da Costa, Jamie Schulte and myself). For those of you not
familiar with our work, you can go here: http://www.preemptivemedia.net/.
Particularly related to this discussion are the projects Swipe and Zapped!.

I started along these lines prior to 9/11, mainly focusing on data
surveillance and information collection practices in the US. My interest has
always been in social sorting, rather than individual privacy matters,
whether conducted by business or government (and often times both in tandem)
for the purpose of selling more product, protecting capital, subjugating
minority groups, controlling behavior, repressing free speech etc. What is
concerning to me is the discreet/invisible nature of these practices, the
lack of subject awareness and consent, the deeply intertwined business and
government interests and the "wild west" mentality in the absence of an
omnibus data privacy law (again specific to the US).

As we all know, after 9/11 the floodgates opened and the dystopian and
invasive technologies that had been written off by many as distant or sci-fi
were given legs in the US and allowed to explode out of the labs and into
the markets to forever change lives across the world, some more than others.
I came across this image again recently (http://bsing.net/times_2002.jpg)
which I had saved from the front page of the New York Times in early 2002.
For me it hailed a turning point, the moment fictive nightmares became
everyday realities. The rapid acceleration of development in the data
surveillance field after 9/11, with huge surges of money and the
permanent-war mentality, was--and still is--mind boggling. There are far too
many to keep abreast of and fully understand their implications: Total
Information Awareness ==> Matrix ==> Advise programs, RFID in every US
passport, NSA warrant-less wiretaps, GPS in every taxi cab in San Francisco
(soon coming to NYC...) and so forth.

For Preemptive Media, we tried to keep up with the US datavallience industry
for nearly four years. Our actions were mainly about sharing and distilling
the information we amassed, creating platforms for dialogue and symbolic
resistance. I say symbolic because we never particularly expected results,
although it is always a pleasant surprise when a material change does occur.
As artists and technologists, we emphasized hands-on learning and visual
and/or performative methods for communication. A large part of the work was
to sort through the hype -- was there reason for panic?
 
The work lives on through the web although we are not actively developing
either Swipe or Zapped! at this point. We still receive frequent requests
for information and code, so it's apparent the need for work like this is
still there, maybe more so than when we first started.

In the last several years I have seen the rise of work termed "Locative
Media" and my own work is sometimes grouped in that category. I usually
ignore labels but this one is particularly bothersome to me because there is
a trend here to collapse this ever-growing field of terror technologies into
infotainment objects. This gets to the issue of what Tim calls the
"ambivalent attraction to technologies of terror" and, as Horit questions,
"what is the relationship between the production of art by means of digital
technologies and the production of terror by the same?" Locative Media (as
with the term Web 2.0) is deceptive in its appearance of being simply shiny,
fun and new. Yet, do we question computer art for its use of the digital
computer, originally designed to quickly crunch numbers to project missiles
more accurately -- wherein lies the difference? Is it only distance from
inception?

My newest work and research considers the thousands of abandoned toxic sites
that scatter the US landscape -- how did they end up that way, who is
responsible, why do they perpetuate, what is the harm and what is being
done? There are many links here to my surveillance research like finding
close ties between government and business interest, cover-ups and disregard
for "right to know" programs, layers of scientific jargon to protect against
public scrutiny and burden of damage falling upon weak political blocks.
These places, many caused by the chemical industry, must be considered
casualties of techno-terror too?

I hope I have not digressed too much but I am left wondering about this term
panic -- which I have pretty much ignored till now. Can it be a productive
force, undermining technologies of terror, or is it always a distraction in
support of more terror? Can it be re-channeled by artists not to follow the
whims of mass media but rather in support of a more democratic need or
process?  


-- 
Brooke Singer
www.bsing.net
brooke@bsing.net