Published in Camerawork: A Journal of Photographic Arts
(28:1) Spring/Summer 1999
Public and Private in an Age of Dataveillance
Steve Dietz
If the progeny of Brady’s public(ity) sphere can be traced through Erich Salomon’s "candid camera" photographs to Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes to Jerry Springer and "reality TV" to jennicam, there is an equally illustrious ancestry for incursions into the privacy of the individual by a surveillance society dating back, according to David H. Flaherty, to at least the 17th-century Puritans and their "City upon a Hill" and including Bentham’s panopticon, Galton’s physiognomic photo composites, and any number of national databases from the DMV to the IRS to TRW.
There can be little argument that the Internet has created new space to play out issues of public vs. private. The important question is whether this new "space" is somehow distinctive or changes the terms of the debate in any way. The interesting answer is that artists are among the most sophisticated in their understanding of the implications of networked, digital media.
Counter-SurveillanceJust as Oscar Barnack’s invention of 35 mm film and a host of related technological advances enabled Salomon to take private pictures of public figures, Moore’s law and a host of related technological advances have enabled an unprecedented degree of automated optical surveillance of public spaces. While these and other monitoring devices such as the Clipper chip are always represented as non-threatening to "law abiding citizens," Heath Bunting’s parody cctv--a kind of international neighborhood watch, which allows viewers to fax in reports of crimes they may have noticed on four different Web cams in England, Germany, Spain, and the U.S to a local police station (supposedly)--brings new meaning to the phrase "global village." It takes a world to police it, you might say.
On the other hand, Steve Mann, an artist and MIT-trained engineer who invented the wearable computer around 1980, views the rise of surveillance as inevitable. The only solution is to make all surveillance data publicly accessible and to empower the individual to make her own surveillance. Paul Garrin’s video of the Tompkins Squre riot and the Rodney King video certainly lend credence to the power of this approach, and if Sony’s new Glass Tron glasses--a commercialization of Mann’s pioneering work--are as successful as the Walkman, the integration of distant spaces with personal ones will be commonplace.
One of the most interesting counter-surveillance projects and Web sites is Area 51: Landscape Painting as Counter-Surveillance by a group from the CADRE (Computers in Art, Design, Research and Education) Institute. The site can perhaps best be described as a "web verite" version of the X Files. It chronicles the journey of Art 210 class, headed by almost-CIA employee and CADRE director, Joel Slayton to surveil the infamous Area 51, a restricted military area near Rachel, Nevada, which does not appear on any maps and which is the site of numerous purported UFO sightings--why else would it be so secret? Along the way, some of the group detect Michael Heizer’s secret compound, "Complex City", which borders Area 51--why is that, do you suppose?--and investigate. During the action, "John C. Yeargin surveilled the black helicopter and the CADRE surveillance team as the CADRE surveillance team surveilled Area 51 and were in turn surveilled by the black helicopter which may have also been surveilling John C. Yeargin." At the end of the day, a French TV crew interviews the artists. The day after the counter-surveillance, Brett Stallbaum "spams" the nearby Nellis Air Force Base, and on the Web site, in an apparent effort to deflect legal retaliation posts the following explanation, which, presumably, even a government bureaucrat could understand:
Tragedy of the Commons: Public -> Commercial Space
Howard Rheingold to Mark Derry
Optical surveillance of individuals in public and commercial-public spaces is annoying at best and invasive at worst, but there are counter-strategies and its effect, if not its presence, is not necessarily permanent. What is harder to mitigate, however, is the potential 21st-century repeat of the tragedy of the commons.
In the good old days of "net.art," when artists were way ahead of corporations in terms of thinking about online, it was even possible to think about expanding the non-commercial--the non-privatized--sector of the Internet. Robbin Murphy describes one such project in his paper, "Thoreau and Walking: Art and the Legal Ambiguity of the Internet," which
Sainsbury retaliated through its lawyers and eventually the site was shut down. Other corporate hijacks, not surprisingly, have also been shut down. As big business has entered the Internet, it has vigorously protected its interests. It has also used the frontier status of the legalities governing the Internet and digital technologies to expand its interests, potentially at the cost of the public good.
Another of Bunting’s projects, for instance, Own, Be Owned or Remain Invisible (http://www.irational.org/heath/_readme.html), takes a newspaper article about him and links most of the words to URLs of the format "http://www.WORD.com." A surprising percentage of the resulting links, such as "www.to.com" are established commercial domains. Over time, more and more of the words of the world’s languages will become "domained."
Daniel Garcia Andujar’s Technologies to the People™ (TTTP ) site hosts the project "Language (property)" (http://www.irational.org/daniel/TM/warning.html), which states simply: "Please take care with your language. The next sentences are trademarks. These trademarks are the property of their registered owners." It then lists phrases such as "Where do you want to go today?" (Microsoft), "The art and science of imagining" (Olympus), "Defining the digital future" (Sony), and "Seeing what’s possible" (Silicon Graphics) with links to the corporate owners’ (of the English language!) Web sites, where their trademark claim is identified. (Of course, many of the links have changed since the piece was launched, but that’s a different story.) For good measure, Andujar throws in a few phrases that TTTP has or would like to trademark, with links to the (faux) products he sells.
While this privatization of the public sphere is significant, it pales in comparison to what some predict in the near future. In an interview about his recent book, The Biotech Century: Harnessing the Gene and Remaking the World, Jeremy Rifkin argues:
Partly in response to this situation, in the spirit of appropriating mainstream formats for other purposes, Natalie Jeremijenko and Heath Bunting created an online zine, Biotech Hobbyist Magazine, "THE place on the Web for biotech tinkerers, builders, experimenters, students, and others who love the intellectual challenge and stimulation of hobby biotech !" (http://www.irational.org/biotech/) Mixing low tech graphics with some apparently serious information with planted letters to the editor with fake ads for real biotech companies, Biotech Hobbyist Magazine is a typical net.art joke that plays freely with the semantics of the Internet to call attention to the way that commercial concerns are undermining this virtual public sphere.
Real Life (Soap Operas)
From reality TV to People magazine’s cover story on Chelsea Clinton, from the Jerry Springer show to the Starr report, much of contemporary media can be seen as the outing of the private realm into the public sphere. On the Internet, the original Trojan Coffee Machine spawned jennicam, which spawned a truly biblical litany of progeny including curler cam, pet cam, fridge cam, Madagascar cockroaches cam, Continental Divide cam, among thousands of others, as well as Webcast birth, sex, marriage, and death. I expect to find out any day about a live tax cam of someone filling out their 1040 at 10:40 pm on April 15. If Don Delillo is one of our foremost chroniclers of this "white noise" of real life, then Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio’s Refresh project is the White Noise soap opera of the Web (cam). (http://www.diacenter.org/dillerscofidio/index.html; see David Hunt’s essay elsewhere in this issue.)
The truth of the cam, however, is that like hotel porn, you almost never see anything. It is the idea that you might. A neverending, worldwide, 24x7 tease. Can it be long, however, before a guide on the Mining Company creates a site devoted to Web cam highlights called Reality Bytes, relieving us of the effort to do anything except click through archives of laugh track moments, just like real TV?
Data R U
Before Matthew Brady’s photograph of Abraham Lincoln (http://198.67.74.211/usiaweb/usis/lin.htm), few people who voted for a political candidate knew what he looked like. Arguably, before what artist and media theoretician Simon Penny has called the "datasphere" or what Roger Clarke refers to as "dataveillance,"politicians have known what only a few of their supporters really "looked like". In an age of increasing interconnectivity and concomitant data mining, that is changing, as this revealing comment from an IRS official suggests:
Tony Jones’s Here's what I (and every site you've ever accessed) know about you: (http://www.wolfenet.com/~ajones/WhoYou.html), is a simple but effective demonstration of the minimum trail of data crumbs we leave wherever we go on the Internet. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Are we our data profiles?