Negative Dialectics in the Google Era: A Conversation with Trevor Paglen by Julian Stallabrass :: OCTOBER 138, Fall 2011, pp. 3–14.

In the last seven years, in a series of performances, publications, exhibitions, and installations, Trevor Paglen has explored the world of hidden military projects and infrastructure. One of his best-known series is Limit Telephotography, for which he trained lenses designed for astronomical photography on secret military bases in the U.S., using their very-long-range photographic capabilities to capture images that would otherwise be hidden to civilian eyes. These are the “limits” that lie at the heart of Paglen’s project: the limits of democracy, secrecy, visibility, and the knowable. Continue reading

Interact with Access online — part of Architecture of Fear :: November 8-25, 2011; 8:00 am - 8:00 pm (GMT +1) :: Z33 - House for Contemporary Art, PHL University College, Hasselt, Belgium.

Access (by Marie Sester) is a public art installation that applies web and surveillance technologies, allowing web users to track individuals in public spaces with a unique robotic spotlight and acoustic beam system, without people wearing any gear, exploring the ambiguities among surveillance, control, visibility and celebrity.

Architecture of Fear explores how feelings of fear pervade daily life in the contemporary media society. The cause of fear seems interchangeable and constantly fluctuating. Continue reading

LoVid and Jill Magid :: October 4-28, 2011 :: Opening Reception: October 4; 5:00 - 7:00 pm :: Pace Digital Gallery, Pace University, 163 William Street, New York, New York.

LoVid: 486 Shorts (2006) stems from a personal interaction with an ordinarily closed off part of a common machine. By getting inside the black box (the casing of an archaic 486 computer), LoVid reached the physical location where signals are passed. Wire was used to make connections on the circuit board of the video card, to produce short videos. Recordings made from these shorts were then edited into 486 short clips, each corresponding to one of the physical shorts. 486 Shorts was recorded during a residency at iEAR in 2006 and released on Analogous in 2009. Continue reading

Antoni Muntadas — Between the Frames: The Forum (Barcelona), 1983–1993 :: until April 2012 :: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, MACBA Collection, Plaça dels Àngels, 1, 08001 Barcelona.

‘Art, as part of our time, culture and society, shares and is affected by rules, structures and tics like other economic, political and social systems in our environment.’ So began the interviews given by Antoni Muntadas between 1983 and 1991 to one hundred and sixty agents from the international art circuit, and compiled in the installation Between the Frames: The Forum (Barcelona), 1983–1993 (2011). Continue reading

Surveillance Cinema: James Coupe :: August 11, 2011; 7:00 - 8:00 pm :: Henry Auditorium, University of Washington, 15th Ave NE and NE 41st Street, Seattle, WA.

In conjunction with the exhibition The Talent Show (through August 21), The Henry Art Gallery invites you to join artist James Coupe for a screening and discussion of the artist’s recent work with ’surveillance cinema’ in (re)collector, Surveillance Suite, and the web-based work Today, too, I experienced something… I hope to understand in a few days.

James Coupe is an artist whose work focuses on emergent systems, aesthetic machines, autonomy, and networks. Educated in Fine Art at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland) and Creative Technology at the University of Salford (England), his recent projects have included appropriative powerline networks, parasitical cellular phone agents, autonomous robot systems, self-organizing telephone call centres, and installations in which computers use spam to search for the meaning of the Internet. Continue reading

The Interception series of actions consists of the illegal interception of CCTV cameras monitoring urban areas. Continue reading

Fellow Prisoners by John Berger, Guernica, July 2011: The best way to understand the world, writes Berger, is not as a metaphorical prison but a literal one. And what better way to inspire solidarity than seeing ourselves (them) as fellow prisoners?

[...] “What is being lived today is new because of its relationship with space.

It’s here that the thinking of Zygmunt Bauman is illuminating. He points out that the corporate market forces now running the world are ex-territorial, that’s to say “free from territorial constraints — the constraints of locality.” They are perpetually remote, anonymous and thus never have to take account of the territorial, physical consequences of their actions. Continue reading

[Adam Greenfield @ Systems/Layers Walkshop] Some implications of networked sensing for privacy in public space: Toward a taxonomy of public objects by Adam Greenfield:

[...] “My feeling is that the complexity of this terrain is such that abstract principles and so-called “best practices” aren’t particularly likely to be useful in guiding us toward better decisions unless they’re firmly grounded in a concrete consideration of some present-day actualities. In our attempt to think more clearly about these issues, therefore, we start by considering five real-world informatic systems, all developed and deployed in the past three years. These are arrayed along a spectrum of concern, from a sensor I think of as self-evidently non-threatening, to something I believe the privacy community particularly — and advocates of high-quality public space in general — ought to be deeply troubled by…”

Here’s an interesting border project that predates Border Haunt and also references BlueServo: Continue reading

Discontrol Party by Samuel Bianchini (EnsadLab / DRii) :: June 24-25, 2011 8:00 pm - 2:00 am :: La Gaíté lyrique, 3, bis rue Papin, Paris.

Discontrol Party is a dispositif which brings together two worlds: that of state-of-the-art surveillance techniques and that of partying. The dancefloor/ live music venue/ performance space will appear in the dual spotlight of a partying event and a data-driven control and surveillance system (computer vision, RFID, recording by smartphones, etc.) The main space of the Gaíté Lyrique becomes for the space of one evening a night-club set up as a control room: far from light effects or other VJing, the participants, while partying, are confronted by multiple visualizations of the information technology system which observes them and seeks to analyze their behavior. Continue reading