In keeping with Sobell’s interest in extra-institutional viewing communities, the entire exhibition will also be webcast at all hours of the day, allowing online users access to the conventionally closed-off realm of the artist studio, in a fashion that constructively challenges existing divisions of public and private space, while also placing her web audience in the ambivalent role of surveillants. Sobell and multimedia artist Emily Hartzell realized a similar project in 1994, also using real-time webcasting to transform their studio at NYU Center for Advanced Technology into one of the internet’s first time-based installations. Reflecting on the experience, they described moments when “our actions were heightened by our awareness of unseen Web visitors,” and others when “we felt ourselves dissolved in…ubiquitous surveillance.” Given her open invitation for musical collaboration for the duration of her forthcoming exhibition, it seems Sobell is presently aiming to produce an installation that both foregrounds the “artist-in-studio as spectacle” and facilitates a new type of community-centric performance space, accessible to viewers near and far. - Tyler Coburn, Rhizome.

Presentations on the theory & practice of surveillance and contemporary protest art, by graduate students in the ITP program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. The presenters’ talks will be grouped into four panels, to be moderated by their Professor, Marisa Olson (Curator at Large, Rhizome), on topics ranging from voyeurism and play to intervention and networks of control. These panels will consist of both artist talks and critical essays, and audience members will be invited to give feedback on a few works in progress.

Program:

11:45 Open Seating
12:00 Welcome & Introduction, Marisa Olson

12:05-1:15 Voyeurism vs. Exhibitionism: Online and In the Streets
Panelists: Allistar Peters and Meng Li, Ana Maria Gutierrez, Heather Rasley

1:15-2:00 Watchful Intervening: From Scientologists to Spy Shops
Panelists: Amanda Bernsohn and Kacie Kinzer, Syed Salahuddin

2-3:30 Playtime: Games, Toys, and Entertainment
Panelists: Oscar Torres, Scott Hoffer, Shlomit Lehavi and Leah Gilliam

3:30-5 Looking at Control: From Candidate Self-Surveillance to Wireless Subversion
Panelists: Michael Clemow and Tom Jenkins, Alberto Tafoya, Emery Martin

The Change You Want To See is the gallery and convergence stage run by the activist arts collective Not An Alternative.

Introduction: SVEN … is a project developed by Amy Alexander, Wojciech Kosma, and Vincent Rabaud with Jesse Gilbert, Nikhil Rasiwasia, and Marilia Maschion. The following text focuses on SVEN’s approach to and issues surrounding computer vision. Cinematography, and its relationship to both software and surveillance video, is also important to SVEN, but it’s a topic for a different text. (Art is of course of particular importance to SVEN—but that should go without saying.)

SVEN is a piece of tactical software art. Tactical software art comes out of traditions of tactical media and software art. It’s a logical mix: tactical media is a response to the way mainstream media influences culture; software art is a response to the ways mainstream software influences culture. Tactical media often involves a combination of digital actions and meatspace—or street—actions. In SVEN, these are one and the same—digital actions that take place on the street (just off the curb in this case)…” Continue reading About… Software, Surveillance, Scariness, Subjectivity (and SVEN) by Amy Alexander [PDF] .

The New Normal brings together thirteen recent artworks that use private information as raw material and subject matter. The concept of privacy, though widely invoked, is difficult to define. The private sphere encompasses domestic spaces, bodies, thoughts, communications, and behaviors—contexts that are usually rendered inaccessible to the public eye by legal, social, and physical boundaries. The practices that demarcate the private sphere are so much a part of the fabric of everyday life—wearing clothing, politely pretending not to overhear a cell-phone conversation— that they only become noticeable when they shift, making the private sphere visible to the public eye. Privacy, to put it bluntly, captures our attention only when it is under threat.

In the wake of 9/11, the specter of terrorism was used to justify increased collection and sharing of personal data by governments around the world. This time of heightened surveillance, characterized by luggage searches, Internet monitoring, and wiretaps, was dubbed “the new normal” by U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney.

The spread of social technology has affected privacy no less profoundly. With the rise of online commerce, many banks and retailers have developed sophisticated methods of tracking and studying the behavior of consumers, while increased use of the Internet has created new platforms for voluntary self-disclosure, from blogs to MySpace. Private information has never been less private, as evinced by Kota Ezawa’s Home Video II, made from “leaked” video files of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s honeymoon,widely available on the Web. Each of the works in The New Normal—video, Web sites, sculpture, artist’s books, found objects, and photographs—grants access to the private sphere of the artists themselves, of strangers, and of public officials. Overall, the exhibition creates a sense that access to private information is a kind of currency, the exchange of which is growing and evolving in bewildering ways. We may find it frightening or fascinating, but we are all inescapably complicit in it.

The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue co-published with Independent Curators International, with essays by Michael Connor, Clay Shirky and Marisa Olson.

[Eduardo Navas]: You explain that you are interested in the concepts of transparency, visibility and access. Can you explain how these came to shape your project “Exposure” and your interest in surveillance?

[Marie Sester]: The situation that became a reality in the U.S. after 9/11 had been developing in Europe for some time. Bombing attacks were part of my reality in France, hijacking planes and taking passengers as hostages was something we lived with day to day. This was often done to ask for money, or demand for political prisoners to be released. Such unfortunate events were not part of U.S. reality.

Terrorism was already present in Europe. Sometimes, when bombs exploded. There were many individuals from small groups using what today we call terrorist strategies; it was at this time that surveillance devices were introduced. I was intrigued by this shift, which was a bit disturbing. As surveillance technology started to be introduced at the airport, it became normal to have one’s luggage X-ray scanned. It became common to find scanners at the airport, as well as government buildings like City Hall. The unexpected beauty of surveillance technology fascinated me.

Suddenly, there was a new form of presence and reality defined by these new devices. And I wanted to work with the images they produced. I had already been working with pre-made objects and images for some time. At that time I forged and assembled the notions of transparency, visibility and access and they are still the basis of my work.

[EN]: You found this imagery beautiful, but at the same time, this imagery was very pervasive, were you ambivalent to it?

[MS]: Yes, I found it ambivalent. This is how the notion of access came to develop eventually in my work. In the Nineties, we began to live with a whole combination of pre-requisites, especially when computers became common. All of a sudden one is expected to log in in one way or another, to get access to information, or to an actual place — but this is nothing new. The mythic city of Jerusalem, for example, had 12 gates, which were well guarded, and in ancient cities as long as we can remember, one had to show or pay a right of entry. So the same thing happens with the digital world, the cyber world. It’s another way of also keeping track of access, in this case more often to information. This is the function of cookies in the browser, and in the end it’s an issue of knowledge and possibility.

Then I reflected on access as a concept and realized that its opposite would be exclusion, which also became very present. Exclusion divided the world in parts. Before we had the wealthy and the poor, and now access divides people in classes. With all this in mind I looked at the X-rays of luggage at the airport, and also thought about our bodies in medical progress, and my work began to take shape.

This is what I call the politics of seeing. For example, in ancient China, the emperor would have privileged access to the highest mountain close to his city to prove that he had the power to oversee and rule. So today we have improved technology to see deeper, to see through objects and bodies. Seeing is a way to attain information. It gives unquestionable power, and today computer infiltration plays an important role. With all this in mind I developed my approach to transparency, which for me comes ultimately from architecture.

[EN]: When contemplating “Exposure” one wonders very quickly how you got access to X-ray imagery of trucks. How did you move from the luggage at the airport to X-ray of passing trucks?

[MS]: It came by chance. I did not know I would be working with such large vehicles. The trucks were being scanned at the airport, by a research lab which was experimenting with the technology at that time in France. During 95 and 96, at some point, I wanted to see the images of scanned luggage, and I said, “how can I get such images?” I wrote a letter to the airport director and asked him if it was possible to record scanned images at the airport. It took me one year, but finally I got a letter signed by the director that allowed me to record images at Orly airport.

I went to the airport with this letter and an expert in recording, who used a high-end camera. He hooked it up on one of the scanners and we started recording, but after three minutes and three seconds I had a hand on my shoulder. A security person told me, “You have to stop.” And I said, “I have a letter.” And he read it and he said, “It is not signed by us. Anyone who has luggage on this plane can sue you. Take your tape and come with me.” Then he took me upstairs for three hours with several policemen. I kept the tape under my arm and we discussed what I was doing there. Eventually they thought that I was just an artist who wanted some images. And they said, to go away and not tell anybody about what I had done. So I kept the images.

However, I was not satisfied. I became more interested and wanted to show the luggage metaphorically, to stand in for a person. I decided to use my own luggage to avoid any problems, because the only thing I would need to do is get the right to use the scanner. During this process, I became close to one of the people working for a company that provided the scanning machines to the airport. This private company was based in Paris, and the director was young and he was open to questioning what he was doing. He opened the doors of his lab to me and started to show me images of trucks and other vehicles like tanks and boats.

This was very efficient technology; a truck of 17 tons would be scanned from both sides and the top in four minutes. The first scans were black and white and the second scans were in color, because they show information differently. People were trained to read the different scans, and I attended training sessions to learn how to read the images.

I got these images of the trucks from this person. I started to use them with the project “Four Engines”. I had engines instead of luggage; eventually, I decided to use them for “Exposure”.

[EN]: That explains the trucks, but why a house in the East Bay Hills of San Francisco? How does the house come into play?

[MS]: When I moved to the U.S. I wanted to explore other ways of scanning. And I met a researcher from Cyra Technologies, Inc. who was also teaching at Berkeley, and was doing research with laser scanning technology. Among a few possibilities I chose this house because to me it was a typical American house. I gave instructions to render a scan moving around the house, as well as through the foliage and through the walls. You can do a lot with a laser scan: the stronger the beam the deeper it goes into the material it encounters. It’s the same thing with X-rays. This is another reason why it’s so incredibly fascinating as a form of representation.

Think for a second: here is this thick concrete material around us, and now we have the technology to see through it. In the future, perhaps even with Google Earth, we could go into people’s houses. I don’t want to put that idea out there, but I think it’s possible. It would be scary. In the end, the gathering of scanned images is a reflection on our obsession with control and hyper vigilance.

[EN]: You are combining two moments in time, the material from Paris and Silicon Valley. So what happens today, seven years later?

[MS]: For me it makes sense to show “Exposure” today, thinking about 9/11, especially because when I listen to people in the U. S. it’s like surveillance just appeared (which is not the case). It was always here, only today the technology is more pronounced. Politically, today the states are using it much more. It has become a kind of obsession, and an actual part of corporations.

[EN]: Since you have traveled so much, do you think that the U.S. implementation of surveillance has changed how surveillance is understood globally?

[MS]: Yes, other countries are obliged to adopt similar strategies everywhere, because the ideology is promoted through entertainment, news, and propaganda. The U.S. says, “We need surveillance.” And the message is so powerful. It stands for personal power, but also a country’s power and it is a way to cope with the ideology of terrorism. The paradox is that the more that one resists the terrorists, the more they find a reason to exist. At some level it cannot be avoided because it is inscribed in the current structure, our technology and even in human nature.

People are influenced by this, of course. Online it started with Jennycam, and now we have the show Big Brother, and there is Flicker, Facebook, and Youtube supporting this ideology of self- exposure and self-promoting, along with surveillance and control. People think that this technology gives them a certain visibility, but at a certain price.

[EN]: In your artist statement you also argue that surveillance depends is a “two-way action”: 1) it retrieves information and 2) it outputs propaganda. Is there anything positive that can be found in surveillance? Can it produce anything else but propaganda, is there a grey area?

[MS]: I should clarify that I’m not passing judgment. I’m questioning, and I’m fascinated by this technology, in part because I find it beautiful. Even before I began with this work, I was intrigued by surveillance images because I found them so loaded and questionable, but I don’t wish to give a personal statement/opinion. Nobody cares about what I think. What I’m interested in is to find and stay on the edge, between playful and scary. Each person who experiences my work has to question herself. “Exposure”
works on this level. But to answer your question precisely, what is fascinating is invisible: it’s incredible how advanced this can be, how human beings can get access to things that they can’t see with the naked eye, and then we can use the material and manipulate it. What I’m concerned with is in having autonomy when using this information, and ask what is the value of information?

[EN]: In relation to this relationship of architecture and network society, how do you see the concept of exposure functioning in the future.

[MS]: I became invested in the three notions, transparency, visibility and access, which you mentioned in the beginning of this interview when I was exploring architecture. In architecture it is about the whole environment, not just the building but the signs and its surroundings — even circulating traffic in the street is part of architecture. From my point of view, our understanding (i.e. notion) of transparency comes from architecture. A shift took place in the 19nineteenth century (1851) with the Crystal Palace, which was made with steel and glass. This building started the process.

I consider that the way of being transparent has many possibilities: a house made out of concrete — no color no paint, nothing on the wall, with no decoration is a specific form of transparency. Center Pompidou, where they put everything outside is also a manifestation of transparency. And then you have the Glass House by Philip Johnson. And today’s latest, is in New York, where there are new apartment buildings, with walls made of glass. This was done on purpose; tenants who live there know that people will drive up and down a highway, and can look into the apartments.

[EN]: The building you are referring to is the Richard Meier Apartments beside the West Side Highway in Manhattan. By contrast, would you, then, say that with his Glass House, Johnson was exploring this idea of transparency, or exposure, as a way to reflect on certain shifts in culture?

[MS]: Since the Crystal Palace, there has been this transition towards transparency and exposure, on to Johnson, a tendency at play with Flickr and Facebook. I believe this started with architecture and then it moved on to biology and other areas in culture. Today, architecture is found so often as discourse, even in Second Life.

[EN]: It’s interesting that you mention Second Life, because it’s a reflection of our world. One could argue that what you describe started in the 19th century is today solidified as part of network culture. Now you can log on and view a mirror version of anything in the world as a virtual replica in Second Life.

[MS]: Now, military and entertainment work together (combining their efforts). They used to be counter-balancing each other, i.e. one was violence, aggression and power skills; the other was play, creativity and beauty when it was at its best. My concern is with monitoring, how far it will go, to engage us and encourage us to spend our time in networks like Facebook or Second Life, building a world reflecting our world, including war games. World of Warcraft, is another example that has various business deals behind it.

What all this adds up to is that architects today try to make something interactive. Buildings start to become more like machines. Buildings and streets become communication tools and the city is turning into the most intelligent output of the human brain.

[EN]: Let’s relate your interest in architecture to “Exposure.” In your artist statement you reflect that today “what had disappeared is not the visible, but the invisible, in other words, all that is considered incorrect.” How do you find network culture and architecture, as you have discussed them so far, linked to visibility and invisibility?

[MS]: I’ll answer with a few examples. The Greeks did not have a name for the color blue. They thought of it as part of the color green. Now let’s think about a landscape; it exists when some of the criteria we define as part of a landscape are at play. Another example: if the whole world were wet we would not have a concept of wet. All this is to show that we define and see cultural values according to pre-existing definitions. This is how ideology develops.

What we define as invisible, then, is what has no right to exist. We remove it. Today, we have tools to see everything, and we define what we want to see. When desired, we penetrate through multiple layers with the purpose of seeing more and more. Yet like the Greeks, if we don’t value certain things, we simply don’t see them, or we think of them as part of another element (for example, green as part of blue). If an element has no function, or is not desirable, it has to disappear. This is what “Exposure” in the end explores on various levels.

In the idiom of maps and cartography, the tendency is to thoroughly identify as many attributes of the physical world and coordinate them to geographic, you know…coordinates, typically using latitude and longitude. Those attributes are usually other instrumental and worldly markers, like street addresses, nearly immovable physical markers like, you know…landmarks, buildings, franchise stores, and so on. The database tables fill in with this information, sorted, sifted, refined. Some deletes and updates.

In between the record sets are the most interesting possibilities for new services, new ways of experiencing the physical world and new kinds of adventures. What I’m thinking about are ways to creatively explore within a fully instrumented, surveilled and mapped world, with counter intuitive uses of this data. There are some excellent examples within the art-technology and design-technology communities, such as GPS Drawing, as shown above. This practice is intriguing because it couples measurement with expression and finds an alternative use for the devices involved — a GPS and a mapping application like GoogleEarth.

Surveillance Camera Players using CCTV cameras as a site for performance opportunities

Younghee wonders, in this context, what are the ways of minimizing “digital traces” — those indications of where you are, and where you have been, in a surveillance world. She says,

That leaves another interesting question: How would people drop out of, or at least minimize their digital traces and minimize contributing to create others’? We are probably not expecting stickers and badges showing “this person does NOT have cameras” or “this person will NOT use cameras”. One of the memorable Ubicomp conference talks was on the interesting concept of creating capture-resistant environment, preventing camera phones to take photos by overexposing photos attempted in the region covered by this technology. While I am sure there are certain types of places this technology would be very useful, I do have my doubts if there would ever be any technology successfully controlling people’s digital behaviors.

Similarly, in a reverse mode, Life: A User’s Manual by Michelle Teran captures the signals leaked into public space by RF-based video cameras and reveals intimate spaces in a very DIY and performative fashion.

Minimzing traces is one possible perspective. I think, perhaps in this era where digital kids do not reflect so much on how much of a trace they leave behind, and indeed have entirely different perspectives on the meaning of surveillance and its implications. How many digital kids (the next “us”) have read “1984″ for example?

In contrast to the Surveillance Camera Players and their performances — where they are maximizing their impact and traces for counter-intuitive purposes, and counter-systemic purposes — groups like the Institute for Applied Autonomy have constructed — years ago, pre-Google Maps — a digital map system called iSee of surveillance cameras that would allow one to plot a course that does precisely what Younghee wonders about — minimizing one’s impact. In other words, the mapping system plots routes that avoids surveillance cameras.

It may be that the question is no to much avoiding “capture” but how to turn that space into something where your voice can be heard. I’m not convinced, but it seems that we (a bit older people) think of surveillance in one way that digital kids (the next “us”) will see as an opportunity for a new form of living.

Beyond this, I am interested in a kind of Personal Positioning System that points out the absences in my experiences in the world. For example, showing me where I have not been rather than showing the entire world from above, as if its fully prepared for my exploration. I’m interested in finding things like longer route between two points, rather than the minimal route. Or routes that are deliberately constructed based on streets or regions I have not been. Purely as a form of creative, digital-era perambulation or motoring. Exploration in a world that is pretty much completely mapped, indexed, databased and optimized. What is exploration in an optimized, instrumented world? [posted by Julian Bleecker on Near Future Laboratory]

Such thoughtful cues in the physical fabric of the exhibition mean it doesn’t take long to cotton on to the data cloud of this year’s festival: ‘Conspire’. This could at first be taken as a prim allusion to the still-unwieldy legacy of Stasi spookery in German social and political life, as well as contemporary control creep in our western security wings…” Continue reading Fear of Fear Itself by Marina Vishmidt, Mute Magazine.

Exposure is a projection-based installation consisting of images of x-rayed vehicles juxtaposed with architecture. The installation was developed in 2001 as the fifth and last installment in a series of video-based work that explores how X-ray imagery was used for surveillance, pre-9/11. Marie Sester is interested in the evolving role of surveillance in culture. Her installations invite viewers to reconsider how reality changes as surveillance increasingly becomes a natural part of our everyday lives. Sester argues that our culture is obsessed with hyper-vigilance and control.

Exposure offers surveillance imagery consisting of x-rayed trucks containing smuggled items, such as a Rolls Royce, three million cigarettes embedded in scrap metal, and 2.5 tons of marijuana packed inside 896 rubber bales. In one of the projections, an x-rayed truck is elegantly juxtaposed with a house, which eventually overtakes the entire screen. The house, located in northern California?s East Bay Hills, was scanned by laser. The juxtaposition of an exposed private space and privately-owned commercial vehicles shows how technology can deliberately be used for surveillance, treating all forms with an egalitarian structural approach, while unexpectedly allowing the artist to expand the language of abstraction in art practice: the images are beautiful as forms, yet violent because they deconstruct the pervasive nature of x-ray technology when used as a form of control.

Exposure was originally exhibited as part of the exhibition “Blind Vision: Video and Limits of Perception” at the San Jose Museum of Art from August 4 through November 14, 2001. Coincidentally, the tragic events of 9/11 took
place while the exhibition was on view. Exposure, then, serves as a window to look back at the drastic adoption of emerging technologies to make surveillance a routine part of our lives since 2001. Marie Sester reflects that today she, as an artist, would never have access to images like the ones included in Exposure due to the levels of control that entities, which she approached in the past, have placed on their surveillance technologies.

Exposure was originally designed to be a six-channel installation, and was commissioned as a two-channel installation by the San Jose Museum of Art. gallery@calit2 will collaborate with Marie Sester and her assistant David Lawrence to turn this artwork into a three-channel installation with the use of contemporary technology currently developed and researched at Calit2.

Exposure was designed to be displayed with serial controllable DVD players — technology that is neither efficient nor relevant. Calit2 is taking the opportunity to re-render the files in HD and manipulate them with a script that will play the sequences as a three-channel installation. This work is spearheaded by Hector Bracho, Calit2’s Media Specialist, in collaboration with Joseph Keefe, Project Manager of the OptIPuter project.

The collaboration with Marie Sester extends the gallery@calit2’s interest in the nexus of innovation implicit in Calit2’s vision, and aims to advance our understanding and appreciation of the dynamic interplay among art, science and technology.

Calit2 is a partnership between UC San Diego and UC Irvine, and houses over 1,000 researchers organized around more than 50 projects on the future of telecommunications and information technology and how these technologies will transform a range of applications important to the economy and citizens’ quality of life. The institute has integrated new media arts into its cross-disciplinary agenda.

Marie Sester is a media artist currently based in Los Angeles. Born in France, she began her career as an architect, having earned her Master’s degree from the Ecole d?Architecture in Strasbourg. Her interest shifted from how to build structures to the manner in which place, cultural values, and political ideas are intertwined and affect our understanding of the world. Her work particularly questions the societal perspective of the West. Sester’s installation work has exhibited internationally, including in the Kwangju Biennale, Korea (1997); Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (1998); San Jose Museum of Art, USA (2001); SIGGRAPH, San Diego, USA (2003); Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria (2003 and 2004); Villette Num?rique, Paris, France (2004); ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany (2005); LABoral Centro de Arte y Creaci?n Industrial, Gijon, Spain (2007); Eyebeam, NY, USA (2007); and many other venues.

She has had residencies at the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences (IAMAS), Japan (2002) and the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) (2005). The artist has received grants from organizations including the New York State Council for the Arts (2003), LEF Foundation (2004), and Franklin Furnace Fund (2004). Marie Sester is a Creative Capital Grantee (New York,
2002) for her installation Access.

‘The model was then taken into Rhino and contoured into horizontal and vertical 2d layers. The intersections were set and vectors cleaned in illustrator. After that individual parts were cut with a laser cutter and assembled into the final work.’

The density of the cell sites reflect the speed and frequency of movement within the city. The more often Andreas visited a place, the more cell sites were added to the map. Aside from the aesthetics, the work was aimed at making people aware of the German telecommunications data retention act (Vorratsdatenspeicherung) which requires the telecommunications providers to collect the connection data of all customers. This is a good example of the confluence of two growing areas of interests within the computational art scene, abstract data visualisation and digital fabrication. [posted by Paul Prudence on Dataisnature]

Also: YesYesNoNo’s Invisible Journey’s (Datalooknise) project aims at mapping fields of Wi-Fi node signals during bike and car trips. Using various kinds of representation systems to visualise different properties of the nodes (such as encryption settings) these abstractions act as timelines of the journey and, at times, give the impression of some kind experimental music notation. Detailed information on the methods used to collect and apply the data is annotated with each image in the development sequence. More >>