Art and Surveillance

I’ve been thinking more and more about doing something creative with surveillance, either in my final group project with David and Courtney or on my own in the summer. The Fag Face Mask certainly acknowledged the ubiquity of surveillance and a desire to hide from it. Laura Poitras, the director of citizenfour, has been making graphic art out of surveillance images and data. Mark Lombardi, who I mentioned in my reading post, made simple, cloud-like graphs that traced financial connections between major global players who likely either promote surveillance or are the targets of surveillance. I think art is one way to both acknowledge surveillance and express thoughts and emotions related to it.

I have a few ideas for surveillance projects. One is doing something similar to Fag Face, but altering how a person walks rather than their facial features because there are programs out there that match a person’s gait to a database that has tabs on how tracked individuals walk. Another and more thought out idea is a codebook that makes a codeword for every ‘red flag’ word that someone wants to hide from the potential unknown and unseen forces reading AIM chats and e-mails or listening in on phone conversations. I already do this personally without thinking about it. When the San Bernadino shooting happened, I texted several of my friends and relatives about it in Orange County and Los Angeles to make sure that they were okay. I specifically changed the spelling of the words ‘terrorist’, ‘shooter’, and ‘gun’ by garbling them (torrest, shoetr, gn) because I certainly don’t want to give the ‘gubment’ a reason to knock on my door. I also do the same thing whenever my sister texts me about anything drug-related. My system is probably not very effective and I would have to get more creative than replacing ‘gun’ with ‘gn’ in a codebook, but the fact that I’ve been doing this for awhile now highlights my belief that I could be spied on any time I use my phone or computer. I also like the idea of a physical codebook being some kind of reaction against online communication. For some reason, I think art critics would read some deep value into a leather-bound book of printed or written codewords being a fight against surveillance and online communication. Like I said, I’m not sure if this will be part of a direction I’ll go for my final project, but I do want to carry these creative ideas into summer art projects.