Terms of Service: research paper

This project explores the hegemonic yet decentralized power inherent in digital infrastructure. Users online often house an illusion of agency of emancipation, thinking of virtual architecture as “immaterial” and thus having no repercussions. However, “the more powerful or hegemonic actors within a network are able to govern and control the less powerful or subaltern actors, not by directly commanding them … but indirectly or infrastructurally, by structuring the field of possible actions” (Tully). The aim of my project is to remind viewers that control exerted online is just as robust a form of biopower as that which is exercised over our physical bodies, despite being “immaterial” and decentralized through network infrastructure. I hope to do this by creating an architectural representation of digital surveillance that the viewer will have to engage with physically.

My research methodology when entering this project was influenced by Susan Leigh Star’s call for an ethnographic study of infrastructure. Star claims that we can find clues to underlying power dynamics by examining the everyday, banal pieces of infrastructure that surround us (379). I began to do research into internet privacy policy and its physical manifestations in facial recognition and location pinning in order to analyse their deeper implications. Increasingly, facial recognition is being used to create a more seamless and personalized experience for regular shoppers in high-end European stores (Facial Recognition). The constant collection, categorization and selling of user information allows these pieces of digital infrastructure to exert biopower over users, training us to be constant digital labourers while regulating and cataloguing our movements and attention. Furthermore, “personal data gleaned from more and more “innocent” commercial and entertainment activities are now sought by the state” (Lyon 163), meaning that one’s data trails could become potentially damning depending on the government in power: “surveillance practices and technologies are becoming a key means of marking and reinforcing social divisions” (Lyon 166).

My piece employs vacant sites - places that data travels through - as an architecture to denote the physical roots and repercussions of supposedly “immaterial” digital surveillance infrastructures. I am trying to create a visualization of branded or colonised negative space: something we assume to be neutral yet has a hegemonic power structure woven through it. Fragmented 3D scans of negative space in Xpace’s interior are translated into transparent, laser-cut acrylic barriers that curate the viewer’s movement. Manifesting ideas of transparency is a key conceptual strategy in my project; I am fascinated by the illusion of transparency that internet infrastructure gives us while its inner mechanics are totally opaque to the average user. “This smoothness of good design is also an anaesthetic. It numbs us to the huge changes in ourselves and our world. The cell phone tries to be as thin as it can be but actually there is nothing light or immaterial about this object” (Colomina 247). The user-friendly interface of social media sites and search engines exist in the same way: it is easy to forget you are in a public, corporate space when you are distracted by personalized content.

Star states: “Infrastructure is transparent to use, in the sense that it does not have to be reinvented each time or assembled for each task, but invisibly supports those tasks.” (381) She later goes on to note, “The normally invisible quality of working infrastructure becomes visible when it breaks” (Star 382). With my use of the 3D scanning application, I attempt to make the algorithm visible by scanning something that is not intended to be scanned; emptiness. In scanning negative space, the algorithm is forced to create materiality that does not physically exist, making the 3D scanning application itself hyper visible. Throughout the entire process of transforming 3D scans to texture selections, paths, and shapes to be laser cut, I rely on the built-in tools of applications and Adobe image creation software, attempting to totally remove my hand from the finished product. My purpose is to reveal the infrastructure of assumptions that lie behind it and allow the algorithms behind the software to make their own interpretations. This process can approximate the way a face is read through the eye of a surveillance camera: broken into chains of numbers, gradients and ratios.

Another strategy I employ to highlight the physical repercussions of biopower is the use of physical surveillance related apparatus to mount and display my work. The pieces of acrylic will be wall mounted on TV mounts and suspended from the ceiling with electrical wire. These materials remind us of the vast embedded infrastructure that our digital communications require. Additionally, each acrylic piece of immaterial-made-material architecture has text cut into it. This text is sourced from a variety of corporate bodies that perpetuate our state in the personalized panopticon: Instagram, Facebook, and Axis Communication (producers of facial recognition software).

Upon entering Xpace, viewers are recorded by a wall-mounted camera (similar to those in banks or pharmacies) and broadcast through the transparent architecture, rendering them unpaid labourers with little agency over their projection. The use of the viewer’s image as the installation’s content draws a parallel to the monetized data that we emit during online and public participation. I also want to draw parallels between the various types of exploitative labour that the production and usage of networked devices entails; “These devices … are produced by people working under conditions near slavery” (Colomina 247). Late capitalism colonizes every moment of networked user’s lives for production and consumption. The free labour that my visitor participates in highlights the content that we create for corporations to mine, and also links back to the low paid manual factory labour that goes into making these devices for us.

Additionally, catching the image of the viewer on camera relates to the state of perpetual self-surveillence we intentionally subject ourselves to via social media. “Homo Cellular prefers to look backward rather than forward, to see itself embedded in its surroundings, literally using the cell phone as a mirror” (Colomina 250). Viewers will likely prove this concept further by taking images or selfies in the gallery space and posting them online in order to record their participation in the Toronto art scene. In this way, a correspondence is also created between the gallery and the corporatized internet as institutional spaces that preach emancipation yet perpetuate embedded hegemonic hierarchies.

Works Cited

Colomina, Beatriz and Mark Wigley. Are We Human: Notes on an Archeology of Design. Lars Müller. 2016.

“Facial Recognition: Who’s Tracking You in Public?” Consumer Reports. December 30, 2015. http://www.consumerreports.org/privacy/facial-recognition-who-is-tracking-you-in-public1/ Accessed February 14, 2017.

Foucault, Michael. “Part Five: Right of Death and Power over Life” A History of Sexuality, Volume 1. Translated by Robert Hurley, Pantheon, 1978, pp. 135- 159.

“How Facial Recognition Works: the Ghost in the Camera” Consumer Reports. January 4 2016. http://www.consumerreports.org/privacy/how-facial-recognition-works-the-ghost-in-the-camera/ Accessed February 8 2017.

Lyon, David. “Surveillance Technology and Surveillance Society” Modernity and technology. Ed. by Thomas J Misa, Philip Brey, and Andrew Feenberg. MIT Press, 2003, pp. 161–83

Mendelsohn, Ben. “Bundles, Buried & Behind Cosed Doors.” Vimeo. 16 Oct 2011. Web. 17 Mar 2016.

“Privacy Policy” Instagram. 2017. https://www.instagram.com/about/legal/privacy/ Accessed March 10, 2017.

Star, Susan Leigh. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure” American Behavioral Scientist, vol. 43, no. 3, 1999, pp. 377-391.