Artists weaponize surveillance tools’ own metrics to resist extraction

Evidence

Harvey is one among a growing number of artists, often young artists, who direct their work to the themes of surveillance and resistance. Artist Benjamin Grosser’s Facebook and Twitter “demetricators” are software interfaces that present each site’s pages with their metrics deleted: “The numbers of ‘likes,’ ‘friends,’ followers, retweets… all disappear.” How is an interface that foregrounds our friend count changing our conceptions of friendship? he asks. “Remove the numbers and find out.” Grosser’s “Go Rando” project is a web browser extension that “obfuscates your feelings on Facebook” by randomly choosing an emoji each time you click “Like,” thus undermining the corporation’s surplus analyses as they compute personality and emotional profiles. Trevor Paglen’s richly orchestrated performance art combines music, photography, satellite imagery, and artificial intelligence to reveal Big Other’s omnipresent knowing and doing. “It’s trying to look inside the software that is running an AI… to look into the architectures of different computer vision systems and trying to learn what it is that they are seeing,” Paglen says. Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s 2017 installation “Hansel & Gretel” created a powerful experience in which participants viscerally confront the surveillance implications of their own innocent picture taking, Instagramming, tweeting, texting, tagging, and posting. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1564

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: artist interventions as a technical counter-practice — how demetricators, emoji-obfuscation, and AI-interrogation art form a new genre of resistance that works inside the system’s own machinery rather than outside it.
• XREF: connects to: Activists and artists now build counter-surveillance tools to achieve invisibility — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1561; Artists reverse-engineer surveillance algorithms to exploit their blind spots — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1563; Protesters are designing anticounter-surveillance tools against surveillance capitalism — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1562

Broader Connections

• Protesters are designing anticounter-surveillance tools against surveillance capitalism #expands (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1562