Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
the identification, banking, and loyalty cards in their wallet—“anything that connects
to a database ”
64
—and then for his installation,
Data Collection
(2010), he used each data
set to compose an individual “canvas” with photographic representations of the cards
on which all of the personal information is visible, with some cards blacked out on
request of participant. A small sampling of dataveillance art, these projects are both
tactile and rhetorical, dependent on the gift of data in order to open a space for the
critical contemplation of that data. They work with—both exploit and capitalize upon—
participants' willingness to share data for no immediately tangible or concrete reward,
that is, for no apparent return on their affective and participatory investment. What is
illuminated by each is the logic of social media and relational aesthetics, which is to
give by sharing.
A skeptical viewer might ask whether such data works are in fact supportive of, and
thus insufficiently attentive to, their own corporate and governmental information
architecture. But this is a variant of the old worry about artists not having sufficient
critical distance from the capitalist, technological, scientific, and ideological systems
within which they are working. In other words, to suggest that using data-mining tech-
niques to produce art necessarily entails adopting the very logic and optics of the dat-
aveillance society is to rehash the old problem of disinterest. The common assumption
is that distance is necessary for critical reflection and that proximity necessarily pro-
duces corruption. But the lesson I think we need to learn from tactical media practi-
tioners more broadly is that critique and critical reflection are at their most powerful
when they do not adopt a spectatorial position on the (putatively neutral) outside, when
they do not merely sketch a surface, but rather penetrate the core of the system itself,
intensifying identification so as to produce structural change.
65
Such a practice—such
a mode and positioning—goes well beyond Michel de Certeau's notion of “undermining
a system from within”; these are not employees wasting time and using the resources
of the workplace to turn it against itself.
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Rather, these art-activists are creating “mirror
worlds,” replicating the scene of data mining—swiping an identification card—to enable
an embedded and embodied perspective of the control network through and within
which dataveillance operates, but without the fantasy of exteriority. Instead, the force
of the immanent critique envisioned here derives from a near-total inhabitation of the
frame, compelling a jarring recognition from the viewer/user and leading to a temporal
interval in which she must formulate a response, whether that be rejection or acquies-
cence. Interventionist art projects such as these work directly against the forces of
interpellation with a counterimage of a dataveillance regime that makes that regime
