Panel Statement
Chair Person: Renee Turner
Presenters: Steve Rushton, Michelle Teran, Aymeric Mansoux & Marloes de Valk
We are living in a time of unprecedented surveillance, but unlike the ominous spectre of Orwell’s Big Brother, where power is clearly defined and always palpable, today’s methods of information gathering are much more subtle and woven into the fabric of our everyday life. Through the use of seemingly innocuous algorithms Amazon tells us which books we might like, Google tracks our queries to perfect more accurate results, and Last.?fm connects us to people with similar music tastes. Immersed in social media, we commit to legally binding contracts by agreeing to ‘terms of use’. Having made the pact, we Twitter our subjectivities in less than 140 characters, contact our long lost friends on facebook and mobile-upload our geotagged videos on youtube. Where once surveillance technologies belonged to governmental agencies and the military domain, the web has fostered a less optically driven and participatory means of both monitoring and monetizing our intimately lived experiences. Bringing together artists, programmers and theorists, these interdisciplinary panels will look at how surveillance and data-mining technologies shape and influence our lives and the consequences they have on our civil liberties. The aim is to map the complexities of ‘sharing’ and examine how our fundamental understanding of private life has changed, as public display has become more pervasive and normalized through social networks. “Sniff, Scrape, Crawl…” is an ongoing interdisciplinary research project. Through a series of workshops, debates, lectures and presentations, the thematic project was initially launched in the beginning of 2011 at the Piet Zwart Institute, Master Media Design and Communication in the department of Networked Media. The formation of the panels at ISEA, is an opportunity to show documentation and expand upon earlier research.
- Renée Turner is an American artist and writer living in the Netherlands . She received her MFA from the University of Arizona, was an artist in residence at the Rijksakademie and a researcher at Jan van Eyck Academie (NL). Since 1996 she has worked with Riek Sijbring and Femke Snelting under the collective name, De Geuzen: a foundation for multi-visual research. Their collaborative projects have showcased in Manifesta, Rhizome, Mute, and Internet Art (Thames & Hudson). In 2006 she was awarded a scholarship from the Institute of Creative Technology and received an MA in Creative Writing and New Media from De Montfort University. Whether writing digital narratives or working collaboratively, Turner’s work often engages with feminist issues and online media ecologies. Next to these activities she has taught fine art, design and theory at the Willem de Kooning Academy (NL), St. Joost Art Academy (NL) and the Bergen National Academy of the Arts. Currently she is the Course Director of the Piet Zwart Institute, Master Media Design and Communication: Networked Media (NL).