Abstract (Long paper)

Keywords: Internet, Internet art, surveillance, participatory, countersurveillance, detournement, humor, hacking

This is a text about Internet art projects dealing with Internet surveillance. In the paragraphs below, I will describe a web service that floods the Internet with fake websites, another web project that allows users to create email accounts in the names of villains that send conspiratorial emails to each other, and a solar‐powered disco ball on which YouTube dance videos are projected. What connects these seemingly disparate projects? It may sound absurd, but these projects may help us understand our complicated existence as surveillant and surveillee within networked communications. Since the projects described in the text were made over more than a decade, the article may also reveal some aspects of how the Internet has changed over time.

• Annina Rüst, Assistant Professor, Department of Transmedia, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA. Annina  produces electronic objects and software art. She creates technologies that are artistically and socially motivated. Her projects happen at the intersection of activism, algorithm, data, electricity, humor, politics, and pop culture. Her work has been reviewed in such publications as Wired and the New York Times Magazine. The Huffington Post called her recent robotics work a “Badass Feminist Robot.” In 2014, she received an Art+Technology Lab grant from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). She has a diploma from the University of the Arts in Zürich, Switzerland, an M.F.A. from the University of California, San Diego, USA, and an M.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, USA.  anninaruest.com

Full Text (PDF)  p. 228-233