Kevin Day
Abstract
This paper examines the potential countertactics of contemporary interactive media art to interrogate the data-mining practices that encode the everyday and exploit user data in the big data economy. It argues that noise is the "other" of information, a way to counter the operation of turning the world into data commodities. Through a Brechtian methodology informed by philosophy and critical theories of media and technology, the paper suggests that amplifying the "noise" of the digital media assemblages deviates from their everyday normative functions and estranges our relationship to them, inviting critical ways of understanding, relating to, and engaging these ubiquitous systems. All three noted artworks destabilize the protocols of data-mining to examine data politics. Specifically, the paper looks at three different tactics that amplify the "noise" of digital culture in different ways: reversing roles, disconnecting, and proposing viable alternatives.
Supplemental Material
Available for Download
Supplemental movie, appendix, image and software files for, Reversal, Disconnect, and Proposition: Noise and Data Politics in the Work of Julian Oliver and Trevor Paglen
- Nicole Aschoff. (2020, November 17). Silicon Valley and the Future of Capitalism. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYKfi1DBivg&ab_channel=UBCSchoolofPublicPolicyandGlobalAffairsGoogle Scholar
- Bertolt Brecht. 1964. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. New York, NY: Hill and Wang.Google Scholar
- Julia Bryan-Wilson, Lauren Cornell, Omar Kholeif, and Trevor Paglen. 2018. Trevor Paglen. New York, NY: Phaidon Press.Google Scholar
- Manuel Castells. 2010. The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Andrew Feenberg. 1999. Questioning Technology. New York, NY: Routledge.Google Scholar
- Christian Fuchs. 2017. Social Media: A Critical Introduction (2nd ed.). London, UK: Sage.Google Scholar
- Alexander R. Galloway and Mohammad Salemy. 2013. The question of interface. Fillip, 18.Google Scholar
- Baruch Gottlieb. 2018. Digital Materialism. London, UK: Sage.Google Scholar
- Martin Heidegger. 1962. Being and Time. London, UK: SCM Press.Google Scholar
- John Jacob, Wendy Chun, Kate Crawford, and Luke Skrebowski. 2018. Trevor Paglen: Sites Unseen. Washington, DC: Smithsonian American Art Museum.Google Scholar
- Colin Koopman. 2019. How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
- Marshall McLuhan. 1966. The Relationship of Environment to Anti-Environment. University of Windsor Review, 2(1), 1--10.Google Scholar
- Ulises Ali Mejias. 2013. Off the Network: Disrupting the Digital World. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
- Joseph Nechvatal. 2011. Immersion into Noise. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press.Google Scholar
- Safiya Umoja Noble. 2018. Algorithms of Oppression. New York, NY: NYU Press.Google Scholar
- Julian Oliver, Gordan Savičić, and Danja Vasiliev. 2011. The Critical Engineering Manifesto. Retrieved from https://criticalengineering.org/ce.pdfGoogle Scholar
- Claude Shannon. 1948. A mathematical theory of communication. The Bell System Technical Journal 27, 379--423.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Nick Srnicek. 2016. Platform Capitalism. Oxford, UK: Polity Press.Google Scholar
- Hito Steyerl. 2014. Proxy politics: Signal and Noise. e-flux 60. Retrieved from http://www.e-flux.com/journal/proxy-politics/Google Scholar
- Shoshana Zuboff. 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York, NY: Public Affairs.Google Scholar
Index Terms
Reversal, Disconnect, and Proposition: Noise and Data Politics in the Work of Julian Oliver and Trevor Paglen
Recommendations
Creativity in algorithmic art
C&C '09: Proceedings of the seventh ACM conference on Creativity and cognitionEarly algorithmic art (also called computer art or digital art) is chosen as a case to differentiate three aspects of creative behavior: trivial, personal, and historic creativity. Extending a remark by Marcel Duchamp on the role of the spectator in ...
Digital islamic art: the use of digital technologies in contemporary islamic art in the UK
EVA '16: Proceedings of the conference on Electronic Visualisation and the ArtsIn this paper, I provide a brief introduction to my artistic practice combining the use of digital technologies with traditional methods for producing Islamic art. Looking at further examples of Islamic artworks by artists in the UK I describe how in ...
Curating digital life and culture: art and information
EVA '16: Proceedings of the conference on Electronic Visualisation and the ArtsThe space between digital life and real life continues to fade and nowhere is this more apparent than in arts and cultural contexts. Facilitated by digital capture and curation, social media, the network, Internet, and the web, these forces combine to ...
Comments