Surveillance, private- and public-sphere section of the portfolio:
Contact & Identification
Short films created to question private and public in relation to personal data and information. One from the data perspective within privacy settings, while the other opening up the face recognition issues within the settings of making face-to-face acquaintances. “Identification” was a public exposure of personal phone contact-book in relation to scrolling your personal data and private information and exposing it in public film festival screenings. And another film “Contact” was a playful interaction with various personalities mixed up in first eye-to-eye moments or dating events eventually creating funny conversations in a flirting atmosphere. The films were protagonists of the era, with questions of privacy in the surveillance age, however, it might be that it was a bit too early to bring those inquiries in 2007.
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Media Inclusus
Surveillance attracted by electromagnetic waves exposing propaganda news in a sacral space of Monastery.
Construction scaffoldings for the restoration of the sacred space of St. Bernardine Church and Monastery in Vilnius, Lithuania, stand like antibodies and influence not only religious life but also attract the energies that are opposite to the surroundings. The artist is connecting electromagnetic extremely low frequency (ELF) receiver to the scaffoldings and transforms it into an antenna.
Suitable frequencies attract not only common waves (10-100 Hz), but are shut down by stronger waves of propaganda and Russian speaking radio station, the extremely opposite worldview for the religious milieu. Christian faith is forced by Russian slogans and greater neighbour's discussions on local issues found a warm shelter. Soviet ideology and Russian propaganda adversely penetrate into a sacramental environment of antagonistic and resistant post-soviet republic space. Psychogeophysics and media ecology come together to resolve the clearance of semantic pathetics.
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Data surveillance project Data Economy for explicit exposure of exhibition's visitors interactive data & Restitutio project exposing private artist's Das Vegas data and information of personal purchasing history (with time, location, sales price and other data) via exhibited cashier receipts.
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Digital Zoom Spying
The work tackles mass surveillance and data collection at an early stage of the phenomenon and with the usage of old technology. The film produced in 2010 using a consumer-level camera - a personal Panasonic NV-DS60 Mini-DV camcorder and its 500X digital zoom at its maximum.
The project examines important issues from a technological point of view about why such technology as digital zoom is implemented in consumer-level cameras? The hypothesis might be that no one will use such technology just for zooming-in and capturing a pixelated image. However, the issue is twofold. Questions regarding the use of a digital zoom feature bring issues of how by using a digital zoom the user can reach the matter and what is this matter about? The captured digital highly-pixelated image reaches just a surface, the aesthetic level of the scenery in front of a camera and somehow aestheticizes the view in an image adding a pixelated effect. With this technology, there is no reach for a deeper reach and collection of information. No machine learning is involved in capturing with a camera approach. Using digital zoom is somehow applying camouflage to the information – the opposite of the purposes of surveillance, the reduction of data, hiding it from the professional advanced machine learning.
Another approach towards the digital zoom is bringing someone using it for a purpose to hack someone’s private bodily images of a stranger and satisfy voyeuristic desires? But in general, the pixelated image is a type of abstraction which in most cases brings more artistic values and opens imagination than provides solutions for and satisfies simple consumer needs. In this case, digital zoom becomes an artistic tool on a consumer level and everyone can enjoy its usage. But another question is how long such weird technology will stay in the market?
Media archaeologic approach attempts to look back to the old technology and analyse and re-examine it through our recent advances in technology and, in this project, brings issues that the digital zoom somehow helps to hide the data, instead of supporting the processes of surveillance or data collection. The capturing of a highly pixelated image sends the user on a surface of the image, it zooms-in on a surface but not getting details of the targeted object. The pixelated surface somehow adds an effect layer with hiding the details for the surveillance and advanced machine learning technologies, at the same time opening a space up for the imagination to reinterpret the view and reimagine it.
“I use camera’s digital zoom feature to zoom-in on passers-by to capture their body fragments, also somewhat satisfying the viewers’ imagined voyeuristic desires, but also hiding the details through the extensively pixelated image and partial abstraction.” - says the artist.
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Penetrations into innermost places are welcome and open for everyone. There are no rules in public space to protect naïve and innocent. No tracing techniques are necessary to capture hidden strategy footage. All data in public space is explicit, open for manipulations. Surveillance video material is accessible to everyone and is potentially broadcasted worldwide. All data is open. Share your privacy! Explicit your source! Your personal data is open to anyone you’ve never seen before. Your public portrait and intimate places are exposed in the exhibition, just for a showing beautiful picture or explaining simple tactics: private is no more private in a public space.
Would you accept a proposal to expose your privatescape to anyone's else purpose, anywhere and anytime? Mediated sitescapes with pixelated view captured by ordinary handy cam using digital zoom provide with a veil of secrecy which easily could be redefined into a quality image for somebody’s back and black purposes.
The observer of the project is identified with a kind of deviant: the deviant Mr. Infinity for a new paradigm of our daily creative and daily technological environment with an indulgence in a perverted aesthetic sickness.
Questioning privacy in the digital age enters the technological means as a technique to manipulate or even to control people, so the art in the age of surveillance is a type of field with its own political consequences.
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Video material captured in Paris, 2010, edited in Stockholm, 2011.
33'33'', loop.
Exhibited at Site-Sensitive Acts in Mejan gallery, Stockholm, Sweden.
