User:Pedro Sá Couto/Graduate Research Seminar/Proposal Outline 02

What do you want to make?

I want to create a series of technologies that can question the topic of surveillance connected to digital-self-improvement. This will be done while creating or re-creating technological extensions that make our life "easier" as a strategy to create innovative and critical thinking around the topic. This might turn out to be an installation further on the way.
These experiments will start while prototyping small hackpacks, from small devices that can track us during our sleep and other small activities, to recreating low-tech biometrics machines.
What I want to achieve with these pieces of technology is their ability to narrate the story I want the readers to understand while being concerned on leaving openness to their interpretation allowing critical thinking around the experiment.
For this series, I aim to create a very detailed plan on how to archive these experiments, and on how to document them almost as it is a scientific procedure. This can eventually be published as a graduation year log.

How do you plan to make it?

From my interest on how are our smartphones, computers, etc being used as personal tracking devices I want to experiment how can these be compared to the microchips implants that Nancy Nisbet documents in the article "Resisting Surveillance: Identity and Implantable Microchips".

It will be a reflection on the topic of self-improvement while addressing the issue of how are we so susceptible to accept new tech, either by convenience, peer pressure, etc, that was once seen with a dystopian point of view, without even understanding what might come with them.

We feel more and more the need to be connected, we don't carry an identity card anymore because it is stored on our smartphones, we give our fingerprints to centralized companies just because it will be easier to unlock an everyday device. A chain of power is created where it is almost mandatory to get digital, from passport checkpoints at the airport to exhaustively detailed residency permit requirements.

I would like to critically approach these thematic while developing low tech prototypes. It is imperative to create awareness from the ground up and tackle it in a very transparent way from the beginning. Low tech experiments have a strong effect on the relationship that can establish with their users.

What is your timetable?

1. September 2019 — July 2020: Testing and documenting the process.
2. September – October 2019: Framework outline + Research + Prototyping
3. November 2019: +++ Prototyping
4. December 2020: Conceptualize way to turn prototypes into the final project.
5. 9 & 10 December 2020: Trim 4 Assessment
6. March 2020: Fine-tune writing. Turn prototypes into the final project.
7. April – June 2020: Finish writing, fine-tune project.
8. June 2020: Finish the project, Prepare the final presentation.
9. July 2020: Graduation Show.

Why do you want to make it?

It is a continuation of a long interest in this thematic. I have already researched around surveillance and I am now able to understand that the knowledge acquired during my first year of the program is going to play a key element while helping me further getting into the topic exploring it from a different angle and with a different critical approach.

Surveillance and privacy is a contemporary subject with an important historical background where I can re-test and comment on other experiments, but still always up to date and changing with the introduction of new technology. This changes and new developments give me an insight to better understand how experiments were developed with a dystopian perspective. There is space for me to investigate what was accurate and extrapolate on what can we still work on. I am also interested in what is the relation between the body and surveillance. Exploring the Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and how technology is changing our behaviors or making us feel more comfortable daily.

We always demand more from the digital world in order to make us safe. We have introduced HTTPS to ensure the protection, integrity, and privacy of the data exchanged between a server and a client but we depend now on a certificate to being online, is this empowering us or creating layers between self-hosting and being online. Are we losing agency over who gets to be online?

I also want to research on online communities that are focused on digital improvement. It is important for me to try to understand what are their goals, see what are they currently using, what is being introduced and what are their concerns around it and see what new grounds can I predict and try to tackle.

Who can help you and how?

Prototyping tutors in developing fully working devices to test.
Michael more in specific with is previous research in surveillance.
XPUB squad.

Relation to previous practice

Previous research on the topic of Surveillance and how can narratives be formed around this. In the past, the experiments that I had developed were more related to face detection but I would like to explore this with a different approach.
Personal interest upon online communities and during the SI8 previous work on data gathered and explored as an artistic practice.
The interest in digital culture formed during my first year in the Piet Zwart.

Relation to a larger context

Digital surveillance is embedded in almost every action of a regular everyday routine. We have integrated technology so much in our quotidian that we have been living with it hand to hand. Surveillance might be quickly spotted as it commonly happens with CCTV because we are able to establish a physical connection with it, we can see it, we can choose a different path to walk from it or even try to disguise ourselves, but digitally we are still far from connecting in such a direct way with it.
In experiments like Wearable computing (Mann, 2003), or Identity and Implantable Microchips (Nisbet, 2004), artists have been able to work with a focus on technology that could raise questions like identity control, self-determination, and privacy.

References

Nisbet, N., 2004. Resisting Surveillance: Identity and Implantable Microchips. Leonardo 37, 211–214.

Mann, S., 2003. Existential Technology: Wearable Computing Is Not the Real Issue! Leonardo 36, 19–25.

Pater, Ruben., 2016. Politics of design: a not so global manual for visual communication. BIS Publishers, Amsterdam.

Kahn, P., 2013. Wear Them, Forget Them. Scientific American 309, 12–13.

Belk, R.W., 2013. Extended Self in a Digital World. Journal of Consumer Research 40, 477–500. https://doi.org/10.1086/671052

Lupton, D., 2014. Self-tracking cultures: Towards a sociology of personal informatics 77–86. https://doi.org/10.1145/2686612.2686623

McGrath, J.E., 2004. Loving big brother: performance, privacy and surveillance space. Routledge, London ;

Velden, D. van der., Metahaven., Kruk, Vinca., 2015. Black transparency the right to know in the age of mass surveillance. Sternberg Press, Berlin.

Hassan, L., Dias, A., Hamari, J., 2019. How motivational feedback increases user’s benefits and continued use: A study on gamification, quantified-self and social networking. International Journal of Information Management 46, 151–162. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2018.12.004