User:Pedro Sá Couto/Graduate Research Seminar/Proposal Outline 01

What do you want to make?

During my graduation year, I want to research the topic of surveillance and privacy.

How is surveillance art challenged by the contemporary panorama of being tracked in the cloud? How are our smartphones, computers, etc being used as personal tracking devices and how can these be compared to the microchips implants that Nancy Nisbet documents in the article "Resisting Surveillance: Identity and Implantable Microchips".

I want to research data mining and the gamification around this. How is data collected, stored, and linked to its user? How is biohacking also seen as personal enhancing and also on what terms are we compromising on our privacy?

How do you plan to make it?

For this process, I'll use myself as a case study in several iterations of what different levels of surveillance can be nowadays. This is something that I imagine being done from my specific point of view as an artist, hacker, and designer. In the past I have been interested in researching online communities, why do they inhabit certain spaces, what kind of concerns do they have, etc. I would simultaneously like to explore different platforms privacy concerns and what kind of awareness do users show around the topic.

Who deserves control over my personal information? Is it still mine or did I trade it with some centralized company while unknowingly signing to their online platform? I also plan to research on what have I already compromised while joining digital and physical spaces. What installed apps do I currently have installed that for the small price of playing a chess game or making myself look old in a picture allow companies to monetize on my data.

In the future I want to explore questions as to how am I seen as data, how would I be profiled, and try to change my footprint online and recheck this always while developing ways to create narratives around this and make it public.

What is your timetable?

Please include a timeline of what needs to be done and the order in which those things will be done.

Why do you want to make it?

It is a continuation of a long interest in this thematic. I have already researched, and I can 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.
Being a contemporary subject with an important historical background where I can re-test and comment on other approaches, but still always up to date and changing with the introduction of new technology.

Who can help you and how?

Prototyping tutors in developing fully working devices to put me to the test.

Relation to previous practice

Previous research on the topic of Surveillance and how can narratives be formed around this. In the past, my practice was 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.
An obsession with terms and conditions and the boundaries to online privacy.

Relation to a larger context

Research on the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the panopticon, Surveillance art.

References

Nisbet, Nancy (2004) Resisting Surveillance: Identity and Implantable Microchips, The MIT Press.
Liu, Catherine (2004) A Brief Genealogy of Privacy: CTRL [Space]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, The MIT Press.
Monahan, Torin (2011) SURVEILLANCE AS CULTURAL PRACTICE, Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
Metahaven (2014) Black Transparency: The Right to Know in the Age of Mass Surveillance, Sternberg Press.