Annotated Bibliography

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

In this essay from 2004, Nancy Nisbet addresses how surveillance is being used by centralized databases with the contemporary concerns of personal security and the use of technological developments to solve them. It also introduces us to Radio Frequency Identification technology (RFID) and the potential that comes with it. From tracking individuals to its use as a key in different applications. The installation ‘POP! GOES THE WEASE’ challenges its visitors to take an active part in experimenting RFID and to question on their own identity and free will. The installation also displays the documentation in the form of a video of the process of getting chipped in which the artist had gone through.

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

In this essay, Steve Mann focuses on how surveillance and technology that is used to monitor individuals are linked to a chain of power where accountability is often dissolved and hard to be questioned.
It is also a documentation of what the author calls as In(ter)ventions within a project that he has developed for the last 30 years, ‘Existential Technology’. It is a set of artworks, inventions, performances, …, where he questions privacy and identity. He uses these experiments to create a different understanding of self-determination and destiny control.

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

This book explores different visual languages of communication and how they are not neutral. It is also able to create in the reader the understanding of how culture is thought in a global context. It contains a wide variety of projects developed by contemporary artists and designers exploring the responsibility of communication that is culturally dependent with a very precise anthropological approach.

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

Philippe Kahn is the co-founder and CEO of Fullpower Technologies, responsible for the development of the MotionX technology integrated into Nike and Jawbone products. In this article, he starts his approach by stating that wearable devices might be on the edge to explode. It is interesting how he introduces the concept of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle [1] where he compares that using a sensor to monitor your sleep might affect how using technology might change the way you actually sleep. Maybe, for this reason, wearable technology is being built smaller and with longer battery lives decreasing the dependence on the user. Another concept introduced is the “sensor-fusion technology”, in an example that he provides if his phone could sense he is in a specific situation it could improve the experience significantly because his phone could automatically adapt and use function relevant to the scenario. We are then trying to adapt technology to be more accurate than ever, precision is important and it is offered to us with the backstory of being a revolution that will improve medical conditions, monitor and prevent them.

[1] “Commonly applied to the position and momentum of a particle, the principle states that the more precisely the position is known the more uncertain the momentum is and vice versa.”, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle [WWW Document], 2013. . Chemistry LibreTexts. URL https://chem.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Physical_and_Theoretical_Chemistry_Textbook_Maps/Supplemental_Modules_(Physical_and_Theoretical_Chemistry)/Quantum_Mechanics/02._Fundamental_Concepts_of_Quantum_Mechanics/Heisenberg's_Uncertainty_Principle (accessed 9.27.19).