The ideas, concepts, and critical theory underpinning my initial considerations for a project investigating the nature of digital space are collated in the video The Digital Divide, an Artist Talk presenting the road to my visual voice and early research for the project.

The idea of the datasphere as existential space is the main avenue of current exploration for my Final Degree Project.

The datasphere is considered as the “notional environment in which digital data is stored” as well as “the space of virtual reality, or cyberspace” (Oxford Dictionaries 2018).

My thematic direction for this project remains open, my initial considerations lying in identifying how a space as invisible as the datasphere can be visualized.

Where do people, individually or collectively, enter into, or interact with, the datasphere? Can those portals be associated with visual markers? How much of the human condition is lost through interaction with, and habitation within, a digitalized world?

Fig. 1: Sunday, October 7th 2018 in Place Eugene Flagey, Brussels, Belgium (Image © Gordon Sutherland 2018)

Musings on surveillance, propaganda and societal control by the gatekeepers to the datasphere and considerations around policing of cyberspace point to potential literary and visual texts as inspiration: Orwell’s Nineteen Eight Four, the Wachowskis’ The Matrix, and Toffler’s Future Shock, for example. How much information can a society absorb before it suffers from culture shock within its own culture?

But where is this digital world and is it tangible enough to be visualised? How is it changing society?

A recent Pew Research study in the United States shows that teens are trying to find the balance between the anxiety of spending too much time on their mobile phone against the worry they feel when they are separated from it (Tiku 2018). Whilst the youngsters involved reveal that they are taking steps to limit the time they spend on their phones, these efforts aren’t necessarily making them happier. Over fifty-five percent of American teens have feelings of anxiety and loneliness – or felt upset – when they are away from their mobile phone.

The report states that American parents also struggle with similar issues in relation to screen time, sometimes to a greater extent. Thirty-nine percent of parents admit to often or sometimes losing focus at work when looking at their mobile phone, this in comparison to the thirty-one percent of teens who state to having lost focus during class time for the same reason. Further, fifty-one percent of teens say that whilst trying to have a conversation with their parent or caregiver, the other person has been distracted by mobile use.

The layers of digital invasiveness in day-to-day life are not only from mobile phones, but come in the form of notifications through various media. These notifications shape the way we live and respond to those around us. I find myself wondering what would happen if the notifications stopped? How would a contemporary digital society respond without these signals?

The 2014/15 exhibition “Watching You, Watching Me” at the Open Society office in New York featured the work of nine visual artists documenting and exploring the surveillance and data retention activities of governments, corporations, and individuals. The exhibition explored not only how photography has been used as much to challenge the practices of surveillance as it has itself been an instrument of surveillance.

Of interest for further research is the work of Edu Bayer for the New York Times in 2011 in which he documented the surveillance apparatus of Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi’s regime, the headquarters of which were housed in a six-story building from which citizen’s movements and correspondence was monitored (Bayer n.d.). The work can be viewed in the context of ‘the ruin’, exposing surveillance in its aftermath.

In his work ‘Plain Sight: The Visual Vernacular of NYPD Surveillance’, aka profiling.is, Josh Begley uses Associated Press released visual texts to produce a wall of images from the NYPD’s surveillance of institutions of businesses affiliated to the Muslim faith. In this project the data artist, filmmaker, and app developer Begley draws attention to the scale of photography’s role in state apparatus surveillance activities. The wall of surveillance material makes me think of a massive contact sheet. Taken more subtly, reference can be found in the display approach of Bernd and Hilla Becher.

Over two years, Simon Menner had access to the Stasi’s visual legacy archived by the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Archives of the former German Democratic Republic. Menner’s presentation of the images allows reflection on the use of photography as a tool at the service of the secret police, whether for training secret service agents, conduction of clandestine home searches, or to track people’s movements (Yamagata 2014). Menner states “They concern photographic records of the repression exerted by the state to subdue its own citizens. For me, the banality of some of these pictures makes them even more repulsive.” (Menner 2018). He further reflects that many of the images are fully open to interpretation making them susceptible to attribution of meaning according to the suspicions of the secret service.

Perhaps the discourse around surveillance, truth, and the (mis)use of data is not too distant from the broader photographic debates of subjectivity and objectivity, or discussions on the fundamentals of intertextuality between visual and written texts. What is the true reading of a photograph in the absence of corroborated written or recorded texts?

The idea of photography as a double agent, or perhaps simply the devil’s advocate, arises in the discourse around its capacity to awaken social conscience of the role that surveillance and state control play with regards to fundamental rights and civil liberties. The ubiquitous nature of the ‘connected’ camera phone and tethered or wi-fi enabled DSLRs means that in both citizen documentary and professional photojournalism, photographers are as much capturing images of socio-political concern with a view to informing the viewing public, as they are providing evidence for use by the surveillance apparatus of the state and other organisations, real or virtual.

The philosophical question remains: is virtual also real? And what does photography the double agent have to say in this debate?

Endnote

Whilst reflecting on surveillance in the data age I was listening to the soundtrack from the film Good Bye Lenin!. The music recalled the story of the fabricated reality created by a young man to protect his mother from shock after she awakes in 1990 from a long coma, to prevent her from learning that the nation of East Germany that she knew and loved had disappeared, and together with it much of her identity [Yann Tiersen 2003].

Sources

Bayer, E. (2018) Gadhaffi Intelligence Room. Available at https://edubayer.photoshelter.com/index/G0000nniWlU_S9oM [Accessed 22 October 2018]

Begley, J. (n.d.) The visual vernacular of NYPD surveillance. Available at https://joshbegley.com/ [Accessed 22 October 2018]

Menner, S. (2018) Images from the Secret Stasi Archives
or: what does Big Brother see, while he is watching? Available at https://simonmenner.com/_sites/SurveillanceComplex/StasiImages/_StasiImagesMenue.html [Accessed 22 October 2018]

Oxford Dictionaries (2018) Definition of datasphere in English. Available at https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/datasphere [Accessed 21 October 2018]

Tiku, N. (2018) Even teens worry that teens are addicted to their phones. Available at https://www.wired.com/story/even-teens-worry-that-teens-are-addicted-to-their-phones/ [Accessed 21 October 2018]

Yamagata, Y. (2014) Taking a closer look at surveillance culture through photography. Available at https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/taking-closer-look-surveillance-culture-through-photography [Accessed 22 October 2018]

Musical inspiration

YANN TIERSEN, 2003. Good Bye Lenin! [CD]. 7243 5 82548 2 2. Labels