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Leonorana No. 8 - Vigilância Surveillance

Label / Leonorana
Category / Essay, Surveillance, Politic, Design, Made in Portugal
Code / none

Fracture and Fugue In this publication we reflect together upon the phenomenon of surveillance as it becomes more than a mere control mechanism and explore its social, political and disciplining implications. Drawing upon the concept of “disciplinary power”, as decentralized power beyond space and time, we further explore “fracture” and “fugue” [escape] as forms of counterpower over more or less subtle surveillance mechanisms and to contradict the idea of surveillance “normalization”. Moreover, we have resorted to the concept of “line of flight” [ligne de fuite], as theorized by Deleuze and Guattari, as a form of resisting and escaping oppressive systems in which surveillance is implicit. Citizens are subject to constant data collection, which constraints and transforms their behaviour, desires and identities. This control and oppressiveness seeps into every aspect of our lives, including work environments, personal relationships and digital interactions. It is therefore urgent to find strategies to build “lines of flight” as modes of resistance and escape that tear down established structures and norms, and to conceive forms of deterritorialization in order to generate new connections through existing boundaries in a process of creative rupture and liberation that seeks to challenge dominating modes of control while opening up new possibilities of existence, such as subversive practices, artistic expressions, nomadic lifestyles, fluid identities or alternative social organizations.[...] Following this thread, this issue of Leonorana brings together six essays with different formal strategies. Chloé, the Super-Object, the first of the six essays, by Filipe Pais, is anchored in two events of our time and presents a story that is apparently set in the future about a super-intelligent digital assistant — drawing on the constant watchfulness, attention and 24/7 availability that characterize the sharp response capacity of digital assistants such as Siri or Alexa. Resident in a government building, Chloé is permanently attentive and tuned to the multiple signals of the environment, but her survival may be at risk due to her increasingly erratic and disobedient behaviour. Created to solve the problem of global warming, Chloé sees and foresees states of anxiety and impending conflicts, which she manages and pacifies by controlling window shutters or light’s intensity. This fiction inspires the possibility for digital assistants to challenge or “fracture” the surveillance system from within. The following essays, Walls Looking From Within, by Ece Canli, and Unfolding a Polyhedron, by Valeria Radrigán, look into the all-surveillant structure, describing its control mechanisms while omitting the risks of its use. By graphically describing violent scenes, Ece Canli proposes a critical, provoking gaze of the prison system and the power dynamics, questioning the voyeurism that is involved in this system. Her essay challenges the logic of prison system surveillance and the way how inmates are constantly controlled and monitored. With her vivid and visceral writing, Canli involves us in the reading and addresses us directly, calling for a critical position in the face of a system that perpetuates mass incarceration. Following from Canli, Valeria Radrigán draws attention to the existence of camouflaged infrastructures in places of social visibility. Radrigán transports us to the exhibition Espesores Tisulares, by Chilean artist Daniel Cruz, in which he questions the contemporary notion of “network living” and how it generates vulnerability in the private space. This exhibition is described as a subversion of contemporary visuality, as the artist invites viewers to decode and unravel the complexities of the digital world. In her essay, Radrigán resorts to the symbolism of natural elements, such as sand, the beach and the human body, in the context of digital communication and explores the connections between the various works on show, highlighting themes such as nature and technology, territory and ubiquity, intimacy and exposure, control and escape. In Notes in the Margin: Vigilance, Cacti, Global Warming and Technologies by Isabel Carvalho, the effects of climate changes on the technologies in which everyday experiences are structured are highlighted. In addition to extreme and specific weather phenomena, ironically, the increase in average temperatures does not only affect human beings, animals and plants, but also mobile equipment and technologies that suffer from the effects they cause. Taking the resilience of cacti as an example, the text presents itself as a web of small autonomous paragraphs of loose but interconnected thoughts that reveal structures of surveillance supported by organic and synthetic technologies. The last essay returns to the exercise in speculation started with Chloé. In this sci-fi short story, The End of Big Data, James Bridle describes a redeeming vision of the future. In a post-capitalist regime, global surveillance has replaced surveillance based on people’s data and a new satellite network carefully monitors the Earth’s surface ensuring that personal data are eliminated. The narrative’s protagonist eventually recovers analogue technologies for his personal project, which he develops after working hours, with the purpose of setting free refugees in precarious conditions. Resorting to so-called obsolete technologies as a disruptive strategy opens up other lines of flight in the work of the Pedreira collective. Their visual essay consists of a transcription of the performance RODA DE SAMPLE based on recordings, text messaging and notes prepared for the event that took place at the Pedreira space (Porto, December 2022). The work emerges from an improvisation process that moves across spaces, either using tech errors such as glitches or introducing spelling mistakes. These recordings, as an experience of sound spontaneity, are translated in analogue and digital forms, both in text and image. As an insert, intertwined in this publication, the artist Ibiye Camp presents the project Ephemeral Data — a graphic essay that points to the mapping and datafication processes of the body and the globe. Camp returned to Freetown, Sierra Leone, to update a photogrammetric series that captures Campbell Street, in the west of the capital, from 2019 to 2023. Somewhere between the 3D scan captured reality and the shortcomings in capturing it, we glimpse the digital reconstruction of a mobile 4G kiosk. Ephemeral Data points to the continuous rendering process which describes the concrete operations that transform buildings, objects and bodies into data. The resulting impression is that of a city in permanent mutation, subject to successive capturing processes and protocols that juxtapose, combine and compress to form an imprecise, low-resolution image.

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