Art at Privacy Camp
The 11th edition of Privacy Camp invites to explore the criticality of our digital worlds.
Invoking critical times often sounds like a rhetorical trick. And yet, this year, we have witnessed the beginning of both an energy and security crisis, caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In the meantime, the world is still dealing with a major health crisis, while increasingly acknowledging the urgency of the climate crisis. In fact, crises are situations where the relations in which we are entangled change, so that understanding and making an impact on how these relations change, and in favor of whom, becomes crucial.
Hence, these are some of the questions we want to ask. How do digital technologies feed into and foster the multiple crises we inhabit? What do we need to consider when approaching the digital as a critical resource that we should nurture, so to promote and protect rights and freedoms?
Art/Artist presented by Privacy Salon: NEW EXTRACTIVISM - VLADAN JOLER (2020) WWW.EXTRACTIVISM.WORK
This is an assemblage—an assemblage of concepts and allegories. The word “assemblage” is usually understood as a collection or gathering of things or people, a machine or object made of pieces fitted together, or a work of art made by grouping together found or unrelated objects. This map and accompanying footnotes are precisely that: one big messy assemblage of different concepts and ideas, assembled into one semi-coherent picture or let us say a map, a world view. The concepts presented are mostly represented here visually in the form of allegories. Dictionaries define allegory as a story, poem, or picture that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning, typically a moral or political one. All of these allegories and concepts together, joined in the form of an assemblage, create together a blueprint of a machine-like superstructure, or a super allegory. In that sense, what we have here is an almost fractal allegorical structure—an allegory within an allegory within an allegory. This work takes three forms that hardly can function independently. Map - that attempts to present the superstructure or overall view; Guide - that deals with the individual concepts and allegories; Footnotes - textual descriptions of the presented concepts.
This work is Commissioned by Digital Earth for the Vertical Atlas publication. Author: Vladan Joler Vladan Joler is Professor at the Academy of Arts of the University of Novi Sad and founder of the SHARE Foundation. He is leading the SHARE Lab, a research and investigation lab that explores the technical and social aspects of algorithmic transparency, digital labor exploitation, invisible infrastructures, and technological black boxes.
Full citation: Vladan Joler, “New Extractivism”, www.extractivism.work , 2020
Acknowledgements This assemblage mainly builds upon research and maps that have been made in collaboration with others, especially Kate Crawford in Anatomy of an AI and for her forthcoming book ATLAS OF AI (Yale, 2021), Nooscope with Matteo Pasquinelli, “My Little Big Data” with Eva and Franco Mattes, and research done within the SHARE Lab and valuable comments and suggestions by Olivia Solis, Vuk Cosic, Daphne Dragona, Vladimir Todorovic and Randall A. Major.
Emmanuel Van der Auwera, Perfect Days, 2022, Two-Channel HD Video, 17 min 07 sec
"Perfect Days", is a new production by Brussels artist Emmanuel Van der Auwera. It is a documentary about confinement. Thanks to the avatar, Kinuko, a 19-year-old teenager, the artist penetrates – like an anthropologist – a metaverse and accumulates hours of recordings from which all the sequences of the film are taken. Originally, this virtual island (in which the artist spent a large part of this period of confinement) was created to provide access to virtual real estate to companies wishing, for example, to organize conferences or meetings. During the global confinement caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, the island becomes a place of retreat in an alternate reality (potentially), the only possible vacation and social gathering destination that has seen a significant increase in the number of its users. .
Close to the video game of which teenagers are the privileged target, this metaverse differs by its nature and augurs the future of virtual worlds which no longer have entertainment as their objective but only business. This virtual utopia of happiness in which the avatars have a panoply of limited feelings (one can laugh there but never cry there) testifies to a reconquest of human relationships whose alienation is exploited for commercial purposes. In this "Perfect Days" (whose title is borrowed from the famous piece by Lou Reed), Van der Auwera ultimately captures the void.
This project was realized during the Artist in Residence program of Privacy Salon and Privacytopia. Emmanuel Van der Auwera is represented by Harlan Levey Projects (HLP) Brussels.