COUNTER-SURVEILLANCE AESTETHICS
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POETICS OF ERROR
The words take inspiration from the famous concept of the Martinican writer Édouard Glissant :
le droit à l'opacité - the right to opacity.
"We demand the right to opacity," is one of the key positions, the core philosophy of the author's Poetics of Relation, often understood as a form of postcolonial resistance against domination (cf. Murdoch 2013).
Opacity for Glissant means the "exultant divergence of humanity": as an antonym of transparency, this notion implies, in a multirelational world, that recognizing difference does not mean understanding otherness by making it transparent, but accepting the unintelligibility, impenetrability and confusion that often characterize cross-cultural communication.
Opacity tries to overcome the risk of reducing, offering a de-hierarchized world-vision, it reflects on uncontrollable “confluences” and an increasing intermingling of diversities, both of which oppose monolithic worldviews.
We Clamor for the Right to Glitch
The glitch is, to all intents and purposes, a desperate attempt, a completely sudden and not calculated, unpredictable peak that interferes in a constant flow,
ça va sans dire that glitch m etaphorically represents a way to disrupt streamlined conventions.
The glitch can be understood as an error, but it’s as well a pretext to expand the same medium on which the same glitch is recorded.
As researcher Charu Maithani states “the error annotates the space-time of an event with a mark that disrupts the (perceived) expected flow, instilling doubt” but also possibility, novelty.
In this case we could speak of the Poetics of Error
The glitch isn’t originally intended.
It deviates from the expectation of perfection, it expose the suspension of functionality and lack of control over systems.
In this regard, a short paragraph taken from a critical article by Paolo Pecere
on Shoshana Zuboff's book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism tells a biographical anecdote from the life of philosopher Justin Smith :
"[...] he recalls, for example, how his formation depended on a heap of books abandoned in a barn. Chance, here, was a condition of the exercise of freedom: "This is how humans in general have made their way into the world, and it has little to do with the sorting system which relies on machines programmed according to the principle 'you might as well like ...' "
Smith liked a book on German forest ranger, something that "no machine could ever have proposed as a suggestion, unless it malfunctions. But what malfunctions stand for machines, for us is the definition of thriving."
If the ultimate revolution we all claim and wait is, at the end, too much to carry
or if at the final bottom of our consciousness we actually realize the idea of how the world should be changed is way too blurred and we need more time to imagine it, meanwhile we glitch.
Glitch is not to be intended as a declaration of fail (toward the ability to foster radical changes), but rather a liminal waiting room that can contains, confronts, tests even embraces and accept all our fears, in order to overcome them one day.
For this reason I think that the glitch and its right to claim it are concepts that deserve to be exposed and shared through art.
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DANK SIDE OF THE MOON
2013 has been a great year.
Many surveillance fantasies have finally found full satisfaction in a freaking-hot-classified-gossips-galore.
In June of the same year Edward Snowden revealed tons of hush-hush detailed documents involving the United States government
"to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them".
Many journalists, including Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Barton Gellman and Ewen MacAskill shed light on the implications of several secret treaties signed by members of the UKUSA community in their efforts to implement global surveillance.
On November 1, 2013 The Guardian published a journalistic masterpiece that collected an in-depth interactive report from the advent of Snowden’s revelations onwards :
NSA File Decoded.
the code name for a program under which the United States National Security Agency (NSA) collects internet communications from various U.S. internet companies and European governments,
which allows for court-approved direct access to citizens’ Google and Apple accounts.
As Tim Dowling from The Guardian explains, the PRISM logo
“certainly illustrates the programme's undisclosed mission: we (NSA) collect the white light of the world's personal data – all of it – and refract it into an array of information we can use to keep America safe”.
Despite the solemn intent of the agency its logo owns an abominable 90s Powerpoint slide aftertaste on the threshold of the ridiculous : an amazing unmatching aesthetics of espionage.
And as crazy it might sounds, apparently the NSA’s PRISM logo is infringing copyright too.
As you can see from Wikimedia Commons the picture belongs to the English broadcaster and scientist Adam Hart-Davis ( © 1998-04-08 ).
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