Performance art is pretty much a social science experiment as it is an art form. Life Sharing (2000) by couple artists Eva and Franco Mattes can be considered as such. And this particular experiment strikes deep in to the notion of “peep culture”. Suppose you have an irresistibly attractive neighbour living next door. Then one particular day he/she neglected to drawn the curtains when changing and you happen to chance upon it. How many of you would turn your head away instead of embracing you inner voyeur? (Not many I guess.) That is the point of many art work involving the privacy of the artists themselves as medium. Can you control your desire to “peep”? Most of us have a certain degree of moral decency. We know that actions like hiding in the changing room to drool at people changing is wrong and will likely land you in jail. But this “peep culture” within our society is not something we can reject with our moral sense. Especially in the third space called the internet where we have the shield of “anonymity” to protect us from being discovered, the “peep culture” runs deep into our very cyber-vein. Life Sharing (2000) proves just that. The artists lay bare their activities and private life in their computer for all to see. It’s like someone streaking in the street asking for indecent act to be perform on him/her. He/she is asking for it. Does it make you right to go ahead and actually do it? Same goes for this work. Even if the artists ask for it, is it okay for any of us to practically intrude their private space? To many people, it is perfectly fine. Simply look at the statistic posted in the main site: http://0100101110101101.org/life-sharing/ In contemporary context, we have our social network to thanks for perpetuating the “peep culture”. The phenomenon of life sharing has become so common today that people literally post everything about their life sans bank account or password. So the question is how much can we share before we thread the sensitive zone. Life Sharing may not be as relevant as it was back in 2000 AD where social media barely thrived. But it strikes a chord because the artists revealed details that most cyber users would not dare to. And it is inevitable that malicious individuals will exploit those revelations. Some people simply do it because they can. A girl neglected to set her birthday event to private. And a random guy who chance upon it thought it was a great idea to invite 3000 random people to said event. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2206919/Riot-Facebook-party-attended-thousands.html#v-1854693716001 Even the untimely death of some arbitrary young boy or a young girl can become the brunt of ridicule and jokes. People were hurt, reputations were tarnished, and they are irreversible. The risk of artworks like Life Sharing can potentially be of catastrophic level for the artists. Is it worth it to run into such risks for the sake of proving some point? As I mentioned earlier, performance art pieces are pretty much social experiment. They produced results that grant us a “peep” into the human condition. And chance are, we’ll be peeping at Medusa riding a wrecking ball instead of Venus de Milo.
Tag Archives: privacy
Research 02: Online Privacy
Is the internet a massive cyber peephole? Sounds like a sensational question? But such claim may not be that far from the truth.
No matter how hacked-savvy people like Julian Assange or Lulzsec is, there has to be a source pool where they get their information from. (Data simply don’t manifest themselves out of thin air.) And the existence of this source pool is why online privacy is an illusion.
A Bit[E] Of Me is an experimental artwork where the artist, Federico Zannier, is literally selling his personal data on the internet. Specifically, he is selling data of his online activities. Eg. The websites he visit, the post he made on forums, etc.
“Since February, I have been recording all of my online activity (the HTML pages I have visited, the position of the mouse pointer, a screenshot of what I was looking at, a webcam image of me looking at my computer, my GPS location and a log of the apps that I was using). Check out myprivacy.info to see some of the visualizations I’ve made.”
-https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1461902402/a-bit-e-of-me
(Unfortunately said data collection does not include how many time he scratches his nose for a particular day. (But you can buy his NSFW browser histroy for $2!)
Practically everyone of us has given up some degree of personal data to companies online via Facebook, Amazon, or Ebay. And said companies may have used those data for monetary purposes without us receiving a single cent of commission or royalties. Remember seeing those long list of texts ending with “I Agree” or “I Decline”? Giving out license to use our personal data for free is literally a button click away.
“Why not profit from our own personal data directly? It’s not like I can hide them anyway” is probably what goes in Zannier’s mind.
Zannier’s motivation is clear. He wants to raise awareness on how frivolous we are with our online data. He wants to highlight the absurdity of such irrational phenomenon. He wants to earn a few bucks along the way. Online privacy is pretty much a false facade, might as well make use of it right?
The advent of the internet has allowed data of all forms to be visualized and quantified. Graphs, maps, charts, images, or videos instead of strings of code. Everything we do online is collected in digital data form and can be chronicled into books or made into film if we want to (disregarding the entertainment factor). As much as we are concern with our online privacy, the moment we step into the internet, such privacy is void. In fact, it may be non-existing. So what if you set your online blog or social network account to private. The moment you saved and publish anything it will always be stored there in the server, up for grabs by anyone who can. So what if you have a high grade cyber security network. It can stop malicious software or incoming threat but for how long? Our online data are all up for grabs by potentially anyone. Companies where you registered an account, government agencies looking for “terrorists”, 4chan lurkers, etc. And we keep giving up our personal information with no means of stopping. Unless we stop using the internet entirely, this is not going to change. (Hint: We can’t.)
On hindsight, how many creepy voyeurs would bother invading your digital private space? If there are what are the consequences? People like Zannier is not revealing his bank details nor anything physically personal — simply his superficial online presence that bares no direct dire consequences to his life if exposed. People post pictures of themselves, their location and their inner thoughts on Facebook every time anyway. (That’s still no excuse for stalking.)
Nevertheless, if we bother locking our doors at night, we should do the same to our personal online space. We can forget about having total privacy but try not to have zero deterrence either.