Carolyn Guertin, Assistant Professor of Digital Media, U of North Texas at Dallas

“Hacktivist (Pre) Occupations: Self-Surveillance, Participation and Public Space”  

Abstract: Under consumer culture, self-surveillance—the act of submitting your own data to corporate interests like Amazon, TiVo or Facebook—becomes a revolutionary gesture of participation (Andrejevic 15) …or so corporate interests would have us believe. With the advent of social media, we now log our own data in the service of multinationals. A number of digital media artists and groups, however, have turned the camera on themselves, using self-surveillance as a means of creating a way of writing their own digital narratives outside of the prescribed parameters of social media’s control. Exploring the ubiquitous potential of surveillance technologies as a medium of self-expression, I will discuss several guerrilla methods by artists that use these tactics to repossess all-seeing cameras for aesthetic ends. (Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Surveillance Camera Players, Manu Luksch, and Elahi Hasan) Secondly, I want to examine how lifestreamers, webcammers and social activists use the potentialities of self-surveillance to reveal and to disguise, to as a way of both communicating and avoiding detection.