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The work of artists in a databased society: Net.Art as online activism. (Features).(Internet standards and a Free Society)(Excerpt)

Afterimage, March, 2002, by Richard Miranda Zuniga

Have you checked your email today? Do you get online to find out the latest scores of your favorite sports teams? Do you use the Web to scan the latest news? Perhaps you make online purchases--a birthday present, new music, or a business flight? The Internet is such a remarkably multifaceted tool that it has experienced an exponential growth and embedded itself in the daily lives of a vast number of people.' As a new telecommunication technology, it allows the common individual to engage in a cybernetic system that is globally networked. Today, however, developments are seeking to establish the dynamics of the Internet as a delimited public arena, and the question is if the cyberspace imaginary will become a highly monitored and regionalized social space or if the Internet will retain its radical potential for independent endeavors and ideological exchange. With these opposing scenarios in mind, the political implications of the Internet as a social network present rich issues for creative and critical cultur al production.

The nature of the Internet as a network of connected computers used to exchange information engenders a sense of liberty and freedom in the individual. Early in its development, mainframe teams established host-to-host protocols such as Telnet and File Transfer Protocol (FTP) that decentralized computer networking between independent users from the mainframe. (2) As the network grew it evolved into a new, public sphere of communication that traveled via a globally expansive routing system and a vast array of online applications, among them electronic mail and the World Wide Web. (3) The individual was able to interface with an enlarged public and an expanded dialogical space emerged.

Given the numerous forms of exchange possible via the Internet, online activity parallels Nancy Fraser's re-articulation of Jurgen Habermas's public sphere as put forth in his 1962 book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Habermas presents the public sphere as a bourgeois arena for exchange where citizens may discuss common affairs, a model based on the old town hall. In her essay "Rethinking the Public Sphere." (4) Nancy Fraser updates and expands the Habermasian public sphere beyond institutionalized public forums to include the market place and the domestic space (specifically in relation to domestic violence). Whereas Habermas places market relations and domestic issues within the private sector, Fraser argues that, in doing so, these arenas of human interaction are restricted from "legitimate public contestation." Fraser's re-articulation expands the public sphere beyond the bourgeois domain to a space that is "open and accessible to all." As the Internet becomes increasingly commonplace and interweaves itself into the fabric of daily life through such collective forums as, to take only a few examples, list-serves, chat rooms and gaming communities, it assumes the role of a host for multi-user domains that, according to Fraser's definition, breeds a multiplicity of publics. Each public sphere is in turn part of a civil domain that is governed by a set of laws and policies. Therefore, just like any public space, the Internet must have its own set of policies that mirror those of society at large.

Among the online policies and regulations currently being established are decisions pertaining to the appropriate level of policing and monitoring of cyberspace, preferences that serve to determine the boundaries of privacy in a networked society. The very nature of the Internet presents, contrary to popular belief, a highly efficient means of surveying these borders, because it is structured through a networked electronic system that interfaces logical indexing machines--computers. The ability to digitize nearly all types of records in conjunction with the computer's indexing and networking efficiency has established the database as an advanced development of the nineteenth-century archive, which in turn borrowed heavily from eighteenth-century taxonomy. As an extension of this lineage, the database has developed into an exemplary model of our society: it draws the lines and terms of participation, it dictates inclusion and exclusion, it unites and sunders, all on the basis of networked data structures that effectively inscribe negotiated biases.

In his essay "The Body and the Archive," (5) Allan Sekula traces early criminology's use of photography to document, categorize and archive the human body. As the body became a subject of the rapidly expanding police archive through the capabilities of photography, the fundamental problem of volume became apparent: "The early promise of photography had faded in the face of a massive and chaotic archive of images." The electronic database's vast storage capabilities promise to resolve the problem of volume that initially threatened to overwhelm the premise of a centralized, controlling domain through what emerged as a lack of organizing principles. Hence, the photographs once used to document and index the body according to a structure dictated by sciences and normative measurements (which were linked to each photograph and are now a feature of every identity card) are phased out in favor of designated data streams, each in turn linked to networked avatars that take the form of usernames, passwords, numbers o r icons. And as various types of data such as our home address, our shopping patterns, our level of institutionalized education, our employment and income, for example, are monitored and stored, data becomes the very basis of identity, and the electronic network used to transfer data becomes a tool of investigation, much like the utility sought and implemented by the Paris police in the nineteenth century, due to its potential for surveillance. The question then arises, like it did with the role of photography in the service of the archive: How far will police, federal and even corporate monitoring of the electronic sphere extend? How will we ever know its parameters? Is it a matter of trust or open systems or regulatory institutions? Where and how will the lines of personal and civil rights be drawn in a networked society?

The questions surrounding online privacy are complex and encompass a wide number of issues such as ownership, which in itself introduces a chain of other questions. It is impossible to present an answer to these spiraling queries, as they will continue to arise. However, I do contend that unless non-governing independent groups protect the Internet as a space for independent production, dissemination and open discourse, the potential of the Internet to support and connect autonomous agents will be consumed, largely through its networked nature. Therefore, if there exists today an artist avant-garde that is ignoring the modernist hijacking of the term and is looking, once more, to merge art with daily social life, it is the growing number of socially active artists engaged in cyber resistance as a critical practice in which the network and the database represent tools for engagement.

After a more comprehensive discussion of how the Internet is used to collect and employ data, I will present two primary forms of resistance as it is executed through two artist projects. Under the heading TO INFORM, Brooke Singer exposes her own electronic data to pedagogically engage an identity woven from data streams. Under the rubric TO SUBVERT, "iSEE," a collaborative project between the Institute for Applied Autonomy and the Surveillance Camera Players, makes use of the database structure to subvert the monitoring of the public sphere.

* THE ELECTRONIC STRUCTURE: A NEW PUBLIC ARCHIVE
It is of the utmost importance to recognize that the Internet is not an isolated electronic sphere, but that it is used to statistically analyze society. By tracking the movements of the individual, determining one's economic status and identifying one's personal tastes, the Internet is used as a corporate tool to shape popular culture and determine the geographic locations of subcultures to target with marketing. (Ever wondered why you only see malt liquor ads in poor and minority neighborhoods?) The Internet generates effects that extend far beyond the confines of the screen, perhaps even more so than its still dominant precursor, television, because the network increasingly interweaves the virtual and real. Unlike most of its predecessors, computer technology used for the processing of information succeeds in part because of its ability to store, transmit and process a very wide range of information types. And as information becomes increasingly dynamic due to new operating systems, software and database l anguages designed to interface various applications, and sources to build information warehouses, corporate goals and federal surveillance become increasingly efficient. The new Oracle 8i is even capable of adding multimedia data to its warehouse, presenting new possibilities for the lingering lineage of the photography archive. Another common database application, FileMaker, is now available in both desktop and mobile versions, and it has, in addition to the inclusion of images, upgraded in the direction of establishing proprietary networks around relational databases that can be published and accessed via the Internet.

Currently there exists a strong corporate push to get consumers to use the Web as a personal storage bin. As artist Brooke Singer points out in an interview:
Prompted by new technologies and the promises they hold, or that we are told they hold, our lives are moving more and more into the digital domain, which in turn enables corporate and federal surveillance. For instance, it looks like the music we listen to whether at work, at home or in the car will be accessed via the Web in some way. What does it mean that some corporate provider will most likely be able to know what music we listen to, when it is playing, for how long it stays on and which songs we choose to repeat over and over? Digital TV is a big promise, too. Maybe it's vaporware so far, but there is a big hype for it, so the programs we watch will be equally surveyed and analyzed. And then there is this democratic hope of interactive TV, which no doubt will involve more bland stuff like the People's Choice Awards, In the drive to digitize everything, we are allowing for our movements and choices to be put under the microscope. In the end the data gathered will only be used to manipulate movements and desires. That is why it is collected and stored in the first place. (6)

The corporate data warehouse contains a wide variety of data used for decision support and analytical processing. Relational database systems integrate workers and disparate pieces of information. For example, many operational systems used in production to run day-to-day business operations of a company may dynamically and periodically load new data into the warehouse in batch mode via a network direct-path option. In addition to the data a company may already own, it can purchase data from external data providers to add to its warehouse. A company may buy information about socioeconomic demographics to more closely monitor and target consumers. By adding demographic data for existing and potential customers, selected marketing can be performed, targeting those who are most likely to respond to a sales promotion. Demographic data can furthermore be used to help choose a location to place a new retail store. The data warehouse facilitates highly sophisticated analysis, reporting, online analytical processing a nd, to introduce an emerging term, data mining. Data mining is part of the knowledge discovery process. By using statistical techniques, vast quantities of data can be transformed into useful information. Data is like the raw material extracted from traditional mines: when turned into information, it is like a precious metal. Data mining allows business to extract previously unknown pieces of information from their warehouse and use it to make important business decisions. (7) This practice has become such a prominent tool for marketing that corporations will go to surreptitious lengths to acquire more statistics. In January, The New York Times reported that "thousands of Internet users who installed popular software for sharing music and other computer files also unwittingly accepted a program that tracked their Web surfing habits...The program collects information about sites visited over the last two days to better place ads." (8)

Of course, data analysis and exchange extends far beyond commercialism. Have you recently become a client of a multi-state system for electronic financial transactions that are operated by transportation authorities to shorten and economize your commute? Be aware, your information is shared with your auto insurance company, and you are being tracked. Are you a responsible citizen who has registered to vote? Those pesky data providers make use of your voter registration for profit. In fact, if you have filled out a form online or a questionnaire on the street that does not state that your privacy will be respected, and that "this information will not be shared," you have given away perfectly good personal merchandise. The data-self may also have much more direct consequence for an individual. In The Electronic Disturbance, (9) the Critical Art Ensemble poses the scenario of a person attempting to acquire a bank loan. She or he enacts all the appropriate social conventions as a loan applicant to give the impres sion of economic security, sporting proper attire and enacting formal etiquette. However, the "loan officer" is primarily concerned with the individuals credit history: "P's electronic double reveals that s/he has been late on credit payments in the past and that s/he has been in a credit dispute with another bank. The loan is denied; end of performance."

* TO INFORM: REVEALING THE DATA SELF
It is this data-based identity, this data-self that artist Brooke Singer constructs as her continually evolving self-portrait. The evolution of net.art has over the last number of years largely consisted of a movement away from narrative, in the traditional sense of using the Internet to communicate and exchange real experiences or fictions based in reality, toward constructions based in and on data that are working in the conjunction of the new bit-based reality and what we may have presumed to be simply real. In other words, the move is toward visualizing and mapping the Internet and its interactions with the discourses and spaces that constitute social, everyday life. Brooke Singer's "Self-Portrait (v2.o)" or "SPV2," (10) a project launched in October 2001, is part of this evolution in net.art.

Derived from the tradition of Western painting, the portrait was once used solely by the aristocracy to display an individual's wealth and power. In the mid-nineteenth century, the photograph expanded the possibilities of portraiture to the petit-bourgeois. In "SPV2" Brooke Singer updates the portrait to the information age. In an age when our data-selves may carry more significance than our real, blood-pumping and breathing selves, Singer has thoroughly investigated various databases accessible on the Web to create an online application cum portrait out of her very own data.

"SPV2" offers the user a selection of various data related to the artist that will load into the browser as a visual collage. Along the top of the pop-up window that presents the project, one is offered a row of categories: DataMine, DataWake, Join Me! and ReadMe. DataMine and DataWake are drop-down menus that list various data packets that will be visualized within the window. Under DataMine you have a selection of data that Singer either generates as part of her everyday life or is merely part of her environment: Incoming Email, Webcam and Weather. Within DataWake you have a selection of data collected around her person by external entities: Web Search, Clickstream, Consumer Profile, Voter Registration Information and Singer's FBI file. As the user makes data selections, the generating self-portrait function grabs data from the chosen source, deposits the data into a visual representation and displays it to the user. One may layer the various visual depictions to eventually achieve an aesthetic blend of dat a chaos.

The fact that Singer has chosen to reveal these files, particularly the self-generated files such as those from the Webcam and email, points to the delight of many Internet participants who choose to reveal their private life to a vast anonymous audience. The concept that many people enjoy the attention of a public stage and make use of the Internet for that purpose is not new. But the juxtaposition of DataMine and DataWake makes explicit the complexity of the Internet as a sphere that we compose for our enjoyment with the knowledge that it also serves a regulating and normalizing function.

This dichotomy is not unlike the double entendre surrounding the photographic portraiture that Sekula describes in "The Body and the Archive" as "a system of representation capable of functioning both honorifically and repressively." Photography functions honorifically in that it documents and memorializes "the ceremonial presentation of the bourgeois self," and repressively in that it entrenches a social hierarchy by documenting and defining the "other"--both the other within western culture itself, characterized by documenting the physiognomy of the criminal, (11) and in the anthropological as well as ethnographic studies that captured the "savage" races. In this day and age, where biology has also become a question of data, it is equally pertinent to ask if you have purchased your credit report lately? Are you quite sure that you would qualify for a new credit line? Where does your data-self put you on the social scale of approval ratings?
Singer reminds us that the Internet is an increasingly corporate space by introducing such icons as the Microsoft Passport Butterfly. In "SPV2" the MSN butterfly comes to life and flies out of the browser when one chooses Incoming Email in the DataMine menu. It reappears later, once the email has choked the browser, to sweep away the text and create a new space for more incoming information. The Internet began its commercial transformation in 1979, the year the National Science Foundation (NSF), once proprietors of the Internet, agreed to sell part of its new virtual frontier to Compu Serve. "Fifteen years later [Compu Serve] claimed 3.2 million users in 120 countries and was part owned by Time Warner. The NSF, finally, in 1995 handed the backbone and its management over to the private telecommunication giants Sprint, Ameritech, and Pacific Bell which became the gatekeepers of the principal access points." (12) This is an all too familiar pattern of mass media, a pattern that has resulted in a highly limited production of independent radio and television programs. In the case of both telecommunications technologies, the dialogical potential was quickly consumed by corporate enterprise. (13)

By publicly revealing her data-self, Singer turns the user into a data-voyeur while simultaneously giving the user a glance at the sort of data that exist within the Internet in relation to each one of us. To further accentuate this point, Singer has also included the join Me! category, which allows users to enter their name and/or zip code and launch the visual representation of her/his own data-self. In effect, the applied value of Singer's work is information. The project takes the first step of activism--it informs its viewer/participant of just how open one's history may be for public inspection. Although once a viewer enters her/his name and zip code the information one gets back is limited to weather reports and an image grabbed from Google, the viewer is rewarded for participating by gaining access to view past Join Me! logs. As Singer explains: "When entering the logs, you see other people's information and it's more than weather and image. There is potentially also a person's date of birth as well a s their personality type and income based on demographics. This access is your reward for participating, but you also realize that your information will now be viewable by the next Join Me! participant. You are now not only a voyeur, but also an object of observation. Participation usually makes you see or feel the benefits, but hardly ever the consequences." (14)

* TO SUBVERT: REVERSING SURVEILLANCE
If Singer's "SPV2" presents the first activist step through awareness and pedagogy, how can art and the electronic network be used to take the second activist step, action?

Over the last three years the Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA) has been searching for tools that turn the camera upon the authoritarian figures that impose surveillance on the public sphere. IAA "an organization concerned with individual and collective self-determination" asks itself: "How can we monitor surveillance?" Most recently, Germany's Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie (Center for Art and Media Technology), offered IAA the opportunity--by providing funding--to produce the project "iSEE" (15) as part of the exhibition titled "CTRL[SPACE]," an exhibition that uses Jeremy Bentham's conception of the Panopticon as a point of curatorial departure. (16)

Once the exhibit was scheduled IAA approached the New York-based Surveillance Camera Players (SCP) to ask for permission to use the SCP's mapping of all closed-circuit television cameras (CCTV) in the Manhattan borough. (A couple of years ago the SCP had a team of people document all CCTV surveillance cameras in the streets of Manhattan.) Using the data provided by SCP, IAA constructed "iSEE," "a Web-based application charting the locations of closed-circuit television surveillance cameras in urban environments. With 'iSEE,' users can find routes that avoid these cameras--paths of least surveillance--allowing them to walk around their cities without fear of being 'caught on tape' by unregulated security monitors." (17) Granted that this data is now outdated and from the onset contained an unknown margin of error, the collaboration does not take away from its symbolic, pedagogical potential. "iSEE" is composed of both an online mapping application and an essay discussing the public use of CCTV surveillance cam eras. Although "iSEE" is primarily a pedagogical discourse and a symbolic gesture engaging a wide audience about CCTV, it appears that the application is also being used practically, as users are mapping routes, zooming into the map and printing the path of least surveillance--and, fittingly, most resistance.

In contrast to Singer's "SPV2," which depends upon the dynamic data existing in networked databases to stir questions of online privacy in its viewer/user, "iSEE" tackles the issue of optical surveillance in "real" space. When asked which form of monitoring has the greatest significance today, IAA responded that it is the move to link public optical surveillance with an electronic network Although most surveillance cameras are currently single channel, new applications are being designed to interface surveillance camera documentation with various network databases. (18) In a phone interview, an IAA operative stated that "CCTV is evolving and continues to be developed by corporate and university research through face recognition. (19) Beyond face recognition, we have seen software that studies human gestures and activity to figure out what one is doing. If the software interprets one's gestures as suspicious, well, you may be picked up." (20) The fact that such software, particularly face recognition software, may easily be used for racial profiling presents a frightening parallel to nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century categorizations of race as well as to the, now discredited, science of phrenology. It appears that although technology has advanced at an alarming rate, its applications to divide and control society has not changed at all since efforts to categorize abject behavior on physiological terms emerged, in one incarnation, with the archive more than 150 years ago. Hence, these seemingly disparate forms of surveillance, i.e. online versus physical public space, are not distinct or separate issues, but rather will lead to enhanced surveillance of an enlarged public sphere--physical and virtual. To IAA physical and virtual surveillance represent a continuum toward a surveillance society, which, to bring in a topical agenda, will present surveillance, under the guise of national security, as integral to the fight against crime and terrorism.

The subtitle of "iSEE" is "v.911: 'Now more than ever"' and the phrase "Now more than ever" is in direct protest to the United States Patriot Act, the anti-terrorism measure signed by the Bush administration following the events of September 11, 2001. The law strongly sets back a U.S. citizen's ability to protect individual liberty, and it affects immigrant residents and citizens in particular. Among the various provisions set forth by the new law are a strong reduction of judicial supervision of federal telephone and Internet surveillance conducted by law enforcement authorities, and it expands the ability of the government to conduct secret searches, including online investigation and monitoring.
On January 4, The New York Times reported the first case directly influenced by the U.S. Patriot Act in which a federal judge in Newark, New jersey ruled that evidence surreptitiously gathered by the FBI about Nicodemo S. Scarfo's reputed loan shark operation can be presented in a trial later this year: "U.S. District Judge Nicholas Politan said last week that it was perfectly acceptable for FBI agents armed with a court order to sneak into Scarfo's office, plant a keystroke sniffer in his PC and monitor its output...The flap started last week, when news reports began to appear about an FBI project code-named "Magic Lantern" [that]reportedly works by masquerading as an innocent email attachment that will insert FBI spyware inside your computer." The judge went on to state that "each day, advanced computer technologies and the increased accessibility to the Internet means criminal behavior is becoming more sophisticated and complex...As a result of this surge in so-called "cyber crime," law enforcement's abili ty to vigorously pursue such rogues cannot be hindered where all constitutional limitations are scrupulously observed..." (21)

The position of the judge coupled with a desire for security and protection after September II can be juxtaposed with the work of IAA to present a social dialogue on authoritative power that illustrates Michel Foucault's observation on the conjuncture of power/knowledge as a dynamic force: "What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn,t only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression." (22)

IAA will do its part in keeping the discourse alive as there are plans to further develop "iSEE," which is only one part of a much larger project. IAA would like to make greater practical use of "iSEE" data in real-time protest, so that marching activists may inform one another of police locations via a customized mapping application for handheld computers. Such use would avoid potential disruption of protests. IAA would also like to map the use of surveillance cameras in other cities such as London and Seattle, two cities saturated with CCTV where demonstrators and police have recently clashed. Lastly, IAA plans to develop a handheld kit with GPS receivers that allow operatives anywhere to document a CCTV camera when spotted by wirelessly feeding the data to a remote database. Therefore the documentation and surveillance of public surveillance would be entirely decentralized and effectively reversed. Through this process, the IAA looks to subvert corporate and governmental use of the Internet as a mechanism of social analysis and surveillance. By turning it into a tool that makes the actions of public protest more efficient, it seeks to lay claim on self-determination.

* THE INTERNET AS A SUSTAINED DIALOGICAL SPACE THROUGH CULTURAL PRODUCTION
The movement to merge art with daily social life is the legacy of the revolutionary avantgarde, a legacy that is bound to the rise of technological invention in modern society. Print, photography, the telephone, radio, film, video and the Internet have each awakened a vision of artistic production embedded in the broad social fabric of the public arena. The tendencies of the technologically driven avant-garde, in its latest incarnation, have been socialist--aiming to debunk the art object from its pedestal through mass production and perhaps more importantly to release electronic media into a dialogical public sphere.
In his 1974 essay/manifesto "Constituents of a Theory of the Media,, (23) Hans Magnus Enzenberger presents the following table to summarize the social dichotomy of media:
Repressive Use of Media
Centrally controlled program One transmitter, many receivers Immobilization of isolated individuals Passive consumer behavior Depoliticization Production by specialists Control by property owners or bureaucracy
Emancipatory Use of Media
Decentralized program Each receiver a potential transmitter Mobilization of the masses Interaction of those involved, feedback A political learning process
Collective production Social control by self-organization
If we apply Enzensberger's set of emancipatory objectives to the Internet, it does indeed represent a dialogical vehicle more so than any other media. However, if we allow corporate surveillance and federal policies to perform an even greater monitoring of cyberspace, the Internet's dialogical potential will be consumed by a decentralized global panopticon. The public sphere no longer implies only the embodied spaces of social geographies--it now encompasses the virtual spaces of the Internet. Hence, new forms of cultural production that make use of emerging technologies must assimilate and subvert the corporate and governmental means of documenting, indexing and monitoring the public domain to enact contestation. Brooke Singer's "SPV2" and the Institute for Applied Autonomy's "iSEE" present two alternative uses of the Internet and the database as tools that provoke and enable constructive social critique through independent production and dissemination.

NOTES
(1.) The Internet has become the fastest growing electronic technology in world history." From The Pew charitable Trusts Web Site, www.pewtrusts.com/ ideas/index.cfm7issue=10, January 2002.
(2.) Brian Winston documents the early history of the Internet in his book Media Technology and Society (London: Routledge. 998).
(3.) Mark Poster elaborates on "Cyber Democracy" as a space where "individuals construct their identities...a 'democratization' of subject constitution because the acts of discourse are not limited to one-way address and not constrained by the gender and ethnic traces inscribed in face-to-face communications." What's the Matter with the Internet? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), p. 184.

(4.) Nancy Fraser presents the concept of "public arenas of citizen discourse and association" in explaining Jurgen Habermas's theoretical definition of the public sphere in her essay. "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A contribution to the critique of Actually Existing Democracy" in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbings (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1993).
(5.) Allan Sekula. "The Body and the Archive" in The contest of Meaning. ed. Richard Bolton (cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).
(6.) Email interview with Brooke Singer, December 2001.
(7.) Much of this description is based on the use and structure of Oracle 81 as presented by Shamkant B. Navathe, Ramez A. Elmasri In Fundamentals of Database Systems and Oracle 81 (Boston, MA: Addison Wesley Longman, 1999).
(8.) "Music Software Users Installed Tracking Program Unknowingly" in The New York Times, January 5, 2002.
(9.) The critical Art Ensemble, The electronic Disturbance (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1994).
(10.) Brooke Singer's project can be found at www.bsing.net.
(11.) Allan Sekula writes, "...this archive of images of the body lies in the fact that by the mid-nineteenth century a single hermeneutic paradigm had gained widespread prestige. This paradigm had two tightly entwined branches, physiognomy and phrenology. Both shared the belief that the surface of the body, and especially the face and head, bore the outward signs of inner character." Allan Sekula. "The Body and the Archive" in The contest of Meaning. p. 347. Where you may have once been displaced by your image, you may now be displaced by your data.
(12.) Media Technology and Society, page 333.
(13.) With radio Bertolt Brecht"s suggestion for its use for dialogue was ignored: "radio Is one-sided when It should be two-. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change the apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes." Bertolt Brecht "'The Radio as an Apparatus of communication" in Radiotext(e), Semiotext(e) S16 (Vol. VI, No. 1, 1993) p. 15. When the world of television heralded the first consumer video equipment, introduced by Sony in the 1960s, media artists and activists immediately sprung upon it. Portable video presented immediacy rare in network television. In the pages of Radical Software and in the alternative movement's 1971 manifesto, "Guerrilla Television." written by Michael Shamberg and Raindance, they outlined their plan to decentralize television so that the medium could be made by as well as for the people. Adopting a sh arply critical relationship to broadcast television, they decided to use video to create an alternative to the aesthetically bankrupt and commercially corrupt broadcast medium. Deirdre Boyle, "A Brief History of American Documentary video" in Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art, ed. Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer (Millerton, NY: Aperture/Bay Area video coalition, 1990), p. 55. Due to the expense of video production and broadcast, such idealization of cable and video has been marginalized to public-access television stations (that now run on badly outdated equipment due to the rise of the corporate cable enterprise). The distribution of independent video productions has also been marginalized to small video banks that must overprice their collections, or independent video rental stores that struggle to survive against the Blockbuster monopoly.

(14.) Email interview with Brooke singer, December 2001.
(15.) The project "iSEE" can be found at www.appliedautonomycom.
(16.) ZKM writes in a statement for the exhibition, "In its exploration of the historicity of surveillant practices in their relationship to changing logics of representation, CTRL ISPACE) will otter both a state of the am survey of the full range of panopticism--in architecture, digital culture, video, painting, photography, conceptual art, cinema, installation work, television, robotics and satellite imaging-and a largely unknown history of the various attempts to critically and creatively appropriate, refunction, expose and undermine these logics." ZKM Web site, http://ctrlspace.zkm.de, January 2002.
(17.) From the IAA Web site, www.appliedautonomy.com, currently featuring the project "iSEE."
(18.) Current surveillance cameras melded with face-recognition systems do, however, not appear to pose much of a threat: "Operator logs obtained by the ACLU show that the system not only has not produced a single arrest, but it also has not resulted in the correct identification of a single person from the department's photo database on the sidewalks of Tampa...Tampa police detective 'fessed up that the system was such a waste of time that cops stopped using it."' Reported by Declan McCullagh. "Face Recognition Needs a Lift" on the Web site www.wired.com, January 5, 2002.
(19.) "Facial recognition has been in development for decades, but recent advances in computer power and software have made the systems less expensive and more accurate-though just how accurate remains a subject of debate. Most systems work by taking pictures of faces, comparing them to a template and making dozens of measurements of each one, including factors like the distance between the eyes...The mathematical description of those features is stored in a database, to be compared with other swings of numbers that have been derived from faces..." Reported by John Schwartz in "New Side to Face-Recognition Technology: Identifying Victims" In The New York Times, January 15, 2002.
(20.) Phone interview with one operative of the Institute for Applied Autonomy, January 2001.
(21.) Declan McCullagh, "Judge OKs FBI Keyboard Sniffing" in The New York Times, January 4, 2002.
(22.) Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981).
(23.) Originally published In 1974 in The New Left Review, the essay is included in Electronic culture, ed. Timothy Druckery (Millerton, NY: Aperture, 1996).
* RICARDO MIRANDA ZUNIGA is an interdisciplinary visual artist whose work encompasses writing, sculpture, video and audio, the Internet and public display. The principle behind his work is communication as a creative process for dialogical exchange. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and teaches interactive and information arts at The College of New Jersey.