Project Description:
“Our technologies watch us. This ‘datification’ of our actions is employed by governments to monitor activities, and corporations to target and manipulate through ‘smart’ advertising.
Working in opposition to such technologies’ manufacture of the individual as ‘target’ or ‘consumer’, ‘Veillance’ is a web application artwork bringing to visibility the invisible territories of data surveillance, reformulating these as a moving typographic map of individual and collective audience experience. Referencing ‘cut up’ writing techniques and concrete poetry, the system (using techniques similarly employed by social networks and search engines) continually transforms audience information, which is gathered ethically. The result is a movement-filled structure made from intersecting real-time pathways of audio-visual narrative, with rhizomic threads being woven cartographically through modes of shared experience.
This moving ‘data-scape’ may be viewed from micro- and macroscopic perspectives. From a micro position, snapshots of the structure perform as individual, organic artworks in the sense that they may be manipulated, saved and shared, to generate further layers of interconnection and becoming.”
Funder: Arts Council of Wales
Website: http://www.fact.co.uk/projects/ronan-devlin-veillance-prototype.aspx
Host institution (s): Bangor University