Surveillance and Counter-Surveillance

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This week I looked into Surveillance and Counter-Surveillance through the lense of personalized ads. In class we were exploring how terms and conditions use significant verbal padding to reduce the likelihood of people closely reading the details of what they’re subscribing to. In looking for the terms and conditions for Google, I stumbled across the data and privacy personalization tab on the Account Management page. Here I discovered how Google uses my search history and site visits to make assumptions about several different aspects of my life, essentially designing a perception of who they believe me to be based on my digital footprint. I found it incredibly compelling that by taking bits and pieces of my information they have characterized my traits and I wanted to project that onto my design practice, finding a way to visualize this. By removing the this concept from it’s original context and applying it to a stream-of-consciousness collage, I was able to pick out pieces and parts from a magazine and arrange them to create characters. This ended up feeling like a process of uncovering something that wasn’t inherently visible but had been there all along. I would relate it to a sculptor uncovering a figure from a block of marble.
From here, I shifted focus, explored the idea of visibility and distortion by seeing how much I could alter the images before they became entirely unrecognizable. This relates back to counter-surveillance garments we looked at in class that were used to provide invisibility to detection from cameras trained to seek out the human form.

It was incredibly interesting to see the subtle differences in the assumptions made about me between the three accounts. The relationship status and education status categories had the most varriation. It was also compelling to note which categories Google felt less confident in categorizing me in. For example, Google seems to have a hard time determining what industry I am in. This makes sense as I don’t often see many targeted YouTube ads pertaining to the design field, but rather more content relating to what people within my percieved gender and age range tend to show interest in.

This is a result of the data that has been gathered from my school account.

This is a result of the data that has been gathered from my professional account (I use this account for important emails and as my main account for contacting employers and managing financial information).

This is a result of the data that has been gathered from my burner account. (This is the account I use most for streaming services and online shopping. It handles a lot of the spam emails and content that doesn’t contain pertinent information to my daily functioning.)

Taking these cutouts, I made three distinct characters. This part of the process can be compared to the synthesis of data collection being used to determine factors about who you are and what you do. Unlike the Google data, the culmination of these figures has no inherent meaning or usage as far as real world application goes. These are merely a result of a process that mimics that of Google’s data collection, with the final result being something representing an animated form, but ultimately being an abstact interpretation of those particular copies of Interview Magazine.

Using the composition above and three more studies that seem to have gotten lost in the process, I wanted to see how I could use my physical environment to further subvert the content. I printed all 4 compositions but accidentally had double-sided print enabled. At first I was frustrated, but then I decided to use that mistake to my advantage. Having only 2 sheets of paper made it much easier to use light as a tool of enhancing transparency and by it being double-sided, I wasn’t as focused on orientation or allignment because that was mostly out of my control now.

In order to stay on topic and bring surveillance and counter-surveillance back into the conversation, I looked to my window. Not only are windows a wonderful source of light for playing with transparency, but they are also an area of concern for me regarding surveillance. Whenever I am changing, I always make sure to have my curtains closed out of fear of someone being able to see me through my window. This seemed like the perfect way to reconnect back to the original prompt while still pushing forward my experimentation with design. I taped the two sheets of paper two my windows and experimented with photographing them in different ways that led to several interesting and unique results.

While the results of these studies don’t necessarily have a direct relationship to topics of surveillance and counter-surveillance, I believe that these studies yield compelling outcome from a design perspective. By deconstructing a surveillance tool and subverting it to inform the process of making, I was able push the boundaries of what I would have initially thought was possible with collage. If I were to move forward with this, I would want to broaden the scope of collected imagery and increase the scale of my experimentation. It would also be interested to see how my results would differ by printing the above outcomes on other materials like tracing paper, or chiffon. Maybe I could even see how the results change using a light box with a more consistent and brighter source of light. I would also be interested to see how the figures made from the cutouts would change when using different magazines, or even different issues of the same magazine. Would they reflect a different aesthetic, would they focus more on a different theme or topic?