![\"86_DO03_Rosamond_Rafman_139](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/86_DO03_Rosamond_Rafman_139-Rua-Indiapora-2-scaled.jpg\")
Nacozari De Garcia-Montezuma, Sonora, Mexico<\/em>, from the series The 9 Eyes of Google Street View<\/em>, 2009-.
Photo\u2009: courtesy of the artist and galerie antoine ertaskiran, Montr\u00e9al
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As Benjamin Bratton reminds us,3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Benjamin Bratton, \u201cThe Black Stack,\u201d e-flux Journal<\/em> 53 (2014), accessed May 27, 2014, http:\/\/www.e-flux.com\/journal\/the-black-stack\/ (emphasis in original).<\/span> although the NSA scandal was significant, it pales in comparison to the massive corporate surveillance apparatus. In hindsight, the NSA might appear to be the least of the public\u2019s worries in terms of surveillance\u200a\u2014\u200athe \u201cpublic option\u201d in a sea of corporate data captures entailing not even the slightest hope of public oversight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Predictive corporate surveillance practices can be traced back several decades; in the age of big data, however, they have reached new levels of ubiquity and robustness. Karl Palm\u00e5s traces the use of predictive analytics back to the post-Second World War period, when former military staff took statistical analysis with them into the business sector. Yet in recent years, corporate sector analytics have become increasingly future-oriented. Today, a corporation\u2019s success might be tied to its ability to predict, say, what customers will want to buy tomorrow (for instance, Kellogg\u2019s Strawberry Pop Tarts\u2122 right before a hurricane), or at what exact point of losses a particular gambler will leave the casino. The casino chain Harrah\u2019s, for instance, uses loyalty cards to track spending, calculating and recalibrating each gambler\u2019s \u201cpain point\u201d in real time and sending over a \u201cluck ambassador\u201d if her losses exceed that point. The luck ambassador might offer a free perk, such as a steak dinner, just when the customer is feeling at her worst\u200a\u2014\u200amicro-managing consumer emotion through prediction.4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Karl Palm\u00e5s, \u201cPredicting What You\u2019ll Do Tomorrow: Panspectric Surveillance and the Contemporary Corporation,\u201d Surveillance and Society<\/em> 8, no. 3 (2011): 338\u200a\u2014\u200a54.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Similarly, a host of online audience-measurement companies invent and instantiate new, surveillant concepts of identity. For instance, Quantcast, one of many companies that provides audience-measurement services for member websites, helps its customers target advertisements to individual IP addresses by ascribing identities to users. Based on browsing history, one of Quantcast\u2019s algorithms might decide that a user is, for instance, male. Maleness emerges as a trait, in Quantcast\u2019s formulae, purely numerically, and purely in consumerist terms, without any reference to either the user\u2019s body or her self-conception as a gendered subject.5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - John Cheney-Lippold, \u201cA New Algorithmic Identity: Soft Biopolitics and the Modulation of Control,\u201d Theory, Culture and Society<\/em> 28, no. 6 (2011): 164\u200a\u2014\u200a81.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n The field expands. The dossiers and storage sites multiply. Unlike the classic surveillance images envisioned by George Orwell and Michel Foucault, today\u2019s surveillance is based on a fundamental permeability between state and corporation\u200a\u2014\u200aand between the private and privatized spaces of homes, laptops, platforms, and data-storage facilities. What we have is not so much a surveillance state (in the Orwellian or Foucauldian sense) as a surveillance economy<\/em>\u200a\u2014\u200awhat John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney would call surveillance capitalism6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - See John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, \u201cSurveillance Capitalism: Monopoly-Finance Capital, the Military-Industrial Complex, and the Digital Age,\u201d Monthly Review<\/em> 66, no. 3 (2014), accessed November 8, 2015, http:\/\/monthlyreview.org\/2014\/07\/01\/surveillance-capitalism\/.<\/span>\u200a\u2014\u200ain which data mining and sophisticated computation vastly concentrate information, money, and power, even as they disperse this power across enormous distances, and pass it back and forth between government and corporate bodies. The surveillance economy\u200a\u2014\u200abased, as it is, in part, on customer identification and hyper-personalization\u200a\u2014\u200aenacts a geopolitics of personalization, spatially redistributing relations between online sharing and data mining, personal information and personal online perspectives, in real time. In the process of all these shifts, of course, various species of spaces\u200a\u2014\u200abedrooms, IP addresses, sleeper dossiers, streets\u200a\u2014\u200aare differently visible, and make bodies visible differently. Given these newly spatialized differences in visibility, some bodies come to bear more of the weight of scrutiny than do others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What are the implications of a geopolitics of personalization for art practices? Several artworks in the excellent exhibition End User<\/em> at the Hayward Gallery in London (curated by Cliff Lauson, November 27, 2014\u200a\u2013\u200aFebruary 8, 2015) can be understood as experiments with this question. (For the sake of space, I will only discuss two here.) In Liz Sterry\u2019s installation Kay\u2019s Blog<\/em> (2011), an exact replica of a Canadian blogger\u2019s bedroom hovers in the middle of the project space at the gallery. Through a window and a peephole, of sorts (surrounded by photos and further information about the blogger, Kay), visitors peer into a small, self-contained, messy bedroom, replete with mint-green walls, clashing green curtains, a mattress on the floor covered with a blue duvet, laundry baskets, a bra draped over an open dresser drawer, some beer cans, and a partly emptied bottle of Jack Daniels by a small television on top of the dresser. The blog becomes a blueprint, a key through which the artist remotely reconstructed every last detail of Kay\u2019s room, a clashing, dishevelled icon of alienated, private space that acts at the edges of the blogger\u2019s online posts. The room, in this new milieu of image exchange, becomes reframed, repurposed as a kind of storage space\u200a\u2014\u200athing-storage, persona-storage, a sleeper dossier with an actual, implied sleeper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sterry\u2019s piece examines the collapse of what appear to have once been more robust distinctions between private and public space\u200a\u2014\u200aeven if, in modernity, these distinctions were already breaking down. (Of course, private, domestic spaces have, for centuries, housed commodities that have intimately tied them to international circuits of production and exchange.) Modern architecture, as Beatriz Colomina argued in 1994, had already dramatically renegotiated the distinction between private and public space, bringing publicity into the private.7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - See Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media<\/em> (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).<\/span> When modern architectural spaces are retrofitted with wifi, laptops, bloggers, smartphones and fibre optic cable, this erosion, and rearrangement, of differences between the private and the public is extended and deepened. However, in an online surveillance economy, it isn\u2019t so much that private space becomes public\u200a\u2014\u200aor, at least, this is not the only<\/em> thing that happens, even if it is on the surface, so to speak, of Sterry\u2019s voyeuristic, staring gesture. Rather, the private, becoming public, is also newly privatized<\/em>\u200a\u2014\u200aturned into data-sets that will benefit a few remote corporate and governmental players whose servers are powerful enough to capitalize on personal information.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n This shift plays out as confusion between desire and its subjects. We are often told that self-expressive, self-exposing bloggers (and this critique is levelled particularly at young women) are narcissistic, that they deploy a na\u00efve style of (classed) online being that trades on confusion between interpersonal connectivity and exhibitionism. Intervening in the geospatial politics of the blog and its concomitant desires, Sterry\u2019s piece exposes and upbraids such assumptions. Kay\u2019s Blog<\/em> changes the viewpoint on the scene\u2019s spatial diagram of desire, erodes the difference between the blogger\u2019s desire to self-expose and the blog visitor\u2019s voyeurism (now transferred onto gallery goers, who peer into the bedroom, completing the spectacle of privacy-becoming-public). In doing so, the piece appears to suggest the seeming automaticity of both of these positions within the state of surveillance capital, which both feeds on and supersedes these types of desire, rendering them moot and obsolete with respect to the cooler, quieter, structural desire of the capitalist surveillance economy to \u201cknow\u201d its subjects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If Sterry\u2019s piece examined geopolitical shifts in the most private of personal spaces\u200a\u2014\u200athe single bedroom\u200a\u2014\u200aseemingly at the other end of the spectrum is Jon Rafman\u2019s The 9 Eyes of Google Street View<\/em> (2009\u200a\u2013). Rafman explores city streets and highways as sites of vastly shifting modes of publicity and display, scouring Google Street View for odd, interesting, uncanny, or arresting images (partly through his own intense search-expeditions on Google Street View, and partly through searching other bloggers\u2019 findings).<\/p>\n\n\n\n A gorgeous roadside landscape, with sun streaming through pines. A flipped car on the side of the road, with a tow truck near at hand. A monkey perched on a stone wall, taking in a seaside view. A Japanese street parade. An escaped convict (could it really be?), clad in orange, running down a country road. A tiger walking through a strip-mall parking lot. A man running up a flooded street. A costumed gang in the road, stopping all incoming traffic. A corpse surrounded by police cars, partially covered with a body bag. A slum with two kids carrying a television. A toilet-papered house. A roadside rainbow. A van on fire. A scene of domestic violence unfurling in a doorway: a man menacingly gripping a woman\u2019s head. Policemen arresting a group of boys, lined up with their arms on the wall. Prostitutes lining the road. Various forms of vulnerability at the edges of the streets\u200a\u2014\u200aenvironmental catastrophe, prostitution, the mortal threat of the car accident or violent shooting\u200a\u2014\u200ameet with the occasional rainbow or breathtaking landscape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rafman\u2019s piece enacts the exploits of the bedroom explorer, who travels the world, partakes of its idiosyncrasies and violence through images, all the while remaining safely ensconced at his desk. As such, it examines the street as a shifting geopolitical territory, subject to new regimes of visibility and invisibility, new modes of exposure, informatics, and display.<\/p>\n\n\n\n From the 1850s to the 1870s, Paris under\u00adwent a vast upheaval in its spatial mesh of visibilities. Georges-Eug\u00e8ne Haussmann remodelled vast swaths of the city, doing away with labyrinthine, overcrowded medieval neighbourhoods in favour of the wide boulevards for which it is known today. As a result of these developments, people of different classes became more visible to each other. The fl\u00e2neur<\/em>, who passively took in all these new clashes of visibility, was born. Google Street View, Rafman\u2019s piece suggests, performs an analogous shift in the conditions of visibility\u200a\u2014\u200aexcept that this time, in addition to the bedroom fl\u00e2neur<\/em>, of sorts (in this case, Rafman), there is also a silent, informatic witness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The street becomes a stage for the bedroom explorer. However, collecting the street\u2019s images, for ostensibly \u201cpublic\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200ayet for-profit\u200a\u2014\u200ause by online users, is also a conceit for the Street View car, which trades in many forms of information as it passes through. (Its antennas also scan for local wifi networks, which help to calibrate its location services.)8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - See Jemima Kiss, \u201cGoogle Admits Collecting Wifi Data Through Street View Cars,\u201d The Guardian<\/em>, May 15, 2010, accessed November 8, 2015, http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/technology\/2010\/may\/15\/google-admits-storing-private-data<\/span> Some kinds of information collected by the Street View car might be quite indifferent, in fact, to the human eye and its ways of seeing. By repurposing the Street View gaze, retrofitting it with photographic history, Rafman explores how the latter globalizes the Haussmannized gaze and places it at a remove, repeatedly bringing class difference and differential vulnerability (the Googler\u2019s safe, indoor haven; the prostitute\u2019s utter precariousness) to the fore. Ramping up the \u201cpersonal\u201d content of Google Street View by highlighting many complex unfolding human dramas, Rafman draws attention to a politics of personalization at Street View\u2019s edges\u200a\u2014\u200athe ways in which its images can never be divested of a personal cost, applied to some bodies more than others, in becoming visible as they become data-mined.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As Ted Striphas argues, there are now two audiences for culture: people and machines.9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - Ted Striphas, \u201cAlgorithmic Culture,\u201d European Journal of Cultural Studies<\/em> 18, no. 4\u200a\u2013\u200a5) (2015): 395\u200a\u2013\u200a412.<\/span> Rafman\u2019s and Sterry\u2019s projects are geared, of course, to human eyes; yet they also reveal something of the eye\u2019s obsolescence in a surveillance economy, which rearranges visibility according to new, remote witnesses. Even with its most distanced, ubiquitous gaze, this new economy cannot also help but be a geopolitics of personalization, presenting, as it does, new models for image-vulnerability that crisscross spatial territories, and a new obsolescence for older economies of image-desire: voyeurism, exhibitionism, fl\u00e2neurism<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n![\"86_DO03_Rosamond_Rafman_Unknown](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/86_DO03_Rosamond_Rafman_Unknown-Road.jpg\")
Unknown Road, Carltonville, Johannesburg, South Africa<\/em>, from the series The 9 Eyes of Google Street View<\/em>, 2009\u200a\u2013.
Photo\u2009: courtesy of the artist and galerie antoine ertaskiran, Montr\u00e9al
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"86_DO03_Rosamond_Sterry_Kay\u2019s](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/86_DO03_Rosamond_Sterry_Kays-Blog.jpg\")
<\/strong>Kay\u2019s Blog<\/em>, 2011, installation view, End User, Hayward Gallery Project Space, Londres, 2014-2015.
Photo\u2009: Michael Brzezinski<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"86_DO03_Rosamond_Sterry_Kay\u2019s](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/86_DO03_Rosamond_Sterry_Kays-Blog-2.jpg\")
<\/strong>Kay\u2019s Blog<\/em>, 2011, installation view, End User, Hayward Gallery Project Space, Londres, 2014-2015.
Photo\u2009: Michael Brzezinski<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"86_DO03_Rosamond_Rafman_139](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/86_DO03_Rosamond_Rafman_139-Rua-Indiapora-scaled.jpg\")
139 Rua Indiapor\u00e3, Campinas, S\u00e3o Paulo, Brazil, 2012<\/em>, from the series The 9 Eyes of Google Street View<\/em>, 2009-.
Photo\u2009: courtesy of the artist and galerie antoine ertaskiran, Montr\u00e9al
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9 Rua Pereira da Costa, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, 2010,<\/em> from the series The 9 Eyes of Google Street View<\/em>, 2009\u200a\u2013.
Photo\u2009: courtesy of the artist and galerie antoine ertaskiran, Montr\u00e9al
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