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

(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.