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

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.