Laura Poitras, et al.: Astro Noise: A Survival Guide for Living Under Total Surveillance (2016)

“The filmmaker, artist, and journalist Laura Poitras has explored the themes of mass surveillance, “war on terror,” drone program, Guantánamo, and torture in her work for more than ten years. For this volume, Poitras has invited authors ranging from artists and novelists to technologists and academics to respond to the modern-day state of mass surveillance. Some contributors worked directly with Poitras and the archive of documents leaked by Snowden; others contributed fictional reinterpretations of spycraft. The result is a “how-to” guide for living in a society that collects extraordinary amounts of information on individuals. Questioning the role of surveillance and advocating for collective privacy are central tennets for Poitras, who has long engaged with and supported free-software technologists.”

Contributions by Ai Weiwei, Jacob Appelbaum, Lakhdar Boumediene, Kate Crawford, Alex Danchev, Cory Doctorow, Dave Eggers, Jill Magid, Trevor Paglen, Edward Snowden, and Hito Steyerl.

With an Introduction by Jay Sanders
Publisher Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2016
ISBN 9780300217650, 030021765X
241 pages
via i_d_rather_be_no_one

Review: Bernard E. Harcourt (Critical Inquiry).

Exhibition
Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (17 MB)

KairUs (eds.): Behind the Smart World: Saving, Deleting and Resurfacing Data (2015)

“The smart world. Created by policymakers, the advertising world, creative industries, and persuasive UX-designers that portray to us a world of shiny brand new technologies, apps that solve all our daily problems and smart cities collecting big data that will eventually solve all the problems of human kind. If we take a slightly more critical look at our smart world, though, our shiny gadgets become obsolete faster than ever, turning into toxic e-waste; our apps and smart cities have turned into an effective all-encompassing surveillance apparatus, and we have no idea who is collecting our data, who accesses it, and where it is stored. There may be issues that the smart world can solve, but at the same time, it raises new problems concerning data breaches, data privacy, data ownership and electronic waste. In this publication researchers and artists unfold some of these issues in three parts: Saving Data, Deleting Data and Resurfacing Data. Each part begins with theoretical texts that address some of the concerns, followed by strategies of artists and activists that expose problematic power structures.” (from the Introduction)

Essays by Fieke Jansen (Tactical Tech), Ivar Veermäe, Emilio Vavarella, Leo Selvaggio, Marloes de Valk, Research Team “Times of Waste”, Stefan Tiefengraber, Michael Sonntag; interviews with Audrey Samson and Michaela Lakova.

Edited by Linda Kronman and Andreas Zingerle (KairUs)
Publisher servus.at, Graz, 2015
Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 International License
ISBN 9783950420005
160 pages

Review: Alessandro Ludovico (Neural).

Exhibition
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HTML
PDF, PDF
EPUB, EPUB

Addie Wagenknecht, et al.: Deep Lab (2014)

“Deep Lab book is a compilation of reflections on digital culture, the post-Snowden Internet, and cyberfeminism. Created in five days by a dozen women, it represents the capstone to Deep Lab, a congress of cyberfeminist researchers, organized by Frank-Ratchye STUDIO Fellow Addie Wagenknecht to examine how the themes of privacy, security, surveillance, anonymity, and large-scale data aggregation are problematized in the arts, culture and society.

During the second week of December 2014, the Deep Lab participants—a group of internationally acclaimed new-media artists, information designers, data scientists, software engineers, hackers, writers, journalists and theoreticians—gathered to engage in critical assessments of contemporary digital culture. They worked collaboratively at the STUDIO in an accelerated pressure project, blending aspects of a booksprint, hackathon, dugnad, charrette, and a micro-conference. The outcomes of this effort include the visualizations, software, reflections and manifestos compiled in this book; an album of ten lecture presentations, the Deep Lab Lecture Series; and a documentary film featuring interviews with the Deep Lab participants.”

By Addie Wagenknecht, Allison Burtch, Claire L. Evans, Denise Caruso, Harlo Holmes, Ingrid Burrington, Jillian C. York, Jen Lowe, Kate Crawford, Lindsay Howard, Lorrie Faith Cranor & CUPS, Maddy Varner, Maral Pourkazemi, and Runa A. Sandvik.
Publisher Deep Lab and Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University, Dec 2014
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 License
ISBN 978-1-312-77551-0
234 pages

Project website, (2)

PDF, PDF (109 MB, updated on 2018-4-14)
Deep Lab Lectures Series (10 videos, Dec 2014)
Documentary (18 min)