The Art of Security: Artists in the Surveillance Space

Length: approximately 29:57

Host: Avery Moore Kloss

Guests: Torin Monahan, Dries Depoorter, Heather Dewey-Hagborg

AVERY: Welcome back to CRSP Talk. The podcast from the Center for Research on Security Practices, known as CRSP at Wilfrid Laurier University. I'm your host Avery Moore Kloss. On every episode of this podcast, we dive deep into the research our members and their colleagues are doing, and we spark discussion on how and why we perform research. Today something new, and because it's new we thought we might give you a quick view into how we make episodes of CRSP talk. Each episode is centred around the work and interests of one of our CRSP members or colleagues. So, we meet, we discuss, and we pick a style to tell that research story in and today I'm excited to introduce you to our researcher turned executive producer for this episode Torin Monahan.

Torin: My name is Torin Monahan, and I do research on surveillance and security and technological systems in society.

AVERY: Torin is interested in the growing critical awareness of surveillance systems and security practices. From Snowden’s 2013 leaks about the NSA’s massive telecommunication surveillance apparatus to recent knowledge that police regularly use drown systems to monitor Black Lives Matter protestors and social media sites like Facebook tracking, and algorithmically manipulating users, perhaps unwittingly pushing them towards extreme political positions. What we know so far about how we are surveilled and how often is just the tip of the iceberg.

Now, a vibrant artistic movement is emerging to interrogate and intervene in these kinds of security and surveillance operations. Critical surveillance art can be visually appealing, intensely participatory and sometimes deeply troubling. So far on this podcast, we’ve heard from other researchers or academics on body-worn cameras, international research ethics, and aesthetic approaches to security research, but Torin wanted to do something a little bit different for his episode of CRSP Talk, and so today we are talking to artists, two artists in fact. Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Dries Depoorter. We’ve prepared for you two soundscapes, think of it like audio storytelling without a narrator, with Heather and Dries discussing their work, their process, and their approaches to critical surveillance art. But first, Torin Monahan hand-picked both of these artists for this episode, and I thought there was no better person to lead us to those soundscapes than Torin himself.

Today on the podcast we are joined by Torin Monahan. He’s a professor of communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and he joins us today from Chapel Hill. Welcome Torin thanks so much for being here.

Torin: Thank you it’s terrific to be here.

AVERY: well, you know what we're going to hear from two wonderful artists in this space coming up, but I thought it was really important to have you here first because this episode is really your brainchild and so I just wondered, give me a sense of why this look at critical surveillance art is important to you right now.

Torin: What artists are doing with their work on surveillance that’s especially compelling is that they’re able to find ways to make visible what is this largely invisible. Ubiquitous surveillance that permeates our lives, so we have all kinds of surveillance systems and information technology and communication technologies that we use on a daily basis but we’re not often oriented to see those as surveillant. So, what art can do is illustrate some of the ways that these systems can be surveillant or they are surveillant and to bring it into focus for us so that we can engage in some critical contemplation about the surveillance in society.

AVERY: you know what struck me talking to Heather and Dries, was this idea that they both really wanted to be sure that the audience understands that they don’t take a particular stance they're not asking you know, their viewer, the viewer of the art, or in the case of Dries, the participant in the art, to come to any specific conclusion that they want them to come to and so I just wondered you know, coming from a critical space and even an academic space where you know, many times researchers are doing all this work and also making recommendations, can you just compare and contrast that for me, that kind of research world on security versus the art world and there different outcomes.

Torin: Of course, that’s a very important insight into some of the differences, where academic scholars’ researchers might be more interested in diagnosing what the problems are with surveillance and security and proposing solutions or policy recommendations or interventions. What artists are able to do that compliments that is to instead generate situations. They generate these relationships between the audiences and themselves and the artworks so that audiences then are infolded into the scenes that are being created by the artist and the situations catalyze experiences for them or what Heather talks about is the feelings, the visceral responses, and that discomfort is productive, that it lingers with people long after they witness an artwork or are exposed to it and it’s that discomfort that can be a catalyst for change for thinking about our relationship to technologies and to others differently.

AVERY: Torin, I love these two artists you picked to reach out to for this soundscape and we’re so glad that they were game to give us just a little view into their world but I wonder from your perspective, why Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Dries Depoorter? Why were those two artists that you really felt you needed to include in this story?

Torin: With Heathers work it’s especially good at creating discomfort in viewers, it does have what she calls this “creep factor” where she finds elements of DNA out in the wild and is able to recreate the faces or what might be the faces of the people behind those DNA. So, it is very disturbing for people, many people, to witness that and to then think what kinds of traces are they leaving in the world, how is their DNA circulating, and what might be the effects of that, who might find it, what might they do with it? So that’s what Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s piece that she talks about Stranger Visions is particularly good at doing, and I was very happy we are able to feature some of that work. With Dries Depoorters work, he generates these installations, so you’ll hear that he talks about his jaywalking piece where he generates an installation that is able to thrust the viewer into an immediate relationship of complicity with the people that, that viewer is observing. So, the jaywalking piece allows one to see others in removed cities around the world and to make a determination about whether to intervene in their lives to report a jaywalking instance, for example. So, what that does though is it, it thrusts people into discomfort where they don’t know if what they’re going to do is going to actually impact upon someone else, and that is I think emblematic of the kinds of surveillance systems we’re all a part of that we’re enmeshed in them, we’re apart of them, we’re complicit with them, and yet we don’t often see that agency or that complicity, and that’s why his work I think is especially provocative.

AVERY: Yeah it's all really interesting and I really hope that after our audience hears these artists talk about their work, that they will look them up and see what that looks like and engage with it and watch their videos. My last question for you Torin is, why now, why is this episode and this discussion about critical surveillance art, why is that an important one to be having at this moment?

Torin: At this moment, many people and artists included are beginning to realize some of the problematic, unequal, differential effects of surveillance, the way surveillance might be used by police in racial profiling, or as an aid for some kind of racial violence, the way that surveillance might be used to monitor refugees or immigrants who are trying to cross borders. The way surveillance is not just generalizable and universal but, instead creates divisions and creates different ways of treating populations based upon assessments of their risk or their value. So, artists along with others are tapping into that, are bothered by it and also want to foster more critical reflection about those decisions that are being embedded into algorithmic code, embedded into technologies that often times resist any kind of questioning whatsoever. So, that’s I think why now. Artists have been doing, working on similar projects for some time but there has been what I think of an explosion of interest in critical surveillance art in the last 5 or 10 years.

AVERY: Torin I think that perfectly sets us up for these two soundscapes with our artists that you’ve chosen for us today so we’re going to kick it off with Heather Dewey-Hagborg talking about her project Stranger Visions, and then right after we’ll hear from Dries Depoorter about his interactive exhibition on jaywalking.

Heather Dewey-Hagborg: My name is Heather Dewey-Hagborg, I’m an artist and a biohacker, and I use art to bring public attention to emerging issues in biotechnology. Biohacker for me means that I interact with biology in a way that is kind of DIY, do it yourself, so it means that I’m not necessarily working in official labs, but often I’m also working in spaces that are kind of non-traditional. I got into biohacking and in general making kind of critical artwork around biotechnology coming from a background of already working for quite some years in arts that was engaged with technology, art that was engaged in thinking about electronic surveillance. So, I was concerned about for example, cameras on the streets and things like warrantless wiretapping, that were issues during the Bush years in the United States with the passing of the Patriot Act, and I was engaging with those things and thinking in particular about the role of algorithms in those systems, automation of surveillance through artificial intelligence and in the context of thinking about all those things, I had this kind of revelatory moment one day where I was sitting in therapy and I was staring at this print across from me on the wall and suddenly I noticed that the glass covering the print was cracked and there was this hair stuck in the crack and I just sat there for the hour staring at this hair and imagining the person who might have left it and thinking well what could I learn about them from that hair, could I extract DNA from it, could I analyze it, could I figure out what they looked like, could I figure out what they acted like, these kinds of things, and then I left and I started seeing these kinds of samples everywhere I went. I saw cigarette buds just being thrown on the ground, some people brushing their hair in public bathrooms, clipping their fingernails on the subway, and I started thinking well this is all DNA information that we’re kind of just throwing out there in public, how easy would it be to read that and find things out about these people.

When you walk into an exhibition and exchange your visions, what you’ll see is on the wall, you’ll see probably seven different faces, so these are three-dimensional full-colour 3D prints, that are very lifelike, they’re the same size as a human face and they’re hung on the wall just above the human size and you can walk up and you can get close to them and you can look up and see different faces and they’re accompanied by a sample box, and in the sample box you’d find the original sample like the cigarette bud or the hair, you’d find a photograph of where I collected it, you’d find an analysis of what I looked at in terms of the genetic data and so this kind of creates the installation feeling that you can walk between these different strangers and look at them and think, you know that could be me that could be my family.

The process behind Stranger Visions involves a lot of different pieces, I’ll try to map them out for you. So, first is the physical layer, so that involved me walking around the city of New York picking things up like cigarette buds and hair, you know obviously wearing gloves, and then bringing those into the lab and walking through, spending some hours walking through different protocols extracting the DNA, checking to see if it was effective, then I would amplify sections of DNA that were associated with different traits, using a technique called Polymerase Chained Reaction, take the results of that, send it for sequencing and some days later get back the results of that sequencing. Most of the samples weren’t good, so you know it’s a tiny fraction really of all the things I collected that came out with good results.

So, the second part is the kind of Machine Learning Model and for this part, I was drawing on two things, on the one hand, I was drawing on a kind of database that I created from sites like Twenty-Three and Me, so I kind of combed through their research and extracted that and put it in this kind of database along with results from SNPedia, which is like the Wikipedia for single nucleotide polymorphisms so these are genetic variations that are associated with some kind of phenotype across the populations. And I put these together with a 3D morphable model that was an open source model from Basel, the University of Basel called Morph Face, and this is a 3D model that could be morphed along different parameters so it was generated through 3D scans of a bunch of different people’s faces, and I took that model and then I kind of pushed it a bit further. So originally it could be parameterized in terms of things like gender and weight and age and I kind of went into that model and I retrained it, I threw more images from facial recognition datasets at the model to expand it, and then I kind of dug in and found different ways that I could parameterize it to analyze things like skin colour, and like eye colour, freckles, nose size, things like this, and so the process then involves kind of walking through this so, take the data, feed that into a program that I wrote in Python that would pull out the profile from the data then that would, in turn, run a program in mad lab that would control the morphable model and that will output the 3D model of the face and this is kind of one possible version of this person based on their DNA.

From there I would generate probably 5 to 7 different possible versions of the person and choose one that appealed to me artistically, aesthetically that made me feel something or maybe that reminded me of someone. I take that 3D model and then I bring it into the blender of open-source 3D modelling software, thicken it fix any kind of inconsistencies in mesh and eventually output that for 3D printing, which I did first with shape waves and then also with NYUs advanced imaging and printing center in New York.

There are two main categories of feedback that I received about stranger visions. One is the kind of enthusiastic response which is, I got a lot of emails, for example of people saying, “Can I send you DNA?” “Do you need samples to experiment on?” So there’s kind of people in the camp of thinking that it's cool, and then there’s people in the camp of thinking it's creepy and an invasion of their privacy and you know the ones that send the hate mail. And that’s totally fine I think you know, there’s a kind of spectrum of responses in between of course. But that is what the work’s meant to do, it’s meant to be provocative, it’s meant to start things up, it’s meant to show these vulnerabilities, and it is transgressing boundaries of privacy in doing that and so, from my perspective it's fine, it’s part of the work to receive these kinds of criticisms, and I hope that the people that send them, reflect on that and also can administer these kinds of critiques when they see this technology coming, for example from the police.

Art provides a unique kind of jumping-off plan for examining issues around surveillance. It gives us a freedom to experiment, but it also gives us a public platform, and so we’re open as artists. We can basically do what we want and call it art, that’s been happening for a very long time so there’s a lot of ways that we can push formally with what art consists of and have it incorporate ideas and scientific experiments, technological experiments, and on the other hand we have this reach to a public audience and so it becomes a way of letting people feel something so comparing with for example, publishing a paper about some kind of hypothetical risks or even publishing a paper of the actual experiments in testing different kinds of risks, art can draw the viewer in to having this kind of visceral confrontation with the risk and certainly that’s what stranger visions does, it invites the viewer to come in, see a face, relate to it, think that it could be them, think about their own DNA and their own vulnerabilities in that sense, and so I think art provides this kind of unique platform of providing this visceral response to these more technological or maybe seemingly esoteric issues.

Dries Depoorter: My name is Dries Depoorter I’m an artist working in Belgium, in Ghent. My job is, I’m an artist and the teams that I’m working around are with surveillance, social media, and privacy. And I’m exempt in all kinds of forms of can be in insulation can be, can be an act, can be an interactive insulation, online game, I like to change up stuff, so I like to make them in different forms. I’m dressing my work in different kind of problems, I don’t try to fix them, I think I try to show what is possible and the dangers about privacy in general.

So one of my projects is jaywalking. Before jaywalking I had many projects with unprotected surveillance cameras and one day was looking to a camera and I saw a person walking through a red light and then was like okay actually its pretty easy to detect this with this software. I did a quick Google, okay is there software to detect if people are jaywalking? It didn’t exist and I made software by myself with the help of this camera, and this is a bit of the starting point of jaywalking, and jaywalking frames. It’s an interactive installation where you can report jaywalkers so the installation exists out of three emergency buttons and three displays and on the displays you see live cameras, you see live images from crossroads in three different countries. So each display shows an intersection, realtime and I didn’t place the cameras there I just got access to the camera. Most of the times they don’t have a password on it, sometimes they have a standard password that I just can find in the manual of the camera and those can be the type of cameras can be like a traffic camera or can be also be like a private camera that is just pointed to a crossroad. Jaywalking means when you are crossing a red light by foot and most countries that’s illegal you can get a fine for this. With this project, I made software to detect if someone is jaywalking. If someone is crossing a red light, I use OCV software. Most of my work is written in Python, that’s a programming language if it detects the colour of the light it checks if someone is crossing the roads. If the software finds a jaywalker, the visitor of the installation gets a question, would you like to report the jaywalker? The visitor then has the choice to report them by pressing the big emergency button. If the visitor presses and reports them, they automatically send an email with the screenshot of the jaywalker, that email of this only exists for 10 minutes. The police will probably not do anything because the resolution is pretty low, there’s a big chance that the email ends up in their spam folder. Two years later I made jaywalking frames, that’s actually like a kind of following-up project, yah it’s actually a wall of more than a thousand photo frames of different people that are jaywalking from all over the world. I used my software and again open surveillance cameras, and people can buy those jaywalking frames, they can buy each unique jaywalker, and the price you pay for each jaywalker is the same as the fine in that country. So, you have cheap jaywalking frames, you have really expensive ones and I think it’s funny that this time the money doesn’t go to the police, but it goes to me, as an artist. I think if people watch jaywalking in exhibition, most of the time I have to do legal checks with the organization, so they go through my code and check the concepts and if it's working, and I think most of the people don’t know, I think it’s all set up, they think the cameras I’m showing are not real-time, and what I also experience is that a lot of visitors of this work are, yah, amazed and surprised that you can find those cameras on the internet and that they’re open. So, I think those two things that I discovered, when people watch this work.

I think art is a great way of giving critique, but I try with my work, I try to let it accessible and at the same time playful for a lot of people, I think that’s something where I keep an eye on if I come up with ideas and concepts and think my work is critical but I try to not to explain myself too much, I don’t talk too much about privacy and surveillance. I try to exchange this message that I have with my work, and not with words.

AVERY: We hope you enjoyed this small peak into the world of critical surveillance art. We are so grateful to Heather Dewey-Hagborg and to Dries Depoorter for sharing their story of their art with us. Heather Dewey-Hagborg is an artist and biohacker she uses art to bring public attention to emerging issues in biotechnology. Heather has a PhD in electronic arts from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, she's a visiting assistant professor of interactive media at NYU Abu Dhabi. To see images of her exhibit stranger visions please visit her website dewey-hagborg.com that’s d-e-w-e-y-h-a-g-b-o-r-g.com. If you're interested in Stranger Visions, a special note to read more about her four-part video installation titled “t3511 a post-genomic love story”. Dries Depoorter is a Belgian artist who addresses themes of privacy, artificial intelligence, surveillance, and social media, through the creation of interactive installations, apps and games. To view more of Dries’ portfolio of work visit Dries Depoorter dot be. That’s d-r-i-e-s d-e-p-o-o-r-t-e-r dot b-e. His recent work is titled “The Lookout” and allows participants to control unprotected CCTV cameras with a PlayStation controller.

And finally, a thank you to Torin Monahan, for bringing this episode together and helping to give it life and audio. Torin is a professor of communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, his research focuses on institutional and cultural transformations with new technologies with a particular emphasis on surveillance and security programs. Torin is currently working on a project on critical surveillance art.

You can always find more information about our guests and their work or research in the show notes of this episode. A special thank you to our supervisor and fearless leader Dr. Carrie Sanders. We are so glad you joined us and we can’t wait to uncover more of our research on our next episode. This is CRSP Talk and I'm Avery Moore Kloss.