Through the Mesh: Media, Borders, and Firewalls

https://www.neme.org/projects/through-the-mesh

Ever since the creation of the Pony Express by the Mongolian Khanate, communications networks are a potent source of social and political power. Marshall McLuhan foretold the “Global Village,” where losses of identity can lead to violence, where everyone becomes deeply invested in everyone else’s affairs (social media, ‘Cancel Culture,’ and so on), with artists being the advance scouts for technology. Conversely, Jean Baudrillard stated in The Transparency of Evil that the signifier becomes about everything but itself—politics becoming entertainment, sports becoming politics, advertising becoming fetish, as the nature of reality dissipates in the distributed nature of the Deleuzian control networks. The spheres of informational power crash into the biopolitical (nation state), and entire nations lift out of cyberspace like great Motherships, and platforms like Meta gesture towards scales of power equal to feudal states before them. As humanity is squeezed and stratified by the COVID pandemic, displaced by climate change, and manipulated by authoritarian games of geopolitical and informatic chess, are there any moves left for humanity, or is it in an endgame?

This exhibition featured the work of artists who initially began to investigate the cultural space of the networks, biopolitical and informatic; who challenge or jam it.

The artworks look at electronic networks as scopophilic and performative, the asymmetric regimes of power they project, and the positive uses of “darkside” technologies. These areas of investigation open the media archaeologies of the panoptic network, its modalities, and the spaces of criticism, humour and progressivism. From the era of the Cold War in which the “net” was created to assure communication, Through the Mesh: Media, Borders, and Firewalls seeks to consider the conditions of the contemporary landscape and suggest progressive strategies for the future.

The elements of the exhibition involved interactive distributed actions for public discourse, varieties of positions in which the notion of networks, the way they are reconfiguring global power relations, and the people behind multifarious borders. It is hoped that the project, through the exhibition, lectures, and actions creates useful dialogues about how the informatic landscape holds promise and peril not only for physical/informatic ecologies but the entire humanity.

Exhibition footage at the NeMe Arts Centre.

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Supporting text

There are eyes everywhere. No blind spot left. What shall we dream of when everything becomes visible? We’ll dream of being blind. ^{1 Louis Wilson. "Cyberwar, God and Television: Interview with Paul Virilio." CTHEORY, 1994. web.archive.org/web/… ?id=62}

The aim of this project is twofold. On the one hand, it looks comparatively and cross-culturally at how different artists interrogate, question, quote, or criticise networks and their relationship to digital networks and surveillance. On the other, it takes these artistic actions as themselves symptomatic of the ways in which networks and surveillance interrogate contemporary society. Through the Mesh aims to demonstrate that networks and surveillance do not simply produce substantive social control and social urgency. Networks also contribute to the formation of the collective imagery about what security, insecurity, and control are ultimately about. In terms of the writing of thinkers like Deleuze and Virilio, is control. These regimes of control also relate to the landscape of moods and affects in a world of digital surveillance such as ours expresses. The degree of asymmetry between data production and manipulation, between looking and being looked at, reveals the intricate relationship between data, vision, and power.

This exhibition examines the role of networks in contemporary art. It proposes that networks are not a specific technology that provides a means for art practice to occur but are a concept that transforms practice and enables networked art. The artworks’ consideration of networks is as a method informed by concept, possible to apply to various forms and thereby situate networked art within trans/inter-disciplinary practice. They contribute to a creative space where research, emergent processes, and creation are accessible to the audience.
In addition, when contemporary thinkers and artists speak of networks, the words surveillance and colonialism are included in the same sentence. According to James Bridle, our communication networks rely on colonial infrastructures, of which the backbone wiring is directly linked with the empires. As such, most post-colonial countries still have direct connections with their colonisers. For example, countries like Argentina and Uruguay are connected to European communication networks via Spain, Brazil through Portugal, and Cyprus still has a direct connection backbone wire with the UK. ^{2 Submarine cable map. submarinecablemap.com.} In the post-digital networks, we are witnessing another kind of colonialism imposed by large digital corporations like Google, Facebook, and Amazon.

There are reasons why global, supposedly post-colonial empires hold onto bits of disputed territory like Diego Garcia and Cyprus; it is because the cloud touches down in these places, and their ambiguous status can be exploited. The cloud shapes itself into geographies of power and influence, and it reinforces them. The cloud is a power relationship, and most people are not on top of it. ^{3 James Bridle. New Dark Age: Technology, Knowledge and the End of Future. Verso 2018.}

Surveillance art—or as Andrea Mubi Brighenti from the University of Trento has called it, artveillance—fits into a creative continuum that stretches back to at least the 1930s. It began when the introduction of “miniature” cameras, such as the ones manufactured by Leica and Minox, made it relatively easy for photographers to take pictures secretly. In popular culture, one of the scenes in Modern Times (1936) shows Charlie Chaplin’s character, the tramp, going into a bathroom to get away from the factory floor, only to find a monitor from which the factory manager sees him and orders him back to work. Artveillance is the domain of the reciprocal influences and exchanges between art and surveillance.

The current wave of networks-focused surveillance art has been evident for many years, especially since 9/11 when the US and other governments increased the powers and budgets of intelligence agencies. Before then, we had already witnessed a proliferation of surveillance cameras in cities like London, where the city has become an open cinema, a panopticon, that only selected people can view. The main difference between pre and post 9/11 surveillance art is focusing on the digital networks, established as the main methods of communication. Artists respond to digital networks as they have become the locus of power, and these nets should be open to public critique to reclaim social norms. The spread of visual surveillance has turned many cities into high-security zones. From this, technical developments allow for an increasing automatisation of surveillance activities. Electronic communication by the computer user inadvertently or naively extends the local nature of their data to international availability and exploitation. Computerisation turns data into information. Shoshana Zuboff described this quantification as surveillance capitalism, where the “global reach of computer mediation repurposes the gaze as an extraction architecture.” Within social network sites such as Facebook, the practice of institutional and interpersonal surveillance is accompanied by a specific mode of data collection with the main aim to understand, politically manipulate and commodify the users. In the age of massive and ubiquitous connection, intimacy and the possibility of real political agency are mediated by so-called personal technologies. That is why Edward Snowden’s revelations fundamentally altered our relationship with the network, devices, and imagery.

In Bourdieu’s sense, the relationship between digital networks and contemporary art emerges as a social field. ^{4 Pierre Bourdieu. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge University Press, 1977} This dimension is taken into consideration by many of the participating artists to map networks and interpret them within the fields of digital networks. This artwork ranges from the dark to the outraged and the skeptical, the playful and defiant, but always a site of transformation for the viewer.

Seminar

The seminar Speaking through the Mesh further augmented the exhibition with presentations by curators Patrick Lichty and Wade Wallerstein and a lecture performance by Keynote guest speaker Geert Lovink. Lichty’s presentation, “Seeing through the Mesh: Exploring the Collision of Data and the Real’ was an exploration of the work in the show discussed through the lens of the politics of the digital and physical worlds as an expression of control through notions of discipline and regimentation. Wallerstein’s discussion, “Phenomenology & Protocol: Power & Paranoia in the Age of the Hyperreal,” expanded on protocols, or structural layers of information, and how they create entire reality ecosystems through media and networks. The seminar concluded with Lovink’s presentation “Sad by Design/We are Not Sick” expanding on his ideas relating to the social effects arising from social media outlined in his book Sad by Design. Combining a diversity of text-, image-, and music-genres, the performance reflects on the encroaching sadness provoked by social media architectures. For this lecture/performance, Lovink and Lichty push for new modalities in both music and critical theory, to shake up both the dance floor and the lecture circuit.

Contributors

Participating artists: Morehshin Allahyari, Mina Cheon, Joseph DeLappe with Malath Abbas and Tom deMajo, Vikram Divecha, Hasan Elahi, Negin Ehtesabian, Ben Grosser, Dina Karadžić, with Vedran Gligo, Michael Lorsung, Umber Majeed, Josèfa Ntjam, Nathan Shafer.

Seminar speakers: Patrick Lichty, Wade Wallerstein
Lecture/performance: Geert Lovink

Curator: Patrick Lichty
Assistant curator: Wade Wallerstein
Project Coordination: Helene Black, Yiannis Colakides

Notes

1. Louis Wilson. "Cyberwar, God and Television: Interview with Paul Virilio." CTHEORY, 1994. web.archive.org/web/… ?id=62 ⇧
2. Submarine cable map. submarinecablemap.com. ⇧
3. James Bridle. New Dark Age: Technology, Knowledge and the End of Future. Verso 2018. ⇧
4. Pierre Bourdieu. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge University Press, 1977 ⇧