invisible

Research based speculation on surveillance and future challenges of AI.
[2021 at UMPRUM, CZ]

full video: https://www.instagram.com/tv/CQi3CtiA18c/

Artificial intelligence is going to win. Or has already won? With recent internet technological developments we have discovered new aspect of surveillance through AI. It presents itself as a some kind of freedom and we are allowed to do whatever we want. While freedom seems to be increased on one hand, the control of our activities expands on the other hand. Surveillance has adapted through the era of ‘society of control’, different from a ‘Panopticon’, with a centralised view that an activity is surveilled, we have various information gathered by algorithms. Everything is tracked and encoded into data, put into patterns that are either acceptable or unacceptable.

It’s impossible to talk about AI without mentioning the term ‘surveillance capitalism’. An economic system built around the collection of personal data with the core purpose of making profit. The big corporations (GAFAM) are leading this exploitation and the influence on human kind is immeasurable.

While social data is something that we know of, we do not understand it, or know who is in charge of it. We live in an alternate data world, in the mid of illusion of freedom. AI is within us and our devices make sure to put us under constant and precise surveillance. In some way it knows where we are and where we might be going and with who, better than we do ourselves. Locating us in different spaces of daily life. 

It is possible to argue that today these data spaces have taken over from traditional architectural spaces. Instead of floors, walls, windows, streets, etc., data spaces are assembled together of complex set of spatial conditions and infinite overlapping social formations. These qualities change how we look at our environment, resulting in changed behaviour.

To get to new heights of needs and spatial organisation, humans are by illusion of surveillance opening up their inner self to AI for collection of data. That data can be used by AI to get deeper understanding of a human behaviour. This process is valid to create something that we did not know we needed or was possible to exist. At that stage AI is within us and surveillance capitalists set the rules for exploitation.

Note that so far this description [of a problem?] is limited to humans. Human data used for human ‘benefits’. Because there lies the value of profit making?. Where does our earth take place in this circumstance? It’s like our non-human environment is left out, as it is only our playground. For the first time in human history we have to acknowledge that we humans are not alone.

The human being is a wreck on the system. The world is facing an uncertain future, dealing with the greatest environmental crisis. In the age of anthropocene and computerized economic system run on complex algorithms, the mankind is becoming a victim of its own infrastructure. We humans are a minority. One has to re-validate its surroundings. Re-evaluate the relationship between the human and their environment. The human and the non-human. In order to collaborate with the invisible and equally co-exist.

How we see the world is based on how we are trained, just like the neuro network [AI] is trained to see the world. A mirror is a tool to observe. We observe our self through it most commonly. It is a valid way to help us shape our identity. But we can overlook the ‘invisible’ easily, the things that are not objectified. Our passions and humanity are translated into things. We accept that. From that point mirrors have nice qualities. Mirrors as a tool that is reflecting and refracting the surroundings, breaking up its forms. In my case it is a tool of visualisation. This object is both the physical mirror and the reflection, defining access to a space of insight. Creating a correspondence between the position of the individual and its coexisting environment. 

The objects are reflecting on different situations, inviting the individual to observe what is worth seeing, the invisible. One is perceiving the invisible connections of the whole. 

Zooming into the elements, giving them an equal value.

At last, when an object of gaze is destroyed.
Nothing will be found except the absence of the invisible.