Page 147 - Flaunt 171 - Summer of Our Discontent - PS

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Eye in the Sky
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(Along with Liars, Fashion, and Ice Pick Lobotomies)
A CONTEMPORARY HOW-TO FOR A HOT AUGUST
NIGHT OUT IN THE INIMITABLE 2020
Introduction written by Camilla Agdal
Yes, we know. A “night out” in 2020—rather than a romp, stomp, paint the town red / run your phone dead / wind up in a random bed, a credit card left behind the bar, Uber in not four but five cars, with a boozy brunch recap— is more likely to see a mere 38 step expenditure on your Health app over the course of several hours, a live-streamed experience that glitches and hitches throughout, piped
in from somewhere seemingly more progressed in the curtailing of the virus than this, the “greatest” nation, and an increasingly pathetic (and is it widening?) ass imprint on the couch. We know.
But let’s back up. Because we’re not here to shed a tear on what we can’t do with our free time. Enough on that’s been said. What we’re here to do is to try and better under- stand what a night out in 2020—were we not behaving in accordance with virus-related impositions by local govern- ment—might look like if we were to sharpen our sensibil- ities to the influences on our daily being, on planet Earth, but also in this fine ship of fools we call the USA.
So let’s say we’re forced to couch it for the umpteenth Saturday in a row, but we say no. We’re gonna leave the mobile phones behind, because we’ve heard creepy stories of people being tracked in this time. Scott free!
Wait, what’s that you say? We’re not exactly free and untethered out there in the world, even sans cell phone? Afraid not. In fact, many of us are hip to our being watched, tracked, logged, analyzed, but do we understand the extent? And if not the extent, do we understand how this is shaping us and sculpting our behaviors?
The virus will have compounded all the more reasons for governments to monitor our mobility, our participation in social action movements or protest, our curiosity as demonstrated in Google search bars. The virus will have
questioned fashion and personal appearance. The virus will have questioned invasive ideologies and technologies. The virus will have changed things.
But what’s often important concerning change is to understand the paths that lead us here, or didn’t. Why? Because of the path forward. And because government has been watching and monitoring its people forev-
er. This isn’t new. Technological innovations are. And with the speed of change, and the reliance on tech in a world that’s far exceeded its capabilities, along with the astounding amounts of disinformation—by intention and accident alike—knowing where we stand, and how this path forward might be better tipped to our favor by a fervent commitment to individualism, is not just a fanciful value of this very publication, but a seemingly imperative tool for survival.
And so: we present four historical accounts of watch- ing the watcher watch the watched, mingled with adorn- ments, Tricky Dicky, and brain scrambling. On the way, we’ll enjoy artworks from some recent literature that ex- plores, albeit it oft-abstract, the themes afoot, along with bespoke artwork created for this issue by Adam Harvey, a researcher and artist based in Berlin focused on comput- er vision, privacy, and surveillance. Harvey is the bee’s knees as it relates to all this. His projects on surveillance include CV Dazzle (camouflage from face recognition), the Anti-Drone Burqa (camouflage from thermal camer- as), SkyLift (a geolocation spoofing device), and MegaPix- els (interrogating face recognition information supply chains). Currently he is a research fellow at the Künstlich Intelligenz und Medienphilosophie program at Karlsruhe Hf, and a digital fellow at the Weizenbaum Institut in Berlin. Boom!
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