{"id":1716,"date":"2015-02-27T17:08:43","date_gmt":"2015-02-27T17:08:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/?p=1716"},"modified":"2015-04-12T20:19:42","modified_gmt":"2015-04-12T20:19:42","slug":"witness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/science-technology\/witness\/","title":{"rendered":"How Not to Disappear in America: Notes on a Panel on Human Rights and Video Technology"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Aerial<\/a>

Aerial photograph of the National Security Agency by Trevor Paglen. CCC 1.0<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

One could be excused for thinking that the panel discussion<\/a> convened this Thursday in San Francisco around the future of human rights and media technology would focus on tools for evading surveillance, increasing encryption, and generally promoting resistance to an NSA logic of \u201ccapture all<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

In fact, the Future of War conference held just a day before in Washington D.C. concluded that the biggest threat to human rights in future wars will be surveillance<\/a>, namely, \u201cthe mass collection of increasingly varied kinds of data by nations with the authority to kill and detain people after analyzing it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Instead, in a space in San Francisco\u2019s South Park, newly occupied by Neon Labs<\/a>, a panel largely addressed problems of an inadequate<\/em> visibility and the need for more<\/em> data collection in regions of conflict. Panelists including artist and Berkeley Professor Ken Goldberg<\/a>, WITNESS program director Sam Gregory<\/a>, and former White House deputy CTO Nicole Wong<\/a> drew on case studies including police brutality from\u00a0Brazil\u2019s favelas to\u00a0UC campuses, war crimes in Syria, and\u00a0demonstrations against energy conglomerates in the Western Sahara.<\/p>\n

From a staggering ca. 500,000 videos of apparent war crimes in Syria to the televised murder of Eric Garner, the evidentiary value of mobile phone technology is rapidly proliferating, as Sam Gregory demonstrated, yet it remains insufficiently mobilized by legal systems and inadequately serviced by the existing social media platforms that typically stand as these documents\u2019 ephemeral archives. The human rights issue\u00a0does not concern surveillance or data collection in itself, the panel concluded, but rather the technologies of power that determine\u00a0who\u00a0creates that data, who has access to it, and who controls the circulation of images. The urgent need to redress the immense imbalance in the relationship between the controllers of data and those whose data is being controlled was perhaps the central message that precipitated out of the diverse presentations.<\/p>\n

The visibly\u00a0engaged audience at this panel made an outsider wonder whether there isn\u2019t a serious shortcoming by tech companies to address the implications of their products for facilitating both\u00a0human rights and their potential abuses, a shortcoming which this lively panel made a small but forceful attempt to redress.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

This discussion that I saw unfold reminds me of a recent dialogue over at Urbanities<\/a> between Craig Epplin and Justin Read on contemporary forms of participatory cartography, ranging from government-sponsored sound maps of Mexico to the proprietary yet user-generated maps\u00a0of google and yelp.<\/p>\n

The question that Craig and Justin chew over\u2014 \u201cwhether the relation of producer-consumer and planner-occupant has really been altered by the advent of \u2018participatory\u2019 modes of technology\u201d\u2014posed itself at numerous junctures in this panel. The asymmetry of this relationship was exposed in Nicole Wong\u2019s discussion of police body cameras and the ways that they perpetuate the abuses that they are thought to guard against; similarly, this asymmetry was exposed in Ken Goldberg\u2019s 2004 project demonstrate<\/a>, in which a robotic (and consumer grade) webcam was installed over Berkeley\u2019s Sproul Plaza and made accessible to anyone on the internet: the degree of controversy that it raised did not extend to the use of similar\u2014yet unidentified and invisible\u2014surveillance cameras by the police on the very campus.<\/p>\n

This is a discussion that has been largely ancillary to the concerns of the major social media platforms, as evidenced by youtube\u2019s deletion, in 2007, of the entire account of Wael Abbas, an Egyptian activitst who documents police brutality. (After a major outcry, his account was subsequently restored, though initially stripped of all videos, views, and comments.) The unforeseen (if not unforeseeable) appropriation of such social media platforms for the exposures of police brutality and other human rights abuses is precisely what Sam Gregory and Witness address through the development of alternative media platforms as well as the integration of human rights channels into existing ones.<\/p>\n

While anyone who watched the #blacklivesmatter protests unfolding around the country knows that citizen journalism is alive and thriving, effectively maintained and livestreamed by decentralized activist networks, we still\u00a0are not seeing\u00a0those documents effectively leveraged for legal\u00a0action, nor are they securely\u00a0archived both for future mobilization and<\/em> against potential political retribution.<\/p>\n

It was inevitable, then, that the panel turned to case of Eric Garner and the failure of a grand jury to indict the police officer who was videotaped choking Garner to death. Despite the promise of the camera, this and other non-indictments challenge us, as David Joselit recent wrote in Artforum<\/a>, to be \u201cskeptical of the ideological promises of representation.\u201d This is a turn that the panel\u00a0largely did not consider until prompted by a question from the audience. The refusal of representation\u2013not just through the use of youtube\u2019s proprietary face blurring tool but through a more radical implosion of representation\u2014offers a politics for the marginalized that is potentially more effective than the production of images intended for easy media consumption.<\/p>\n

In his article, Joselit gives the example of William Pope L.\u2019s 2000 performance of Eating the Wall Street Journal<\/em>, in which pieces of the newspaper were ingested along with milk and ketchup to make it more \u201cpalatable,\u201d and then vomited out. Joselit elaborates,<\/p>\n

In his 2002 text Hole Theory<\/em>, closely related to the procedures of ingestion and rejection performed in Eating the Wall Street Journal<\/em>, Pope. L declares, \u201cI do not picture the hole. I am<\/em> the hole.\u201d In other words, his art does not represent but rather suggests an elusive alternate space for consuming information\u2014not the ostensibly democratic sphere of the forum, but the much more slippery, biopolitical locus, or threshold, of the hole<\/em>. Indeed, a concept like \u201cthe hole\u201d may present opportunities for those who, like Garner, cannot command presence in official forums.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Such a hole is alluring, but who gets to disappear representation\u2014and who is merely disappeared? In an age of capture-all information capitalism, commanding absence may present significantly more tactical challenges than commanding presence. The allure of \u201cthe hole\u201d is the allure of an outside to the spectacle, an outside to the tandem enterprises of telematics and predictive control, to the capture of life into data, to the extraction of value from virtually any and every thing, to the \u201csystematic exploitation of nano-labor\u201d that Justin Read defines as \u201csocial media.\u201d For most of the subjects of human rights abuses around the planet, Joselit’s and Pope L.’s\u00a0hole might come across\u00a0as a sentimentalized ideal and a largely unviable alternative to achieving a politically effective\u00a0form of visibility.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, an art that would seize circulation as a technology of power, as Joselit has written about in \u201cWhat to Do with Pictures\u201d<\/a>\u00a0and as Ken Goldberg’s art explores,\u00a0does promise empowerment on a scale not possible by (literally or figuratively) consuming images.<\/p>\n

The comprehensive programs and forums developed by Witness are commanding presence for the marginalized and dispossessed and thus redressing local wrongs and abuses around the world, but a large-scale advancement of their mission must also work in concert with the\u00a0dismantling of the structural inequality that pervades most mass media, even in Web 2.0 and so-called participatory media. And alongside the panel\u2019s unanimous call for more<\/em> professionally documented evidence to counter human rights abuses, we should perhaps recall that one of the most successful mobilizations of visual attention toward the criminally covert abuses of human rights in the U.S.\u2014the NSA photography of Trevor Paglen\u2014has achieved its visibility not despite but because his often intentionally blurry and distorted photographs are, as he writes, \u201cuseless as evidence<\/a>.\u201d Alongside discussions\u00a0of how to achieve\u00a0visibility for the victims of police raids in Rio, armed conflict\u00a0in Syria, and mass kidnappings\u00a0in Guerrero, we need to keep in play the conversations around how to disappear in America<\/a>\u2014and elsewhere.<\/p>\n

[Update, April 12. Witness has a write-up of the event on their website: http:\/\/witness.org\/witness-in-san-francisco-to-discuss-the-future-of-human-rights-and-technology\/<\/a>]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  One could be excused for thinking that the panel discussion convened this Thursday in San Francisco around the future of human rights and media technology would focus on tools for evading […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1718,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-actualities","category-science-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1716","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1716"}],"version-history":[{"count":30,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1716\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1777,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1716\/revisions\/1777"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}