veillance
Ronan Devlin
a data art collaboration with:
vian bakir, ant dickinson, carwyn edwards, michael flückiger, gillian jein & jamie woodruff
Our technologies watch us. Digital devices
track our everyday actions, communications and purchases in both real and
virtual realms. This information mapping is employed by governments to monitor
activity, and corporations to target and manipulate the public via ‘smart’
advertising techniques.
Working in opposition to this invisible
information capture, Veillance is a web application artwork which renders these
territories of data surveillance as a real-time typographic map of individual
and collective audience experience. Referencing ‘cut up’ writing techniques and
Concrete (or shape) Poetry, the work’s data-scraping and visualisation system
continually transforms audience information, which is transparently gathered
with clear consent, into real-time poetic narratives. The result is an
ever-expanding rhizomatic structure woven from interconnected audience
experience.
This information environment may be
experienced and navigated through from various perspectives. From a microscopic
position the audience member follows a moving pathway of real-time self
generated typographic assemblages, with accompanied text-to-speech sound. From
a macroscopic vantage point the traveler perceives the ‘datasphere’ as a whole
and may view and engage with text clusters generated by other participants in
the expansive, chattering typographic constellation.
With audience information as its medium,
the artwork aims to invite experimentation with, and questions ownership of,
the data we generate. The project seeks to re-assert our roles as (creative)
producers of information as opposed to subservient consumers or targets,
recognizing the virtual realm as a living environment we co-habit.
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