Post-privacy

The poster caught my eye earlier last week. The visual reminded me immediately of the preceding months during which I took a close interest in the research Jessi was doing for her thesis sub-titled From the Panopticon to Surveillance Art. Taking a closer look I saw that the symposium would take place close by in my neighbourhood, at the Akademie der bildendnde Künste, the Academy of Fine Arts. This institution was founded in 1808 and is housed in a beautiful complex built in Venetian Renaissance style, competed in 1887.

The third session of the all-day conference was titled Netz und Kunst, Web and Art, and there were presentations by creative activists whose exploits reminded me of the quote from Frank Rieger of the Chaos Computer Club cited by Jessi in her paper:

“We need to develop a ‘let’s have fun confusing their system’ culture that plays with the inherent imperfections, loopholes, systematic problems, and interpretation errors that are inevitable with large scale surveillance. Artists are the right company for this kind of approach. We need a subculture of ‘in your face, peeping tom’… exposing surveillance in the most humiliating and degrading manner, giving people something to laugh about must be the goal.”

The couple of hours we spent at the event brought no eureka moments, as such. I did, however, pick up a flyer issued by IRISS, the acronym standing for Increasing Resilience in Surveillance Societies. One hardly expects mischief from the instigators of an EU research project, the allusion to the eye’s central component, the iris! No this is a very serious piece of investigation, with the universities of Edinburgh and Barcelona among the academic institutions participating. The local partner is the University of the Federal German Armed Forces (Universität der Bundeswehr), which in the present climate gives pause for thought. The research goal is an evaluation of the concept of privacy in a networked world.

And thus my thoughts are once again focused on ‘privacy’, ‘secrecy’, ‘publicness’ and ‘art’. I find myself still hooked on the issues my daughter dealt with in her paper. And I am surely not alone, with the astonishing Edward Snowden story still developing almost hour by hour.

And yet more and more I am wondering what all the fuss is about. As one of the inalienable human rights surely universal individual privacy is a rather bizarre addition to the list? And it is an addendum we owe largely to Anglo-American thinkers, and a concept which sets English and North American cultires apart even from Western European cultures such as French or Italian. Many languages do not have a specific word for ‘privacy’. Such languages either use a complex description to translate the term (such as Russian combining the meaning of ‘solitude’, ‘secrecy’ and ‘private life’) or simply borrow from English. To the extent that the term was in use prior to the Middle Ages, the connotations were of ‘seclusion’, ‘mystery’ and even ‘conspiracy’.

Is it entirely whimsical to return to the Genesis story and those hastily grabbed fig-leaves of privacy? I think not. I also cannot imagine the notion of privacy as having any reality in the societies of earlier centuries. In tightly knit communities little could remain hidden from the elders of the tribe or the leader of the clan, and even their own secrets could be revealed by conspirators or even just by gossips. Can it be said that the Church of Rome placed value on privacy? Certainly not for the unschooled faithful, whose lives were transparent in the most intimate detail thanks to the discipline of the confessional and the peer pressure of the community. Surely for the longest time there was much which was darkly ‘secret’ but little that was lauded as ‘private’? Modesty and circumspection might be seen as virtues but was it not ‘in private’ that many dreadful sins could 

be committed?

 

I think three factors contributed to placing a new value on the idea of privacy. The first was the democratization of knowledge after Johannes Gutenberg in the 15th century, the second was the Protestant Reformation which followed and the third was the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries. If the Founding Fathers of America promoted a right to privacy (if not in word then at least in spirit) they must have found themselves treading very carefully. Their intention was not to facilitate sin hidden from sight, after all! I suspect that there was already talk of the virtuous having no need of concealment. The uncurtained windows characteristic of Holland to this very day, recalling a Calvinist suspicion of what draperies might mask, proclaim the readiness of the inhabitants to be subject to the gaze of equally upright fellow citizens.

In this perspective we can see ‘privacy’ as a concept which we have fetishized in very ambiguous ways for no longer than a couple of centuries which are now irrevocably over. We are again as comprehensively ‘known’ both to the organs of the state and to each other as in earlier times. We must no longer line up in front of the confessional, it comes to us as we walk along the street, surf the web, shop online, register our details or update our status on social networks and our shriver exacts digital penances.

 

This was a week which started (as noted here) with an exploding egg. Two years ago the interactive art project caught my fancy, allowng me to participate in ways which were more facetious than profound. Lissie Pötter, the artist behind the Broken/Unbroken venture, happened to pass through Munich mid-week and it was a pleasure to have drinks with her and her husband and to discuss future performance art plans.

‘Performance art’ is quintessentially post-private, an interdisciplinary performance presented to an audience. It may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation. The performance can be live or via media. The performer can be present or absent. It can be any situation that involves four basic elements… time, space, the performer's body, or presence in a medium, and a relationship between performer and audience. Performance art can happen anywhere, in any venue or setting and for any length of time. The actions of an individual or a group at a particular place and in a particular time constitute the work.

Post-privacy we are all performance artists, each time we post a ‘selfie’ online or upload a clip to YouTube, we benefit from what the writer Hille Koskela called  ‘empowering exhibitionism’, making reference to the webcams used at home, to complicit candidate participation in voyeuristic television shows and to the use of the camera function of mobile phones.

The future may not be without modesty and circumspection but I feel that privacy will be the exception and not the norm. And I am convinced that we shall learn to live with that quite well.