Corpus Ex Machina: Art Surveilling Technology

Abstract

This thesis considers how the artists Trevor Paglen and Hito Steyerl, as well as the theorists Shoshana Zuboff, Kate Crawford, and James Bridle, interrogate the implications of technological surveillance on corporeal identity. What they have identified is a fundamentally altered landscape of seeing, in which human-premised imagery and visibility has been increasingly supplanted if not obviated by machine-machine learning, communication and evaluation, with deeply troubling impacts on human lives, dignity, and agency. By interrogating the patterns of surveillance and hegemonic data acquisition by big data entities, increasingly consolidated into fewer, largely unregulated hands, the artists and theorists considered here insist on a counter-surveillance of rendering its obscure realm visible, in an effort of resistance toward dismantling its processes, while envisioning a new, more humanistic future premised in human vision, understanding, and corporeal self-definition.