de Gregorio

Description

In Retained Reports I question the politics of private-data – which surveillance capitalists gather as free raw material, fashioning them in prediction products for behavioural futures markets – and I invite us to imagine alternative socio-economic logics. I turned the surveillance capitalism's means of production against themselves by training an AI to hallucinate portraits of imaginary individuals based on an analysis of the public-domain archive of Acsinte, one of Romania’s most prolific early-20th-century artists. Many of Acsinte’s fragile glass plates were damages over the years due to heat and moisture. The delicate silver gelatine emulsion peeled off and the glass cracked or splintered. Worn down by time the portraits in the Acsinte’s archive are allegories of the impermanence of human artefacts. Their counterparts in Retained Reports, though, are, like private-data in the hands of the surveillance-industrial complex, permanent artefacts of computation and visual antiphrases. It is hard for citizens to delete their data, even when they stop sharing them. They are presented as images persistently retained on powered-off e-ink screens chosen in lieu of traditional archival paper. When asymmetries of knowledge between citizens and the capitalists translate into asymmetries of power, what will be the consequences for democracy? When we lose our private realm how do we assert our moral autonomy? When all our future behaviours are predicted what does it mean to be human?

Process

When asymmetries of knowledge between citizens and the surveillance capitalists translate into asymmetries of power, what will be the consequences for democracy? When we lose our private realm, how do we assert our moral autonomy? When predictions of future behaviours are enabled by knowledge and end up with control, what control do we retain over our lives if companies know more about us than we know about ourselves or than we know about them? Or, ultimately, when all our future behaviours are predicted, what does it mean to be human? 


Retained Reports is result of a collaboration between my two parallel careers as cybersecurity technologist and research artist. It is my 25+ years long experience in the industry, government, and academia as a technologist who has innovated at the intersection of cybersecurity, economics, and ethics, to inform my artist practice in both its form and contents. The chief artistic concern is to raise questions about the world and time we live in and imagine more just societies, while focusing my attention on the societal challenges related to my scientific career. In a way, my primary desire is to offer to our fellow citizens – the real cybersecurity stakeholders – alternative lens to problematise where our human communities are heading, and to invite them to engage more with our democratic institutions, so as to ensure their views are reflected in future policies.

Tools

I utilised PyTorch-GAN on AWS to train a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) over the public-domain archive of Costică Acsinte, one of Romania’s most prolific early-20th-century photographers. I programmed the e-ink screens via their driver board connected to a SBC to permanently retain the generated images. The final digital images are hallucinated by the GAN, imprinted on e-ink screens, 17.4cm x 12.75cm x 0.07cm, and encapsulated in a perspex frames.