Res Googleable and POV-opticon between landscape and geography By Mitra Azar I. The battlefield / The Google gaze circuit and the POV-opticon The idea of border as a fluid, flexible, amorphous space and the political role of digital technologies, within the frame of an aesthetic of crisis and of mass events, have been the framework of my practice-based research. For almost ten years I've been building an archive of site-specific works in some of the most controversial areas of the planet – usually at the very border between confining countries – or in the context of socio-political, cultural and ecological struggles – mainly through the lens of visual anthropology, visual art, and media philosophy. Within this framework, I’ve started investigating the offline/online politics of spaces and platforms as seen through the technologies of vision shaping the regimes of visibility at work in these bordering and crisis areas. From this starting point, I’ve expanded my interest towards the 'Google gaze circuit’ (Google Maps, Google Car, Google 360, Google Glass), to understand new forms of subjectivization 1, datafication2 and securization within emerging online/offline platforms/spaces. How does the 'engineering' of the gaze associated with new technologies of vision produce new subjectivities that operate within these regimes of visibility and between these online/offline platforms/spaces? In the 2017 film The Circle by James Ponsoldt3, from the homonymous book by Dave Eggers4, Eamon Bailey, CEO of the Google-like social network The Circle, presents to his employees a new technology called SeeChange – an internet thethered POV-like (GoPro-like) micro-camera recording everything all the time everywhere, invisible. 1 Cfr. 2 Stiegler, B. Technics and time I-II-III. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Print. Cukier, K. N., Mayer-Shoenberger, V. ‘The rise of Big Data’. foreignaffairs.com, pp. 28-40. May/ June 2013. Print. Web: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2013-04-03/rise-big-data. 3 Ponsoldt, J. The Circle. USA: STXfilms, Europacorp, 2017. Film. 4 Eggers, D. The Circle. New York: Vintage book, 2014. Print. “Camouflaging is essential” 5 says Eamon Bailey, whose vision is that of a world where “knowing something is good, but knowing everything is better” 6. In another scene, the young and rampant worker Mae manages to witch-hunt a fugitive prisoner in ten minutes and twenty-one seconds by accessing in real time 14 million POV mobile phones images in England (where the fugitive is most probably located) and one billion world-wide, all connected to The Circle. The so called SoulSearch technology proceeds to real time scanning the images produced by the community through a machine vision technology trained to recognize the fugitive’s facial features. It seems possible, indeed, to think about a form of POV-opticon replacing the modern Panopticon and functioning as the aesthetic format enabling one of the most aggressive surveillance assemblages ever seen in history. A form of surveillance which is not limited to tracking behaviors and analyzing data, but which actively aims at constructing the subjects by designing their (POV) data-double7, and the custom-made (POV) post-truth8 reality tailored around them. For example, in Arkangel, one of the episodes of the last Black Mirror series, a mother implants her daughter with a device which allows her to see in real time the images she is looking at from a POV perspective. Furthermore, the mother is provided with a user friendly interface that gives her the possibility of deleting from the daughter’s “sight stream” images she thinks could traumatize her kid. As a consequence of this technology, the kid grows incapable to recognize conflicts or violence and indeed incapable to behave accordingly when they appear in front of her eyes, after having been freed from the device. 5 Ibidem. 6 Ibidem. 7 Haggerty, K. D., Ericson R. D. The surveillant assemblage. British Journal of Sociology Vol. No. 51 Issue No. 4 2000: pp. 605–622. Web. https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/matnat/ifi/INF3700/v17/bakgrunnsnotat/the_surveillant_assemblage.pdf. 8 Cfr. McIntyre, L. Post truth. Cambridge: MIT Press. 2016. Print. Arkangel technology user interface. Arkangel episode, Black Mirror 4th season. Meanwhile, in the real world, a software based on deep neural network patented by Stanford university9 enables real time facial re-enactment and spreads on the Reddit community to be used in the production of DeepFakes, a type of video image generated by the seamless overlapping of the face of famous Hollywood actresses over the body of pornographic ones while recording X-rated movies, with the face of the former assuming seamlessly the facial expression of the latter10. The actor Jordan Peel uses the same technology to hack President Obama official speech, applying his voice and his facial expression over the President’s face11. DeepFakes, Emma Watson, 2017. 9 Face 10 Capture and Reenactment of RGB Videos”. Web. https://graphics.stanford.edu. Romano, “Why Reddit’s face-swapping celebrity porn craze is a harbinger of dystopia”. vox.com, 2018. Web. https://www.vox.com/2018/1/31/16932264/reddit-celebrity-porn-face-swapping-dystopia. 11 BuzzFeedVideo, “You won’t believe what Obama says in this video!”. youtube.com, 2018. Web. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ54GDm1eL0. Jordan Peel DeepFakes re-enactment of Obama. II. The subject / Res Googleable Within new online/offline platforms/spaces and their related regimes of visibility, a new type of subjectivity emerges. The way Google operates affirms a new logic: I exist if I am 'googleable', that is, if the algorithms which operate Google's indexing are able to trace me, turning me into a thing other than the Cartesian Res Cogitans and Res Extensa 12. Res Googleable, is the hybrid organic-digital online/offline circulating organism defined by the Google gaze circuit. I am Res Googleable when I become an online profile, when I am uploading a picture, and even when I am taking it with my mobile phone – because my behavior is already oriented towards uploading, and the physical space around me is already conceived as something ‘uploadable’. Res Googleable moves through online platforms according to an ever-changing personalized Filter Bubble 13, which is shaped by tracking users' online/offline behaviors and which shapes in turn and on behalf of the users the platforms/spaces they are navigating through, turning them into anonymous yet highly personalized forms of non lieu14, where mirroring and similarities take over differences and singularities. 12 Descartes, R.Discours de la méthode. Pour bienconduire la raison, & chercher la véritédans les sciences plus La dioptrique et les meteores, qui font des effais de cetteMéthode. Paris:Adam and Tannery, L. Cerf.,1902 (1637). Print. 13 Pariser, 14 E. Filter Bubble. New York: Penguin Press, 2011. Print. Cfr. Augé, M. Non-Lieux. Introduction à uneanthropologie de la surmodernité. Paris: Seuil, coll. «La librairie du XXIe siècle», 1992. Print. III. The object / POV as a political-aesthetic battlefield and the emergency of an online space of appearance POV technologies of vision seems indeed very relevant in the circulation of new regimes of visibility and new regimes of truth experienced by Res Googleable. It is important to notice that one of the most interesting features of these regimes of visibility is that they appear as dynamic structures that constantly overlap. For example, the overlapping between POV and CCTV regimes of visibility as the main feature of the POV-opticon is materialized in the GIGA Selfie, a technological system patented in Australia which allows tourists to take images of themselves remotely by controlling with their phones a CCTV-like camera that is able to zoom from a CCTV frame to a POV selfielike close-up of the users' faces. GIGA Selfie technology, Australia, 2015. The shrinking of the distance between CCTV and POV proceeds with the collection of data from users’ phones and emphasizes the colonial nature of the POV-CCTV circuit over the subjects and the space around them. The offline space of appearance15 tends to shrink together with the shrinking of the distance between POV and CCTV regimes of visibility, colonized by security systems that go from CCTV cameras to POV facial recognition technologies to body scanners. Meanwhile, an online space of appearance surfaces and almost take over the political agency of the offline one, activating new authoritarian politics as much as new subversive practices. 15 Arendt, H., The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. Print. IV. The structure / POV-opticon and the city “from the internet up” The Google gaze circuit is moving more and more aggressively towards the offline space, and projects such as the building of a new district “from the internet up” 16 in the Quayside area of Toronto by Sidewalk Labs, a division of Alphabet (the corporate parent of Google) confirm this trend. Here, the city as a whole is seen as a smartphone, and indeed manufactured in relation to its capability of real-time data harvesting17. “[T]he anticipated Googlehood would comprise physical, digital, and ‘sense’ layers. The physical and digital layers are as you would expect: Google headquarters flanked by ‘radical mixed-use’ Lego-like modular housing and self-driving shuttles, as well as a programmable interface that would allow app developers access to the neighborhood’s data and infrastructure. The sense layer, however, would deploy wall-to-wall sensors and cameras to capture the flow of pedestrian, bicycle, and vehicle traffic, as well as environmental measures like hyperlocal weather patterns, carbon monoxide levels, and noise pollution” 18, turning Quayside into “the most measurable community in the world” 19. Quayside sketch, Toronto, 2018. 16 Besner, “Alphabet city”. http://evenmagazine.com/, 2017. Web. http://evenmagazine.com/alphabet-city/. 17 Ibidem. 18 Ibidem. 19 Ibidem. V. The philosophy / Google gaze circuit between landscape and geography The distinction between 'landscape' (or territory) and 'geography' (or map) 20, is useful to understand what happens to the online/offline circulation of the Res Googleable through the Google gaze circuit and the shrinking of the distance between POV and CCTV regimes of visibility. According to Merleau-Ponty, landscape is a “world prior to knowledge, this world of which knowledge always speaks, and this world with regard to which every scientific determination is abstract, signitive, and dependent, just like geography with regard to the landscape in which we first learned what a forest, a meadow, or a river is” 21. Within the Google gaze circuit, the overlapping between POV and CCTV provokes the collapse between landscape and geography, becoming impossible for the Res Googleable to really experience 'landscape' as a process of singularization, defamiliarization and alertness the way Merleau-Ponty is referring to by evoking a primordial aesthetic experience. The overlapping of POV and CCTV regimes of visibility is well explained by Borges short novel On Exactitude in Science: “In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it”22. Thus, alongside the thinking of Baudrillard, the Google gaze circuit seems, similarly, to generate “a map that engenders the territory […] whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map […] in […] the desert of the real itself”23. In the Google gaze circuit, geography generates landscape, and “simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation of models of a real without origin […]: a hyperreal”24. 20 Cfr. Erwin Straus, Paesaggio e Geografia, in E. Straus e H. Maldiney, L’e- stetico e l’estetica. Un dialogo nello della fenomenologia, Introduzione di Andrea Pinotti, Mimesis Milano 2005; pp. 69-79.Print. 21 Cfr. Merleau-Ponty, M. Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard, 1945. Print. 22 Borges, Jorge Luis. Del rigor en la Sciencia. Buenos Aires: Los Anales de Buenos Aires 1.3, 1946. Print. 23 Baudrillard, J. Simulation. New York: Semiotexte, 1983, pp. 166-184. Print. 24 Ibidem. VI. The philosophy / Res googleable between conjunction and connection The colonization of the POV is a process that happens in the offline/online circulation of the Res googleable and in the affordances25 offered by the military-entertainment complex26. In this context, it seems crucial to elaborate strategies of collective resistance to the authoritarian nature of the Google gaze circuit, which tends to reify users’ identities, tastes and beliefs. Bifo refers to this process as the “conjunctive”27 - the offline modality of 'becoming-other' and developing singularities by enhancing differences. The colonization of the POV – enabled by the shrinking of the distance between POV and CCTV technologies of vision – instead, works as the visual format the Google gaze circuit adopts to replace the 'conjunctive' with the connective28 - the latter defined as the functional interaction of elements of a given relationship, according to principles of similarities and compatibility. In the Google gaze circuit, as much as in the Googlehood of Quayside, the subversive unpredictability of POV – anesthetized by Filter-Bubble-like mechanisms – is mined from a 'landscape' of singularization into a 'geography' of mirrors and echoes. The awareness of the differences between landscape and geography is an important element towards anecology of mind 29, while the ability to freely browse from one to the other, a direct consequence of it. This is also the main skill of those who practice a sport called 'Foot Orienteering', in which participants explore an unknown space and run from one point to another with the help of digital navigation maps. The participants face an unfamiliar environment, in which the POV embodied and emotional reading of the landscape, and the rapid change in the horizon line, are interspersed with a CCTV analytical scanning of the map. On the contrary, the Google gaze circuit assimilation of POV into CCTV and of landscape into geography targets the uniqueness of the relationship between organism and environment (real or virtual), and preemptively 25 Cfr.Gibson, J. J., Pictures, perspective, and perception. Boston: MIT Press, 1960. Print. 26 Lenoir, T. &Lowood, H. “Theaters of War. The Military-Entertainment Complex”. Stanford.edu, 2002. Web. 27 Cfr. 28 Berardi, F. And: Phenomenology of the end. New York: Semiotexte, 2015. Print. Ibidem. 29 Cfr. Bateson, G. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972. Print. destroys the heterogeneity of an online connected collective intelligence30. VII. The strategy / Hacking the circuit POV-CCTV When thinking again at The Circle, let’s remember that the desire of accountability evoked by the CEO’s speech during the launch of “SeeChange” is associated to images of the Egyptian Revolution screened gigantically behind him. There, POV mobile phones images uploaded online become the available format for people to perform their political agency in the context of social unrest and protests, opening towards an understanding of the emancipatory nature of POV images – already captured by the corporation to justify instead the implementation of POV invasive yet invisible mainstream security technologies such as in the case of “SeeChange” microcameras. Furthermore, during the Egyptian revolution, the shrinking of the distance between POV and CCTV regimes of visibility, instead of generating a POV-opticon, is transformed into an instrument of resistance. The collective Mosireen31 and Kazeboon32 produce POV images of clashes between people and military during the Tahrir revolution using mobile phone cameras, upload them online reaching out to a global audience and establishing connection with activists worldwide, while at the same organizing public screenings all over Cairo and beyond, sometime in the same places where the images were originally recorded. The so called Tahrir cinema functions as a pop-up mobile cinema infrastructure which squats public electricity from lamppost and provides a decentralized network of activists with projection screens and sound systems, which could be requested by filling a form online33. In this way, the Tahrir cinema produces a virtuous circuit between a POV regime of visibility – in the form of the activists’ mobile phone capturing POV images during clashes – and a CCTV regime of visibility – in the form of a CCTV-TV-cinema like techno-aesthetic set-up towards “offline” public screening. Furthermore, the Tahrir cinema 30 Cfr. Lévy, P. Collective intelligence. Mankind’s emerging world in Cyberspace. Cambridge: Helix Books, Perseus Book, 1999. Print. 31 http://mosireen.org/ 32 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazeboon. 33 http://www.tacticalmediafiles.net/events/4778/TahrirCinema produces a virtuous circuit between ‘upload’ and ‘download’: after uploading the images online, activists use social networks to organize “offline” screenings, metaphorically “downloading” the images back into the “offline” public spaces they were taken from. Tahrir Cinema event, Tahrir square, 2011. The algorithmic transformation of POV by new technologies of vision such as the Google gaze circuit, is also turned into a strategy of resistance in the case of the 2015 first hologram protest held in Madrid, Spain 34. Here, instead of physically taking to the streets, activists designed a new form of protest by manufacturing an algorithmic hologram version of themselves to oppose the law banning demonstrations outside the government buildings, thus becoming a virtual crowd in order to exercise its continued right to protest in a public “offline” space. Hologram protest, Madrid, 2015. 34 Mullen, Jethro. “Virtual protest: Demonstrators challenge new law with holograms”.Cnn.com, 2015.Web. Finally, the new regimes of visibility generated by the shrinking between POV and CCTV technologies of vision, which produces the shrinking of the distance between landscape and geography, turn the Res publica into the overlapping of a new civic space which we called online space of appearance and of a hyper-controlled public space shaped by what we called the POV-opticon. The above examples show ways of hacking the circuits at work during the circulation of data produced by Google gaze-like circuits and express the subversive nature of POV images by reconnecting them to an effective political subjectivity, capable to hack processes of POV colonization / datafication.