User:BlackHoleEd

Becoming imperceptible in an age of perceptibility

In Anna Munster's article Data Undermining: The Work of Networked Art in an Age of Imperceptibility she argues the importance of counteracting and subverting the neo-surveillance and normalizing aesthetics of a cyber-space, and highlights how this can and is done by contemporary artist working with software and code. It's a practice she refers to as 'Data-Undermining'. Some networked art has moved beyond just rendering visible data processes in the arrangement of contemporary relational or networked data. They created something more, an aesthetic approach and radical shift in how we perceive the invisible information and language of data, and it marks a change in the social-ethical perception of it too.

Extensions for Firefox MAICgregator or Ad-Art developed by Steve Lambert produce new approach to the norms of Web design and culture. These projects demand socio-aesthetic domain for data, where it is not appropriated by mindless automation and where work of all elements is not rendered imperceptible and irretrievable. They provide the potential for facilitating alternative social-political spaces of knowledge generation rather than mere knowledge discovery. A good example is the ShiftSpace project, an extension plug-in for Firefox. It allows a layer of graphically displayed and designed text to sit over the top of any website. Anyone with the same plugin can write annotations, add them to the design of the site and share it with others. ShiftSpace plugin literally shifts the space of online authoring, removing the edge of what has been privatized and what is available to anyone to share.

As two French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari noted in 1987: "Becoming everybody and everything is to world to make a world." In a current digital climate where our movements and subjectivity is watched and contained (perhaps even determined?) in the cloak of imperceptibility we must develop and cherish technologies/software that help us uncover knowledge and communicate it in our own fashion - we need spaces to generate data differently. To unbecome one’s proprietorial self – a web author, web user, database manager, developer even a ‘prosumer’ and so on – and desire instead an undoing of these identification tags upon which knowledge production still relies; it is to desire imperceptibility in an age of the perceptible.