12/15

Alejandra López Gabrielidis

Paper published in Teknokultura Magazine Vol 12, No 3 (2015):

Challenges of collective action in the post-Snowden era: readings from Latin America

revistas.ucm.es/index.php/TEKN/article/view/50385

This article addresses the link between the hypervisibility regime in which the contemporary subject is enrolled and the new forms of surveillance. An analysis of Hito Steyerl's audiovisual work How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational.MOV File (2013) explores the modifications that the traditional surveillance model has undergone and highlights its features. the current cyber-surveillance device. The s. XXI is witnessing the socio-technical phenomenon of transforming the subject into image-given as a result of what Paul Virilio calls the industrialization and proliferation of "vision machines" (cameras, microscopes, telescopes, drones), social habits online that tend to the "autocaptación" and autodifusión, and of the processes of dating. The subject today assumes an active role in the mechanisms of surveillance and is therefore responsible for the control exercised over them. In this video, Hito Steyerl teaches techniques of camouflage, confusion, and low-resolution uses to be more invisible to the eyes of power. However, the excessive visibility and exposure of the subject seems to be a difficult circumstance to counteract the technical conditions in which we live. As we reflect towards the end of the article, in order to solve surveillance problems in the digital age, the notion of privacy must be redefined from the concept of digital identity, with all that it implies, and thus open the way to new forms of date power