Generation Loss: Identity in the Surveillance Age
Modern society has rapidly grown highly digitized. Many elements of the human experience like communications, events, interests, and likenesses, were quantified into large amounts of data and diffused online. To power new algorithmic technologies, this resource is increasingly scraped and utilized by corporate interests for profit, transforming these pieces of our identity into products. This quantification, commodification, and surveillance diminishes human identity and threatens our fundamental sense of ourselves. Reclaiming human dignity involves recovering agency over our own data and advocating for a society that respects human privacy and identity.
What is data? Our online activity constantly generates it. The attention economy revolves around it. We abstract it. It’s a series of bits, one and zeros stored in data centers across the globe, electrified and quantified. But these scattered bits represent behaviors. Those behaviors represent identities, and those identities represent a self-told story that gives our life cohesion and purpose. We knowingly and unknowingly provide our data to corporations and governments as the cost of exiting online, but what part of us is extracted in the process? And how we value these scattered fragments of our identity?
Conversations in Binary
“Conversations in Binary ” is a publication documenting two conversations with the same individual, Clara Belitz: an academic and an old friend. First, we discussed digital identities to understand the academic underpinnings of modern digital culture. Between growing surveillance and generative technologies, preserving our own identities has never been more challenging. Then, we discussed an impactful memory of illness, something only now exists in our recollections and in data. In fluctuating between these two conversations, I bridged the academic and the emotive, conveying the practical issues of a digital economy while connecting it to the real stories we’ve lost in quantification.
Identity Scrolls
“Identity Scrolls” follows the philosophy of Historiography. They are small scripts of memories, fashioned like film reels. Each one contains a constructed history following a narrative created by intentional inclusion, exclusion, and juxtaposition that provides the basis for our own sense of self. Some scrolls lie separately, each a linear story. But after time they intertwined. A jumbled assemblage of events; a non-linear, ambiguous identity. Making these scrolls gave clear narratives to my own past; clear stories with a beginning, middle, and end. But as they tangle together, these messy scraps feel more authentic than any narrative I could construct.
Visualizing Digital Decay
Databending refers to the deliberating alteration of a media file, through unusual software usage or intentional file damage. “Visualizing Digital Decay” is about closely scrutinizing that process. Instead of mourning that loss of information, this collection finds beauty in digital destruction. Databending is a cancerous process. It takes an existing network, functioning together to create a coherent entity, and it alters its most basic elements as that machine mutates, stumbles, and falls apart. This project freezes those moments, so the viewer can see the most basic building blocks that make up data as they all slowly come undone.
Gallery of the Digitalized Self
The “Gallery of the Digitalized Self” is an audiovisual project to visualize the emergent form of identity lying between our physical bodies and our online data, the disembodying “digitalized self”. Each of the four animated portraits is created from opposing elements: a person’s physical attributes alongside their online footprint. Each portrait oscillates between these two selves: both slowly and suddenly, visually and auditorily. We are both empowered and cursed by these digital representations. However we cannot deny these digital homunculi are a small part of ourselves in a time where culture, communication, and commerce are all mediated by digital space.
Data isnt just an abstraction. It’s somebody’s labor, it’s somebody’s memories, it’s somebody’s identity. It’s a piece of a person. And if we think people have inherent value, then this data has inherent value too. We should be mindful to the generation loss that results from taking human experience and stripping into its most basic parts and advocate for a society that provides dignity to our data. Our own identities have value because they are ours.
