REVERSE at Creative Tech Week 5/4

BI_tumblr_o326gtRHF71qav3uso1_540

Post Privacy: Is privacy becoming a thing of the past?
MAY 4TH, 3:45PM – 4:45PM
Clemente Center, 116 Suffolk St, New York, NY 10002

REVERSE is excited to be a part of Creative Tech Week this year with BEAUTIFUL INTERFACES: THE PRIVACY PARADOX, a new media art exhibition accessible via a wireless network from hacked wifi routers, which are not connected to the Internet. As part of the programming activities of the exhibition, REVERSE will host Post Privacy: Is privacy becoming a thing of the past?, a panel discussion moderated by curator Helena Acosta and featuring Dan Phiffer (artist/programmer), Lior Zalmanson (writer/curator) and Carla Gannis (artist) as panelists.

The panel will be focused on the concept of post-privacy.  Is privacy becoming a thing of the past? Datafication as a phenomenon has been spreading into every nook of our daily lives; today our existence has a reflection in a digital grid where almost every movement leaves a footprint that can be tracked and pointed. Does this reality make us more vulnerable to the eyes of evolving power agencies? In this permeable context, what counter surveillance strategies can we rely on?

Researcher Christian Heller has coined the term “post-privacy” to define the dissolution of privacy in the digital age, as a way to capture what might be an inescapable change in the privacy paradigm. As technological progress gains momentum, our interaction with digital tools becomes increasingly recurrent, not only in the way we interact with our governments and authorities, but also in our personal lives. Technology has become an extension of our identities.

Panelists will discuss the concept of privacy and overexposed behaviors in the digital age. They are invited to explore these questions: is the protection of privacy a lost battle? What methods can we use to deal with a potential post-privacy data model? Can we envision surveillance, or privacy, working symmetrically between power structures and civilians? Is this a utopian assumption?

 

ABOUT THE PANELISTS

Dan Phiffer is a programmer and artist based in Brooklyn working on projects that use computer networks as raw material. In the Fall of 2011 Dan created Occupy.here as an alternative web forum for the Occupy Wall Street encampment and its affiliated working groups. Unlike the official OWS online forum, Occupy.here was only reachable via local wifi darknets at Zuccotti Park and at 60 Wall Street, another nearby Privately Owned Public Space. Each Occupy.here wifi node is designed to be disconnected from the Internet, operated independently in an archipelago of affiliated open virtual spaces. Dan is currently a fellow at Columbia’s Tow Center of Digital Journalism and has had projects exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1, and SFMOMA.

Lior Zalmanson is a writer, lecturer and researcher interested mainly in digital culture and the information society. His research interests include social media, pricing of information products, consumer engagement and user generated content. His research has won awards and grants by Fulbright Foundation, Dan David Prize, Google, Marketing Science institute and more. Lior has written on digital and online behavior for Wired UK Alaxon.  Lior is also the founder of the Print Screen festival, Israel’s digital culture festival, which explores themes of digital culture in cinema and audio-visual arts. Furthermore, he is a grant and award-winning playwright and screenwriter.

Carla Gannis is an artist that explores the concepts of nature and the politics of identity, drawing from art history, technology, theory, cinema, video games and speculative fiction. Identifying as a visual storyteller, Carla uses 21st Century representational technologies to narrate through a “digital looking glass”, reflecting on power, sexuality, marginalization and agency. She is fascinated by contemporary modes of digital communication, the power (and sometimes the perversity) of popular iconography and the situation of identity in the blurring contexts of technological virtuality and biological reality.