Surveillance Art

Every aspect of contemporary, digitally mediated culture conforms to surveillance of some form. Social media encourages its users to voluntarily provide personal information, targeted advertising monitors the webpages that users visit, and international travel requires biometric identification. A number of activist and hacker networks such as Anonymous and Tor have challenged this culture of conformity to digital surveillance that has developed since the early 2000s.

The most visual and visible challenges, however, have often come from artists. Although artists have been addressing ideas of surveillance and control for many years, the Internet and wider digital culture has given rise to a new wave of artists who employ digital surveillance culture as both their medium and subject matter. Art is an important lens through which the social ...