DIGITAL PANOPTICON

« Take a moment and try to recall all your online activities of the last days. What’s impossible for you is at the heart of Google’s business plan. Unlike you, the company remembers each word searched, each email sent and each way found via one of its apps. What Google knows about you, me and billions of others, all world leading secret services can only dream of. Similar to George Orwell’s « Big Brother », it is through the „telescreens » of our computers and smartphones that Google observes us. Orwell installed his famous dystopia of a surveillance state in 1984. One year later, I was born in a country that had been shaped by right and left state surveillance for decades. Thus I often wonder what a totalitarian state would do with all the personal data that Google currently holds ? By whom and how will these traces of the daily lives of millions of people be used for, now and in the future ? How do data monopolists, like Google and Facebook already channel our actions and shape our ideas ?

My installation gathers some of the information that I unconsciously injected into the Google universe. It presents fragments of what I really did, saw and experienced on 20/3/2019, but also data fragments that were incorrectly calculated by Google. Places and shops that I have never visited and which, nevertheless, form part of my Google user profile. The traces of my partly fictitious life are presented on banners, dismantled computer stands and painted-over photographs that spin in a vortex. The whole installation is guarded by eyes, reminiscent of icons to disable/enable « cookies », one important tool for digital companies to track our on- and offline behavior. Each passerby is both reflected in and observed by these eyes.

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han declares that, through our seemingly harmless online activities, we are all taking part in constructing a new form of digital panopticon. But since current power structures are friendly and seductive instead of being repressive, they are all the more difficult to recognize and to criticize. »