This week I found an essay that hits particularly close to my own interests, "The Work of Artists in a Databased Society: net.art as on-line activism" by Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga. It hits all the key points I hit on this blog: art, new media, identity, control, etc. He even references a very similar base of work that I'm familiar with including the Surveillance Camera Players and Allan Sekula's "The Body and the Archive." Yet while nothing he writes is inherently disagreeable to me, there is one underlying assumption running throughout the piece that doesn't recognize fundamental protocols of interaction on the web.

Zúñiga begins with the familiar (and entirely correct) theme of dismantling utopian visions of the internet as some sort of idealized Habermasian public sphere. Yet from this he jumps to the idea that it is necessarily a distopian space where corporations surveil the masses - clearly delineating the individual and the crowd. I can't disagree that the internet has proven to be the best data mining tool ever known, but I think the implication of "data mining" is short-sighted and not recognizing either the construction of "the corporation" or "the masses."

Data mining implies an unseen few taking data from the seen and unknowning many. This isn't exactly what's happening. This doesn't want to acknowledge is that the process of archiving the data takes place, increasingly, of our own volition. We can't simply say "data has been gathered" as though some man in a suit came to my door with a bag into which he put all my data. We have to recognize that interaction has been designed - or has developed, depending on how techno-determinist you are - in such a way that the archivization has become a primary interactive protocol. That's just the thing about the corporation as it is outlined in a piece like The Postscript to Societieties of Control: it is less and less the few deciding how to control the masses - largely by defining them as such - it is ourselves taking on the role of both the mass and the few. When Deleuze writes about "the corporation" in Postscript, he is speaking less about Coca-Cola specifically than a social construction in which the individual is concurrently affirmed and aggregated. This is the concept of corporation that we must take into account when discussing archival interaction via the web.

Zúñiga's view is certainly true with more traditional data mining such as spyware, but these methods will fade in time as the population grows accustomed to these technologies. This is why we must see controlling archivization as being enacted through ourselves and our peers and encouraged by the Deleuzian corporation.

A section of the piece that also highlights the distinction between the few and mass that I'm taking issue with is in his discussion of Brooke Singer's "SPV2". This piece involves a variety of digitized surveillance methods aimed at the artist herself and opened for participants to view and enter information themselves. Zúñiga describes it like this:

"By publicly revealing her data-self, Singer turns the user into a data-voyeur while giving the user a glance at the sort of data that exist within the Internet in relation to each one of us. To further drive this point, Singer has also included the Join Me! category which allows users to enter one’s own name and/or zip code to effect the visual representation and give one just a taste of her/his own data-self."

Zúñiga reads this as a critique of a corporate (Coca-Cola style) internet, which it certainly can be. Yet i think it is more useful as an observation of contemporary web-based interaction. The artist reveals her data and receives the same from the participants. This is no different from MySpace or del.icio.us. Interaction has become centered on the revelation of data: the more complete, the better. The Singer piece is not about the Coca-Cola/singular-controlling eye on her (or the implied "you"), it is about the crowd's eye on her. Instead of placing herself as subject to the gaze of the few, she is subject to the gaze of many: a reversal of traditional power structures.