hi everyone my name is Kyle and I'm an
artist I've only been working with these
themes for maybe three or four years now
but I got started in early two thousand
nine when i read a blog post from a
friend dan paluska called thoughts on
total openness of information and he
wrote what if all your private
information was public just the
information not the control this means
your bakes your bank statements are
public but not the bank password for
transferring funds is it possible that
your information is better off in the
hands of the general public than it is
in the hands of our large fallible
institutions if everyone has your
information does that make it less prone
to theft do enough people care to make
it repair itself the way Wikipedia
repairs itself the society function
better if we actually know the truth
about each other if all the bad people
have your info well you have your
identity stolen but if everyone already
knows your info how can it be stolen
this really got me thinking he's kind of
a philosopher and an artist and that
engineer so he's tying a lot of
different themes together and I think
he's not just like mindlessly accepting
the possibility of a surveillance state
he's actually asking us to ask ourselves
are there any social benefits to
openness that maybe we hadn't considered
is there some way of owning this so I
decided to answer these questions for
myself with a project called key tweeter
that I started right after I read this
post for one year i posted everything i
type directly to twitter every hundred
40th character i entered on my laptop
was instantly posted as a tweet and this
included emails to friends skype
conversations with my parents my entire
master's thesis waking up and going to
bed with my girlfriend everything and it
did not include any passwords or credit
card numbers or social security numbers
that's because I started to realize
there was this difference between
information and that sort of general
sense and control information or control
of information that one of these things
is kind of about who you are or who
you've been and the other thing is more
about who you're becoming or who you
might become or having control over your
identity and I wasn't so interested at
this point yet and letting people become
me yeah so one of the things i learned
from this project is that I don't know
there's there's normally this freedom
that's associated with anonymity like if
you're more anonymous then you have more
freedom but I found a different freedom
from this project which was the freedom
of kind of being honest with people i
found that knowing that everything I was
doing was posted completely in public I
didn't have any secrets to hide there
were no games to play with people I
didn't have to figure out like I keep
track of what I'd said to whom I could
just kind of be myself and be okay with
that but I I'm not really espousing this
idea of like oh you should have one
identity you know you should have this
consistent thing that doesn't change
because over that year like I changed a
lot like from the beginning to the end a
lot of beliefs i had chant changed a lot
of things I'd working was working on
change my friends had changed my
girlfriend had changed and you know so I
I guess why I'm saying more is like
maybe there's a different kind of
freedom and openness that then the
freedom that we associate with anonymity
maybe there's a place both for anonymity
and for openness after finishing Keith
waiter I got really interested in some
ideas around sorry some of some other
ways of approaching sharing our openness
of kind of what was happening in my
short private personal digital life I
started thinking about visual
corollaries like tearing away bits of my
screen as I was using it so whenever my
mouse moved over something then it would
tear away a slice and kind of scrapbook
it and post it online or whenever I
whoops whenever I clicked on something
advanced you for there we go whenever I
click on something
it would store a 32 by 32 pixel icon of
what I'd clicked on and I could see over
the course of the day you know a little
bit of itunes a little bit of YouTube a
little bit of answering emails and
writing code and I was posting these
with friends and I'm still working on an
app that allows people to see what
everyone else is clicking on at the same
time after that I worked with a friend
Thea Watson on a project called happy
things where it was just a screenshot
directly of your screen with you kind of
composited in the corner but the screen
shot was taken and posted online
whenever you would smile so whenever you
smile this something on your screen it
would automatically post it and we got
everything from you know cat photos to
animated gifts one guy just smiled at
the knick Wikipedia page from Nicolas
Cage I think it's pretty funny too so
but the most helpful thing I discovered
was actually in this time lapse of
myself actually turning it around
instead of looking at the screen just
looking at myself with the webcam I took
a photo every minute and i was expecting
that maybe there would be something
about my face that was revealing my
interactions with other people that
would kind of do the same thing that key
tweeter had done that would reveal
something about the way that i was i was
working with people or that way i was
using technology the way technology was
mediating my interactions but what
happened instead as i noticed i just
always have this face like it's like
this computer face this blank stare and
it and it's there throughout the whole
day i think one of these photos i'm
smiling kind of but this really freaked
me out i thought it is this really like
what technology is doing to me is this
like is this was happening on the other
side of the screen I thought well what I
should do is I should go do some
research and find out if other people
have this face or not so I went to the
apple store in Manhattan tried to find a
nice public space to take some photos
which happens to be legal as was
discussed earlier
and I found out it's the exact same
situation for everyone else I
automatically posted thousands of photos
tumblr over the period of a few days and
everyone's wearing the same face we're
all looking at computers the same way
but Apple didn't really feel the same
way about this as I did and a few days
after posting the video kind of wrapping
up the project I got a visit from the
Secret Service at 8am and they executed
a search for it confiscating my laptop
and anyway so I moved on to the next
project I've been exploring a lot of
things with face tracking for maybe a
year up to that point so I started
working as just as they confiscated my
laptop I started working with a friend
Arturo Castro on this idea called face
substitution where we were replacing
people's faces in real time I was one of
the reasons we were interested in this
is just as really cool looking effect it
was like really surreal this your face
substituted in real time with all your
expressions and movement and motion and
we were just kind of psyched for this
crazy effect that we were getting but
the more that we played with it we
started to see these reference kind of
back to these other themes of privacy
and surveillance we started implementing
this idea from philip k dick called the
scramble suit which is this replacement
that's a composite of lots of different
people simultaneously so you get the
impression of talking to someone without
actually knowing who you're talking to
but my favorite project was from this
student keith la fuente at CMU I posted
all the archer oh and I we posted all
the code for face substitution online so
anyone could kind of take this technique
and appropriate it and reinvent you know
how they wanted face tracking to be used
for themselves with their own creative
projects and Keith did this really great
project called mark and Emily where he
takes on both the roles of mark and
Emily generic and normal couple
maintaining a long distance relationship
over Skype and he said the work was
inspired by a conversation with his
mother who encouraged him to continue
abiding by a heteronormative
standards even after coming out to her
and so he sees that it has a critique of
the limitations of heteronormative and
he's using this technology to like you
know replace his face and give him this
kind of mixed identity that allows him
to address something that's very
personal to him but also kind of this
like interesting cultural and political
thing and this is like the way that he
wants to use face tracking in the way he
wants to use these technologies that are
normally associated with surveillance
and have privacy concerns for the rest
of us yeah and it's especially
interesting to see Keith doing this were
coming from CMU I think this was about a
year and a half or two years ago because
it's one of the CMU's one of the places
where some of the most important face
tracking research has been done recently
Alessandro acquisti did this wonderful
project where he determines that by
taking photos you in a public space he
could cross correlate that to
information taken from public digital
information and determine your social
security number so I'm just curious
actually who knows this research anybody
here all right cool that's the most I've
seen in any crowd that was almost half
the audience yeah and this I don't think
most people realize like how direct this
connection is but this is like the other
end of the spectrum of you know we have
some artists on one and hacking on
possible creative applications of face
tracking and then we have a kind of
security researchers on the other end or
computer vision researchers hacking on
on this approach and we don't see this
kind of technology very often in public
spaces or we don't maybe just know maybe
we don't know the capabilities of this
technology you know it's not super
obvious like we know with the more
digitally oriented stuff like people are
doing prism or the more like physically
oriented stuff like trapwire it's not
always obvious like what the exact
capabilities are they're kind of
sometimes they're hidden in secret
documents and sometimes they're you know
leaked and but there are some things
that happen in public spaces like seen
tap has been used for a few years now
too
figure out you know who who is going to
the bars what is the makeup of the
people in this bar you can check in
advance to find out you know is this
going to be a good scene or not I don't
know like wow it's I think we need
artists to kind of engage with these
technologies and figure out not just the
security researchers also we need some
artists to engage with these
technologies and figure out how to
respond to them maybe the right way is
like you know thinking about your like
your identity as a queer person related
to these technologies or maybe it's
thinking about like just wanting to
avoid this technology like maybe we
should all just start walking around
with her head tilted at 15 degrees this
is an artist aaron barr soul that I work
with demonstrating a very simple hack
and this is a movement currently in
Berlin people are walking around with
their head tilted at 15 degrees to avoid
face tracking or we can go a little
further there's a CV dazzle from Adam
Harvey this is another technique for
avoiding face tracking using kind of
creative makeup application and fashion
this is again from an artist like this
is a reinterpretation of these same
technologies I really like projects like
cv cv dazzle because they represent this
creative response to this technology
rather than just you know denouncing it
or complaining about it I think some
other berlin-based artists Daniel
vasilia of Julian Oliver Gordon civiche
are doing really interesting work in the
space of appropriating surveillance
technologies and reinterpreting them so
news tweak is an example of one of their
projects they have a small router that
they put in the corner of the room at a
cafe and it takes all of the unsecured
wireless traffic and it doesn't man in
the middle attack on it and it it
replaces news headlines basically so
you're browsing the cafe internet and
you just discover suddenly apparently
ahsan just wanted for the Defense
Department
this is still running and many cafes
around the world actually not many
people know about it it's been running
for a year or so yeah they've also done
this project the transparency grenade
which is really nice where this device
intercepts unsecured traffic but instead
of transforming it or translating it it
just keeps a record and archives it for
later analysis so it's meant to be
triggered in private meetings it's a
tool for leaking data sort of like sue
valence this idea of reversing
surveillance technology to observe the
people in power yeah I don't I can't
imagine actually sneaking this into a
meeting but I think that's part of the
point yeah one more reverse all finished
with this two years ago it became clear
that it's 23 years two years ago I think
that Apple was storing GPS locations of
every iPhone and sending the data back
to their servers every now and then
without really clear justification they
see their receive really heavy criticism
for this and they responded by making
the log a little shorter and I I really
like the kind of artistic a response to
this or the creative response to this
which was open paths which was partially
Jerris or worked on this and the idea
was just collect all that data and use
it for for research purposes so that we
could kind of take the data that was
kind of already being acquired like
collected by Apple and do something
useful with it like weird everyone was
just speaking about in the last few
sessions it's interesting because Google
was actually doing the same thing at the
same time with Android phones and they
were using it to feed all of their
traffic data on google maps but for some
reason it didn't get as much attention
after it became clear that they were
doing this yeah and I only found out
about that from a friend who's a
security researcher in LA who told me
that Google was tracking your phone
location for Google Maps when he decided
that he wanted to get home from work
fast one day so he
spoofed all the traffic so that it would
look like the road was really busy and
no one took the road I think I think I
think that's why he didn't really write
it write a report on it at the time if
you wanted you know if you really need
to get home one day you just you know
press the script and then anyway all
these all these things considered I
don't think there's much of a question
like someone just said during the last
session like there's not this isn't
something that we can like stop at a
dead that we can't like completely
reverse what we've done already I don't
think there's a question about the
future of anonymity and surveillance
it's only going to get harder to be
anonymous there's too much with an
incentive to know where people are at
all the time know where people are in
what they're doing at all times and when
you're in a position of power it's
tempting to believe that the more
information you have the more
understanding you have about the people
that you're observing yeah one of the
most dangerous parts for me o most
uncomfortable parts for me about the
Secret Service investigation was the
feeling that I knew they were they were
watching my email they asked me at one
point what is your password for your
email account I didn't know at the time
that I didn't have to give it to them so
I said okay you know here's my password
and but i really i stalled for a second
because I'd done key tweeter and I
thought you know this is control
information this isn't just this isn't
just who I've been this is actually the
point where they get to decide who I am
in the future if they so choose this is
like the thing that determines who I am
so I stalled but I give it to them
because I wanted to see what would
happen it turns out nothing really
happened as far as I know
but I it I think it's really this it was
really disturbing for me to think that
you know they were distracted by this
huge collection of information and tried
to find something that made sense into
their conception of how they wanted me
to be as an individual yeah anyway I'll
just wrap it up though I think the only
answer with all of this is to embrace
surveillance creatively in a great
surveillance into our lives and spend
some time being anonymous spend some
time over sharing and figure out for
ourselves kind of where the where the
boundary lies for us what the boundary
between private and public is for each
of us and I think if you're in a
position to make decisions about how
people are exploring these topics are
treated it just remember that artists
and troublemakers are always going to be
important for pushing these boundaries
and helping us understand where things
break and where they work best thank you
very much
you