May 13th 2015
9h30-11h30
PANEL 1 – CONTEMPORARY SURVEILLANCE POLICIES: OPACITY, TRANSPARENCY, RESISTANCE
Surveillance after Snowden
Prof. Dr. David Lyon (Queen’s University)
In 2013, Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA and its partners had been engaging in warrantless mass surveillance, using the internet and cellphone data, and driven by fear of terrorism under the sign of ’security.’ It is important to consider the technological shifts involved, the steady rise of invisible monitoring of innocent citizens, the collusion of government agencies and for-profit companies, the distinct global reactions to Snowden and the implications for how we conceive of privacy in a democratic society infused by the lure of big data. Also significant are the basic issues of how we frame surveillance, and the place of the human in a digital world.
Security, Intelligence, Surveillance, Compliance: Contemporary Perspectives
Prof. Dr. Didier Bigo (Sciences Po e King’s College)
I will analyse the controversies related to the transnationalisation of national security intelligence, the diagonalisation and hybridisation of surveillance, the forms of “servitude volontaire” (neither compliance nor resistance) that are organising everyday internaut behaviours.
Militarization of cyberspace and shared resistance
Prof. Dr. Sérgio Amadeu (UFABC)
The presentation will address the shift in global surveillance and espionage practices by the United States and its allies after 9/11. Corporations and market technologies are widely used by the intelligence structure, which constitutes a chain of social control in the service of a state of emergency. At the same time, the espionage practices are providential to the economic interests of big corporations. In this scenario, there is the emergence of a type of resistance based on cyberpunk principles and hacker culture in which politics are conducted by the development of codes.
Chair
Prof. Dr. Fernanda Bruno (UFRJ)
11h45-13h15
PANEL 2 – TERRITORY, CONTROL, DISAPPEARANCE
From remote control to ‘occupation’: territorial contention in the metropolis of Rio de Janeiro
Prof. Dr. Rogerio Haesbaert (UFF)
The territorial issue, or rather the issue regarding the “control of space”, becomes increasingly complex, both because of the alleged increase of mobility and the relativity of borders (phenomena confused with “deterritorialization”) as because of the possibility of remote control provided by new information technologies. Semiperipheral contexts, such as in Brazil, offer examples of this complex amalgam between remote and physical, or direct, control, as in the political call for the occupation of favelas in Rio de Janeiro by the Police Pacification Units, that occurs in parallel with the sophistication of the remote control apparatus through Center of Operations in Rio, one of the most advanced monitoring centers in the world. We would like to discuss the new territorialities arising therefrom and the role of physical dimension of territories (including favelas projects and the large walled ways) in this new “regulation of the disorder” (Agamben), provided by policies no longer in the matter of confinement but, most importantly, in regard to territorial restraint, by monitoring and “canalizing” good and bad circulations.
Surveillance mirages: operational images and the aesthetics of disappearance
Prof. Dr. Tadeu Capistrano (UFRJ)
According to Harun Farocki, the “operative images” do not have the function to entertain or inform, nor simply to reproduce or represent something, but they are part of a particular operation. These are images produced by sensory devices (tracking, monitoring, surveillance and control) that tear down the work of the human eye when they recognize and interpret reality as information. These ideas, which are present in several works by Farocki, dialogue with the theories of Paul Virilio and Flusser about the increasing abstraction of vision in the current universe of technical images. From these clues, this presentation focuses on the “vision without looking” inaugurated by such devices, trying to understand the status of spectator and of the spectacle today.
Chair
Prof. Dr. Rodrigo Firmino (PUCPR)
May 14th 2015
9h-10h30
PANEL 3: SUBJECTIVITY, FANTASY, SURVEILLANCE
Cyberbullying, the “right to be forgotten” and the dream of an editable past
Profa. Dra. Paula Sibilia (UFF)
Today we live together with a monstrous machine that seems to remember everything: the Internet. From this fabulous quality of this technology spring the complaints that emerge against search engines like Google, on behalf of the right to forget or the right to informational self-determination in digital networks. What is being claimed is that certain personal data that refer to past situations are deleted. Although these data they may be valid, the applicant considers that they may produce harm. Therefore, the right of every individual to self-manage the information about themselves is argued. In order to support this wish of control over the chaotic happening of life, a variety of artifacts are available to us, both technical and legal. However, that promise seems to be an illusion in a society that promotes its self-visibility and self-spectacle as a way to ensure its own existence.
The fantasy of a total gaze
Prof. Dr. Silvia Viana (FGV-SP)
Chair
Prof. Dr. Rosa Pedro (UFRJ)
11h-12h30
PANEL 4: BIOPOLITICS, AESTHETICS, THE DIVIDUAL
Bioconceptualism: exercises, approaches and contact zones
Prof. Dr. Ricardo Basbaum (UERJ)
Since the development of action and intervention practices in the field of contemporary art, it became necessary to delimit contact zones with a territory identified as bioconceptual, where traces of conceptual art and conceptualism are articulated to elements of biopolitical configuration, present in the formation of art circuit in its process of reorganization, going on since the last decades of XX century: while we perceive the changes of contemporary art and its institutional circuit – effects of the neoliberal macroeconomics on the art system – it is important to consider the action of artists and intellectuals in the redesign of poetic and theoretical and critical discourses aware of the value of the meeting between subject enjoyer and work of art. In the current framework, curatorial and mediation practices and policies, as well as disputes around the themes of social production and the construction of the artist, indicate how the issues of spectation/expectation and of the artist’s image moved to the center of political debate in contemporary art – issues that put the production of the work and the artist’s role as apparently subsidiary and accessories in a production chain full of automation and tightly regulated. It is against these formations that artists and intellectuals seek to articulate poetical-theoretical-critical practices in order to desautomatize and denature processes and protocols and enable regions of meeting, contact, experience, speech and writing.
The spectacle of the dividual. Aesthetics of the self and surveillance shared on social networks
Prof. Dr. Pablo Rodriguez (UBA)
There is no doubt that we live in a society of spectacle, yet with some transformations. If social networks confirm that personal relationships convert into images, as asserted by Guy Debord, it is also true that people themselves cannot be understood the way they were in 19th and 20th century. In his text on societies of control and in some of his books, Gilles Deleuze outlines a worrying figure that opposes that of the individual: the sphere of the dividual, which is a sort of collective double of the images and the subject without therefore being its duplication. Today, there would exist individual beings (neither people, subjects or individuals) that communicate permanently and to everyone about their privates lives, changing the classical relationships between the public, the intimate and the private, trying to create the aesthetic self (Michel Foucault). On the other hand, all activity of the dividual is duplicate in the strict sense as information, as data: all traces are accumulated and processed in the digital sphere. This generates a qualitative transformation of global surveillance, which we will try to examine in our presentation. We do not pretend to call attention to the contemporary explosion of informational surveillance, as this is well known. We aim to show that the fundamental novelty lies within the fact that us, the dividuals, do not care anymore about being surveilled; or even more, that surveillance has been distributed, as asserts Fernanda Bruno. Hence it is fitting to reformulate directly how we should interpret surveillance and what new and not so obvious dangers we are facing.
Chair
Prof. Dr. Fernanda Bruno (UFRJ)
May 15th 2015
9h-11h
PANEL 5: SURVEILLANCE IN LATIN AMERICA
Watch the Others: Hispanic danger in American cinematic dystopias
Prof. Dr. Nelson Arteaga Botello (FLACSO, México)
We analyze how cinematic dystopias project specific forms of domination, and the social tensions that contemporary societies face. We analyze the films Blade Runner and Elysium through the analysis of four iconographic elements they share: the city of Los Angeles, the abandonment of land by the elites, a socio-multicultural context, as well as the presence of social surveillance technologies. The research analyzes how these films construct an idea of the Latin American that gives meaning to the apocalyptic scenes that are drawn for the future, while they project the apocalyptic present of Latin America today.
Connected multitudes and social movements: From zapatism to #YoSoy132 and the protest for #Ayotzinapa
Profa. Dra. Guiomar Rovira (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, México)
For over 20 years, the playful and libertarian use of digital technologies initiated by the early programmers and hacktivists has deepened from concrete experiences, surprising in their irruption and in contrast with the development of technological strategies for social control and economic profit. In the mid-nineties, the spontaneous emergence of an Internet network in solidarity with the Zapatista Army of National Liberation was an inaugural example. Soon after, the global justice movement emerged with global convening power. From 2010 onwards, Wikileaks has showed the dark side of power and has made a series of revelations about cyber-surveillance. Since the Arab Spring, the connected crowds have manifested intensively on networks and on the streets of cities around the world, creating meeting places both in situ and online, connecting the local and global flows of indignation. It is the emergence of a splintered policy network, open to anyone, facing new risks. The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between digital technologies and social mobilization, by analyzing the specific cases of the movement # YoSoy132 and recent protests against the disappearance of Ayotzinapa students in Mexico.
The Politics of Surveillance in Latin America
Katitza Rodriguez (EFF)
Chair
Prof. Dr. Marta Kanashiro (UNICAMP)
11h15-12h45
PANEL 6: TECHNOPOLITICS: PRIVACY AND ENCRYPTION
Criptografia como resistência à sociedade da vigilância
Prof. Dr. Marcio Moretto (USP)
Encryption as resistance to the surveillance society – Prof. Dr. Marcio Moretto (USP)
Surveillance is not a current phenomenon. In the way we understand it today, its appearance is closely related to the formation of modern states. On the one hand, surveillance replaced punishment as a form of control of society. On the other, it arises as a promise of a tool for implementation of public policies and greater political participation, i.e., as a mean of control by society. More recently, its form influenced and adapted to so-called information technologies. The first Hollerith machines served to make more dynamic the censuses in the United States and in several European countries, including Nazi Germany, and the first computers were created with the intention to violate privacy communication. The popularization of the Internet and the emergence of social networks made this framework even more complex. If before letters could be violated and personal data statistically treated, it is now possible to scrutinize the structure of social networks and find non-trivial patterns in a giant mass of personal data.
The technological promise of a greater understanding of social dynamics that would allow overcoming inequalities and increased political participation has been overshadowed by the reality where personal data are used by companies to construct consumer profiles and by government security agencies to make analysis. In this context, encryption is a useful tool of resistance. Well-written applications, based on primitive and solid protocols can assure communication between two parts free of the scrutiny of these companies and agencies. Far from being a solution to the surveillance society, encryption applications can mitigate some of their problems. Therefore, we need criteria for choosing these applications, that must include at least the auditability of its code and, where applicable, the encryption end-to-end.
Privacy and Human Rights: the Smart Cities
Prof. Dr. Natalia Viana (Agência Pública)
Chair
Prof. Dr. Henrique Parra (UNIFESP)