Ars Electronica. Jasperschelling.com

The first few days of the Festival are dedicated to various symposiums. Yesterday we attended the symposium on fundamental rights in the digital world. Today is the first day of the Goodbye Privacy Symposium. When taking the tram to the city center we find out that we can actually use the trams for free with our festival passes, which is nice, saving us the hassle of having to buy a ticket every time, since it doesn't seem possible to buy a week ticket or something, anyhow we get off in the centre and head out for the Kunstuniversität Linz. On the way we grab some fresh coffee (don't underestimate the effect of starting your day with proper coffee). Roel goes up to the pressroom to work on the blog a bit more, while Sarah and me enter the Kunstuniversität.

The speakers in the first leg of the symposium are focusing on the value of privacy, and whether it is possible to maintain a private sphere against the backdrop of terror and Web 2.0?

Since the location where the symposium is being held has a limited seating capacity we take our seats in the tent that is erected in the courtyard of the Kunstuniversität. Though it's nice to be out of the rain, it friggin' cold in here. Within a few minutes some people from the organisation install some kind of generator based heating device, but it doesn't seem to improve the situation much.

Though we missed the introduction of the day we were in time for the first speaker, Beate Rössler. Unfortunately she couldn't be present in person, so we were stuck watching her prerecorded speech on the screen in the tent.

In her talk she focusses on the need for autonomy, from which the need for privacy automatically arises, because of the fact that one can only be completely autonomous, if one has the freedom to make choices which are wholly internally motivated.

Rössler discerns three types of privacy, the ability to make your own descisions, having your own private spehere and informational privacy. I found the third typ to be the most interesting in terms of public awareness and the need to educate children in school about this

The first two types are very much determinede by your cultural background and upbringing. Now, informational privacy is something that people can be made aware of thru education. People immediately feel invaded if their carefully crafted public appearance is taken oout of context, by surveillance systems or people who betray our trust by passing on information about ourselves that we confided in them. Once we're aware of the fact that any of our expressions can be modified, taken out of context, misrepresented - in essence, refering to Joichi Ito,remixed- we can relax, and even play with the systems of surveillance taht occupy our society.

When we're talking about privacy it is always interesting to look at the fears that drive us to relinquish our privacy and independence and put ourselves under surveillance, be it automated surveillance, or surveillance by authorities.

On the subject of fears two speakers talk about their work, American artist & writer Jordan Crandall and Austrian investigative journalist Erich Moechel.

Jordan Crandall

Crandall's speech started on how in the current culture of self-publication and self-exposure everbody's life is on play. We solicit the attention of others, craving to be observed by our peers. In that sense his talk shared some similarities with professor Jochem Horing's keynote at the See Conference #2, in Wiesbaden, who gave a ravishing speech on the attention economy.

Jordan presented one of his works having to do with this subject, an installation called "Homefront". In this work we view the rendezvous of two lovers through various cctv camera's monitoring a downtown LA alleyway.

A still from Homefront. view the project on the artist's homepage by following the link.

Erich Moechel

After Jordan's talk Austrian journalist Erich Moechel gave a talk on the surveillance directives in the EU and the effects that they have on European society. Erich started his talk with a description of the directives and protocals that are in place in the EU for wiretapping and (phone) traffic analysis.

Erich Moechel telling his story of murder, corruption and espionage in the European telecom industry.

Talking about standards such as ETSI ES 201 671, ends up being rather technical and dry, so my attention drifted a bit, until he told the stories of two recent european surveillance scandals, involving suicides (though murder was implied), corruption, hacking and international & corporate espionage.

A good write up of one of the stories can be found on the European Digital Rights website.

And another one, this time in Greece, which started with the apparent suicide of a 38 year old Greek engineer.

At this point in time the two of us were freezing our hands off and for once I was glad that macbookpro's tend to run hot. I queued up a nice renderjob, so that i'd get some of the feeling in my legs back when viewing the final minutes of Erich's speech. After Erich finished up, we went to check on Roel, and attend the afternoon session of the symposium.

overview

A charming Austrian filmmaker tells us about how she used the law to create her film; a story shot using only footage from CCTV cameras. Her story is confronting us with the seamingly controlled and watched society of the United Kingdom, where I lived for five months. As a London citizen, you agree with being observed by CCTV cameras, when you set foot in public space. I knew this and I didn't really mind, but I was shocked to discover that the amount of CCTV cameras installed in the UK is about 4.2 million(!).

Manu Luksch

According to the UK Data Protection Act (DPA), a company or institute is obliged to provide a citizen with the captured footage of that particular person (subject) if they have that in storage. When researching on this particular way of retrieving footage, I must state that this act is quite entertaining. For example, when requested, a company should provide the subject at least with an answer within 40 days.
Unfortunately, due to other privacy legislations, the provider is also obliged to anonimize the footage, before submitting such a request. So every person, every face on this footage has to be blurred out, or replaced with a black dot (actually, it is up to the providers' creativity, since he is allowed to solve this according to his own meaning). You can imagine this process is ridiculously expensive. Manu shows us a picture of a box of printed frames she received once, where apperantly the faces of others where removed with nail scissors.

Manu Luksch, Austrian filmmaker displays footage she requested containing her image on surveillance tapes

Think about it, someone has to dig into the video archive, find the right video this ignorant person is requesting, make a copy, anonimize it and finally sending it. The law states, that the provider is allowed to request a fee for this favour, at a maximum of 10 pounds!

Continued...

Volker Grassmuck