Surveillance, Gamergate, and the Artistic Difficulty of Making the Internet Real
"XXXX.XXX". Image: Addie Wagenknecht/Bitforms

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Surveillance, Gamergate, and the Artistic Difficulty of Making the Internet Real

​In "Shellshock," artist Addie Wagenknecht creates a wonderfully satirical and mesmerizing altar to the Information Age.

The scale of the data trail we leave in our internet wake boggles the mind, yet visualizing these ephemeral bits in a dynamic fashion is a highly difficult task. This is precisely what artist Addie Wagenknecht attempts in her latest show, Shellshock, currently on exhibit at Bitforms Gallery in New York City.

It's a show where two surveillance cameras ("-r-xr-xr-x") become locked in what the artist told me is a "star-crossed lovers" gaze; where PCB boards, toy tanks, custom circuit boards, and ethernet patch cables become sculptural forms, but ones that intercept and log anonymous live data captured from nearby wifi signals. And as a female artist who deploys tech and internet media in her works, Wagenknecht also takes the opportunity to comment on the recent Gamergate dust-up in a brand new online piece, "Blue Screen."

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What Wagenknecht, who studied computer science, manages to create is a wonderfully satirical and mesmerizing altar to the Information Age—a physical space where the cloud, social networks, data, leaks, and social capital can manifest simultaneously.

It may sound somewhat depressing, but Wagenknecht insists that Shellshock is about searching for "warmth" in the contemporary post-WikiLeaks culture, "where surveillance is ubiquitous, online clicks serve as capital, data is measured by net worth, and classified information is leaked over encrypted channels."

"We are in a period that every secret, relationship, and memory is archived onto server farms and the data we output forms our identities as much as our economic structures," she said. "As a result, I wanted the works to coexist in the gallery, as a form of practical fiction; as extracted altar pieces to the events of the last five years, so they become products of the network."

In visualizing data and ephemeral internet interaction, Wagenknecht isn't so interested in showing what has specifically happened in the digital past, but in the essence of what plays out. "XXXX.XXX," a sculptural piece of several PCB boards arrayed on a wall, each containing pulsating wifi signal lights, functions as a visualization and portrait of networks and systems. To add some gravity to the piece, Wagenknecht's sculptural forms function, intercepting and logging anonymous live data captured from nearby wifi signals.

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"Emulating server racks, circuit boards are connected to each other by a few hundred ethernet cables," Wagenknecht said. "The piece attempts to anthropomorphizes and emulate a sort of 'black box' of cultural capital. It is about the power of enclosing beauty and not about what specifically has happened, but rather the truth of what has happened."

Wagenknecht said that "Kilohydra," one of the PCB board sculptures in "XXXX.XXX," was inspired by Chelsea Manning. At the time Wagenknecht was developing the piece, she was obsessed with following WikiLeak's "Collateral Murder" leaks, which showed classified video of a United States Apache helicopter shooting and killing 11 individuals who didn't return fire.

"Compassion fatigue is pretty rampant in American culture and as an artist I was looking at ways to circumvent that and translate her efforts into a sort of eulogy to hope and, in some ways, like a tragic love letter to a lost love," Wagenknecht said. "I wanted the works to get us past compassion fatigue and give you things to remember."

Similar to"XXXX.XXX," Wagenknecht's "Cloud Farming"is made of custom-printed circuit boards, ethernet cables, and pulsating lights that form a sculpture. Instead of fixing it to a wall, Wagenknecht hangs it from the ceiling, perhaps to remind us all that the cloud isn't some ethereal plane but a multitude of physical servers occupying actual three-dimensional space. In "1:24," she transforms a rhinestone-encrusted toy tank into a WiFi network jammer, an analogue to remote-controlled weapons like drones.

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And with "Blue Screen," Wagenknecht comments on the Gamergate controversy with a web-based narrative composed of three unique web pages done as a commission for NewHive, a new DIY publishing tool. As Wagenkencht said, something is broken in "Blue Screen"—the system has crashed.

The first page, subtitled "windows," features the sentence "I will look out of windows more than I look into them," repeated ten times. The phrase psychologically combats what it can be like for women to play in the boy's arena of the tech and gaming industries.

By clicking each iteration of the word "them," viewers experience live streaming feeds from around the world, highlighting micro and macro viewpoints, including a police scanner, underwater sea life, an eagle's nest, and puppy cams. On the following page, rose petals fall into an endless abyss, a reference to the Blue Screen of Death, which Wagenknecht calls "the ultimate terminal error of the machine." Here, she uses it to reference ongoing Gamergate-related harassment.

"The upside to all of the recent publicly-outed misogyny is that the suffering had lead to us standing up and flipping tables," she said. "The damage is done, [and] we will never get that time back and we might never get the recognition women really deserve for our work. It's a culture that is so absurd it has to undo itself."

"Art and code is a subversive act when you could just consume instead and so it's threatening," Wagenknecht added. "Outputting is like removing the tape from your mouth, laying your skills online for everyone to evaluate you. How can we advance the narrative and simplify and distill women from just being naked online to something more profound and visually present both IRL and NIRL? It takes a mass willing to go to war with their clothes on and be willing to get hurt in the name of the greater good."

Though Wagenknecht is speaking here of the Gamergate fallout, Shellshock shows that blending of art and code into a single act of subversion might as well be her artistic modus operandi. With the work, she hopes to inspire many more individuals, whether would-be artists or coders, to pull the tape from their mouths.