Making Peace with Data Waste, Overflow, and Excess at Berlin's Art Hack Day

Mass surveillance and privacy are issues infiltrating art with greater frequency. Last fall, for instance, we interviewed Curtis Wallen about his Aaron Brown project, where he used Tor and other anti-surveillance techniques to effectively disappear and create a new digital persona that spilled over into the real world.

Transmediale, a Berlin-based art, culture, and technology festival, understands this fertile meeting ground for hackers and artists, and organized an event in collaboration with Art Hack Day and LEAP in conjunction with their "Afterglow" festival. Called Berlin Art Hack Day, the multi-day event is being held at Haus der Kulturen der Welt January 27-29 in Berlin.

"As coders we fear the ‘legacy’ system, a piece of old junk we haven’t yet figured out how to throw away," reads the Art Hack Day website. "As artists, we’re tempted by prolific outbursts of freshness and novelty; more art of less value. Businesses and government crave more data, more connections, more context. By embracing these impulses without contemplation we perpetuate the technological hype cycle and unintentionally shorten the half-life of our artefacts."

The organizers, who call the digital revolution a "dinner party" that brought a dystopian "afterglow," are interested in how technology has become a natural resource, "generating physical and immaterial waste that is appropriated in such diverse contexts as e-garbage dumps, big data businesses and mass surveillance schemes." For them, leftover, discarded data (keyword searches, cookies, caches, etc.) is no longer trash, but the central component of our digital lives, or "post-digital lives," as they describe it.

"When digital detritus piles up it decomposes, giving rise to a post-digital afterglow with the potential for new expression and new enterprise," suggest the organizers. "Can we make peace with our excessive data flows and their inevitable obsolescence? Can we find nourishment in waste, overflow and excess? Can the afterglow of perpetual decay illuminate us?"

Whether digital detritus actually decomposes is a matter of debate. This spent data may have little meaning for internet users as they evolve (or devolve) both intellectually and digitally; but, for tech companies, advertisers, and governments, that data accumulates in infinite, Borgesian stores. The data only decomposes if those entities storing it find the data useless enough to forever trash it. Even then, is our data ever well and truly deleted? It's hard to say these days. Nevertheless, interesting art hacks should result from the event, as well as some notion of what the future holds for the derailed digital revolution.

Art Hack Day organizer Paul Christophe interprets the notion of digital decomposition as obsolescence. "As technology progresses, some websites don't even run on modern day browsers because the code used to write them is obsolete," said Christophe. "The idea for me is as we increasingly make and use technology, it's just going to happen that tech will become obsolete with a shorter lifespan. So, there will be this data out there that is living but not directly accessible."

Fellow Art Hack Day organizer Olof Mathé suggested, with a hint of humor, that an argument could be made that data doesn't actually decompose but petrify. Even so, he wonders how relevant that petrified data can possible be. "All of this stuff that we create that is so culturally specific has a half-life of 15 days before it becomes irrelevant," Mathé observed. "Say the NSA has a full history of my Facebook posts and conversations—how much of that data is culturally relevant two or five years later, and what does it actually say about me?"

Mathé also sees a paradox in that those who actively work to improve technology are simultaneously accelerating its demise. The more someone tweets an article, for instance, the more users shorten its half-life and push it into irrelevancy. How often, Mathé wondered, do we actually go online and see sites that are really old? Not very often. He sees an "absurd cult of freshness" online that isn't as dominant in other media. Analogue libraries, for example, don't exhibit this characteristic. In libraries there is a concern for canon and complete works instead of the internet's constant demand for new production.

All of this has me wondering if there is another layer to the paradox. Might this cult of freshness make data mining not only possible but, indeed, powerful; exerting a pressure that pushes us to constantly create more personal and collective data.

Christophe said that the last few Art Hack Days had elements of data mining, surveillance, and the dodging thereof as themes because they're part of the tech zeitgeist. But, he insisted, each artist decides for themself how deep they want to delve into those themes. Christophe pointed to Null Stecker, a project developed by Dennis Paul for "Going Dark," as a good example of the type of hacked art produced at recent events. Null Stecker is a hardware hack where 220V power plugs are "modifed to trigger short circuits when plugged into the wall," shutting down all electricity in the process, and turning the power plug into an instrument of disruption and civil disobedience. In the age of surveillance, darkness becomes anonymity.

For "Going Dark," artist Niko Princen created a coloring book based on the NSA's cloud graphic found in the PRISM slides. Using the coloring books that are mandatory in totalitarian regimes like North Korea, Princen placed hundreds of cloud sheets on the floor at Art Hack Day. Much to his surprise, kids in attendance started filling in and embellishing the clouds.

Another artwork, the Beacon Frame (again, inspired by PRISM), was a genuine exploit where people walked into a dark room to find a rotating prism projecting names and other data onto the walls. The data was all pulled from smartphone WiFi communications. "When most phones are searching for WiFi, they're simultaneously sending a lot of information about the phones' user," noted Mathé.

And for the New York Art Hack Day, the project "How to Be Anonymous in the Age of DNA" dealt with DNA spoofing. Developed by a four-person group including Adam Harvey, the idea was that since DNA links back to us, it can therefore be compromised to foil surveillance. "We usually think of surveillance in terms of Facebook or anything that happens to our digital lives," said Christophe. "But, this is something that can happen in the physical world, where there is technology that can be leveraged for 'found DNA'."

The goal is to be technically, politically, and artistically relevant to the times. "While the theme could be read as having a surveillance and privacy component, there can also be truly artistic and technological interpretations," said Mathé. "'Afterglow' is the natural follow-up to 'Going Dark," which Mathé said was co-opted from the government term used to describe new technologies that put their surveillance capacilities in the dark. There is the political dimension to that phrase, but it also evoked the technology that helps people go dark, and, on an artistic level, what it means to go dark. As Mathé put it, "Afterglow" is the mature, post-Snowden perspective on these issues.

"As coders and artists, we have this very ambivalent view on all of this data we generate," noted Mathé. "As artists, we're always propelled to create something new, while as coders we're terrified of anything that stinks of old technology. As it turns out, old technology is probably the best way to avoid surveillance."

Though Mathé insists that one never knows what will come out of an Art Hack Day, he believes the event will see a fair amount of hardware works being made, given DIY hardware trends in Berlin. So, old and new tech could find a fresh synthesis at the Berlin Art Hack Day. And with close to 100 participants signed up, there is sure to be some creative hacker art.

Akihiko Taniguchi, who describes himself as a "part-time artist," recently posted a video of his meticulously 3D-scanned day-to-day landscape. It's a great metaphor for surveillance culture, from state-sanctioned espionage to corporate data mining. Another participant, artist Verena Friedrich, was hitting on data mining back in 2007 with ENDO, a black box-like device that records data from its surroundings. Equipped with various sensors, ENDO featured a computer mainboard and a terabyte hard drive, and continuously gathered data like sound, images, temperature, GPS-coordinates, humidity, and air pressure.

"In the course of time, the machine produces a huge pool of information whose content or usage remains unknown," Friedrich mused at the time. "Does the record serve for any secret intentions? Could it be exploited to act against ourselves? Is this a trap? What remains is endless speculation—about the nature of information, the construction of medial reality, the 'ghost in the machine' and a potential loss of control."

And artist and programmer Justin Blinder recently created "Dark Side of the Prism," a Firefox add-on that "provides a soundtrack for our surveilled internet meanderings" in the post-PRISM world. The add-on uses Pink Floyd's "aural prism," Dark Side of the Moon, as a "playlist to the NSA's tracking efforts, serving as an auditory reminder of how our online activities are surveilled."

These are just a few of the contributors who will be fusing hacking and art as a commentary on mass surveillance, Big Data, privacy, and other aspects of our post-digital lives. Organizers are making a bunch of equipment available to hacker artists, including Arduinos, Kinects, soldering stations, monitors, and other gadgets. Apparently there will be some surprises leading up to the event, so stay tuned. Later this month I will be rounding up some of the most interesting projects to come out of the Berlin Art Hack Day.