Surrogate is a body of work centred around issues of reproductive technology and bodily autonomy comprised of a series of physical and performative inputs and outputs to engage and provoke conversations about the topic.

Created by Anouk Zibault at ECAL, ‘Lieux Ordinaires’ (Ordinary Places) is a project that explores new narratives of public space framed by surveillance – an alternative perspective and a medium with a power to ‘document’.

Created by Filipe Vilas-Boas, ‘Tracking Skynet’ comprises the recording of a surveillance satellite whilst being under surveillance of the same.

Created by Random International, Zoological is a flock of autonomous, flying spheres that move collectively. Algorithmically driven, the spheres react to their surroundings and, sometimes, to people within their environment. 

Showcasing three film collaborations by Liam Young and Tim Maughan, “New Romance: Love Stories from the Machine City” is an exhibition currently showing at the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery (Columbia GSAPP) about finding respite and cultivating resistance in the smart city.

“Evidentiary Realism” is an exhibition that delves into the aesthetics of sites of inaccessibility, incarceration, and intrigue. CAN’s NYC correspondent Dylan Schenker ponders the Paolo Cirio-curated show, which emerges from the collaboration of NOME and the Fridman Gallery.

Go Rando is a Chrome and Firefox extension by Ben Grosser that allows Facebook users to obfuscate their emotional reactions to prevent them from being surveilled and analyzed.

Julian Oliver’s latest hardware provocation is a fake cellular tower masquerading as an HP laserjet printer. The device evokes ubiquitous ‘StingRay’ surveillance technology and the real (fake) cell towers that pepper urban landscape.

Created by Saurabh Datta (automato), Poetic Router is a project that investigates the potential of the everyday manufactured IoT platforms beyond what is commonly discussed. Whereas most concerns of IoT are focused on security since every “Chip-‘ed” device is hackable and can be jacked and modded remotely. Poetic Router explores network transmission as a way to generate poetry by scraping the data found on the server links.

In the social media age, one’s importance or relevance is typically measured in online followers—as that number goes up, the level of validation we feel does too. But how would a ‘real life follower’ change those dynamics? Created by Lauren McCarthy, ​Follower​ is an uncanny performance project that examines our feelings towards attention and surveillance.

This past December a dozen artists, activists, and researchers converged at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry for a book sprint. Led by Addie Wagenknecht, the all-women cadre convened under the collective moniker Deep Lab, and examined how privacy, security, surveillance, and large-scale data aggregation are problematized in the arts, culture and society.

Created by Francesco Tacchini, SPOOK-I is a hypothetical but operative US National Security Agency inspired machine. It mimics two surveillance techniques available to the NSA Tailored Access Operations unit, in order to expose the technology employed by state surveillance for the ‘weaponization of everyday’.

Drawing on his expansive knowledge of the history of representation, artist and scholar Pablo Garcia ruminates on the significance of the selfie in response to the ‘New Perspectives’ theme of HOLO 1’s PERSPECTIVE section.

A strangeness abounds when people are asked to theorize and elucidate something so untethered and rhizomatic as the Internet. At its basic structure, networks connect us to the images, data and knowledge we draw upon every day. Yet what is at the heart of these connections and what separates or integrates our In Real Life (IRL) and digital personas?

This installation by Seiko Mikami, consisting of three parts, is currently set up in YCAM – Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media