Mapped futures and poetic experiences: cartography, performance and surveillance

Abstract

From the notion of surveillance capitalism, characterized by massive data collection and analysis, we will present how this type of system goes beyond the discussions of technology, having strong political configuration and aesthetic results that establish new forms of visibility. With the increasingly common machine learning algorithms, and the large amount of information that these systems can extract from the most diverse daily actions, a detailed profile of everyone is constructed with objective analysis, decision prediction and mediated exposure to the most appropriate content. The construction of a subjectivity based on the future but updated in the present with experiences already foreseen and calculated by an information system. In a duality of information and sensation, experience gives way to prediction. Starting from a bibliographical contextualization of theorists who study these subjects, the discussion scenario will be established. Then, using the poetic research in development by the author, the project “In Search of a Place” will be presented: an audiovisual performance that uses commercial artificial intelligence systems as triggering devices for poetic actions. In the performance, algorithmic approximations of geographically distant places are performed, based on surveillance images made by the artist. As a result, new cartographies are created of a space that is built with surveillance mechanisms, but that in a way subverts them, taking away the function and objectivity expected by the system. Thus, it concludes by presenting the subversion of the functionalities of algorithmic logic for poetic creation.