Why Queering Surveillance Capitalism with Art Matters: A Microfilm by Lynn Hershmann Leeson
In the microfilm Shadow Stalker (2019 - see below), artist Lynn Hershman Leeson highlights the consequences of integrating AI algorithms into the social sphere. The video is part of a larger interactive installation that aims to highlight the biases in AI, but also to raise awareness of data protection and privacy. At the entrance of the exhibition space, visitors are invited to give their e-mail address. An algorithm especially conceived for Shadow Stalker collects data linked to the e-mail address and projects the retrieved personal data such as pictures, bank account numbers or
Data collection is ubiquitous. From browsing the web to using apps, from facial recognition systems to the Internet of Things (IoT) and from financial transactions to healthcare records, telecommunications and drones, escaping the surveillance of data or ‘dataveillance’ is hardly an option anymore. Moreover, dataveillance disproportionately affects marginalized groups of people that are underrepresented in the data the algorithms are trained on. The algorithms hence perpetuate and reinforce discriminatory norms on identities and bodies. Facial recognition systems are, for instance, more biased with dark skin tones, especially those of females, transgender persons are misidentified and persons with disabilities are not recognized by the systems. These biases carry significant political and social implications since they are used in many areas such as law
Artists such as Hershman Leeson play a crucial role in exposing, disrupting and countering these systems. Ephemerals wants to probe and speculate on the implications of contemporary AI systems through art and queer theory - both open-ended terms - that enable a greater hack into systems of surveillance and control.
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Data as the Contemporary Panopticon: A Look Through Shu Lea Cheang’s ‘3x3x6’
The work, that expanded over various rooms of the 16thcentury prison Palazzo delle Prigioni, touches upon the criminalization of non-conforming sexualities and contemporary uses of surveillance techniques.
The installation compromised ten videos. Each of them centered around a character that was convicted for sexual misconduct. It stretched from Casanova, who was imprisoned at the specific site, to Sade or Foucault. They are presented in subverted ‘counter-historical’ videos that deconstructed the visual and legal hegemonies and demonstrate how norms are created on sexuality and gender.
Michel Foucault was imprisoned in Poland because of his homosexuality. A prolific writer, he did not only lay the basis of surveillance studies with Discipline and Punish (1975), but he also paved the way for queer theory with The History of Sexuality (1976).
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault claims that power and control are gained solely by observing someone. He illustrates this through the ‘panopticon’, an architectural prison concept designed by Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century that would allow a guard to watch over all inmates from one specific point. Unknowing when the prisoners are being surveilled, they would adapt their behavior at all times.
For Foucault, modern-day Western civilizations are disciplinary societies with the concept of the panopticon being used throughout institutions such as prisons, schools, factories, hospitals and the military. Watching over individuals with the use of scientific knowledge turns the individuals into ‘docile bodies’ that are easier to control, discipline, normalize and punish.
Building on the Foucauldian notion of panopticism, Gilles Deleuze anticipated the expansion of surveillance through data in Postscript on the Societies of Control (1990). He noticed a shift from Foucault’s ‘disciplinary societies’ to what he named ‘societies of control’ that were made possible through data collection.
In 3x3x6, Cheang installed facial recognition cameras at the entrance of her installation to capture the visitors’ faces. They are projected in a later room, the images are altered in an aesthetic way. Cheang underlines the ethical aspect of capturing someone’s face and identity and the opaque and subjective uses of them. She also hacks the technology by using the faces for aesthetic purposes instead of domination.
In the final room of the installation, the visitors are invited to upload a video through an app of themselves dancing, supporting a girl in Iran who convicted for posting a video online where she dances. The interactivity integrates the visitors in the work, which raises their concern and empathy with the topic even further.
Probing surveillance capitalism through gender and sexuality, like Cheang does, is “fundamental at mounting a critique of surveillance” according to Kirstie Ball, scholar and co-founder of the journal ‘Surveillance and Society’. Surveillance has historically been used mainly on marginalized people such as political dissidents, slaves or sexual non-conforming people.
In History of Sexuality, Foucault parallels how scientific knowledge on sexuality — just like on criminality — enabled the modern control and domination of people through their sexuality. He notices that in the 20th century, people felt obliged to confess about their sexual life to their physicians or therapists. They thus internalized norms on sexuality and aimed to conform to them. Sexuality became a fundamental social construct for moral and identity that dates back to the Victorian era where heterosexuality was considered the norm (Foucault, 1976).
Shu Lea Cheang’s work can also be read through the writings of Paul B. Preciado. In Testo Junkie and The Countersexual Manifesto, he presents a counter-hegemonic vision of sexuality that challenges normative constructions of gender and desire. The Countersexual Manifesto proposes a radical reimagining of sexual politics based on the rejection of heteronormativity and the embrace of non-normative forms of embodiment and desire. Preciado calls for a politics of pleasure that celebrates the diversity of sexualities and resists the regulatory forces of bio-power.
With 3x3x6 Cheang challenges heteronormative norms and laws and reverses the gaze from ‘being viewed’ by technology to ‘exposing’ through it and ultimately celebrates each one’s uniqueness. By disrupting surveillance technologies, Cheang highlights the reality that “we live in a data panopticon today” while instilling a queer utopian perspective to it. With these various strategies, Cheang disrupts technology to raise awareness of contemporary surveillance techniques, she deconstructs heteronormative historical formations and invites to collectively resist and queer contemporary surveillance systems in a symbolic and poetic way.
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The Cyber (In)Visibility Paraodox As Seen in Hito Steyerl’s Fucking Didacting Educational. mov File
Steyerl highlights the inherent dangers associated with both being seen and not being seen. On one hand, the disappearance from public discourse poses a significant threat to marginalized groups and non-conforming identities, as it can lead to erasure and further marginalization. Conversely, constant surveillance and visibility subject individuals to vulnerability, echoing Foucault's notion of surveillance as a mechanism of power.
This paradox is exacerbated in a datafied world, where surveillance from higher authorities, sousveillance from peers, and counterveillance from the dominated towards the dominating powers coalesce into an "omniveillant" digital society. The ownership and control of personal data by Big Tech companies often clash with individual agency and privacy rights, further complicating the issue.
Sex workers are an example of this visibility-invisibilty paradox. While they can promote their services to a larger public, they also expose themselves to threats. To help sex workers with the issue the collective Cypher Sex published How to Cypher Sex: A Manual for Collective Digital Self-Defense Guides (2024). A manual that is specifically aimed to supporting sex workers in Belgium to hide their identities.
Talking to Donatella Portoghese from Constant that supported the publication, she explained that the collective carried a thorough research to understand the needs of sex workers in Belgium. They received demands for a similar publication from other regions as well, but the self-defense guide is specifically designed for the Belgian context and cannot be duplicated since it strongly depends on the local context like local privacy laws, communication platforms, service providers, etc.). It provides however a blueprint on how to camouflage from digital surveillance.
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Queering Genetic Data: Biohacking à la Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Mary Maggic
Artificial intelligence (AI) plays a significant role in analyzing genetic data, using algorithms to classify, surveil, and commodify human biology in ways that raise ethical concerns about bias, privacy, and the reduction of identity to data points. Heather Dewey-Hagborg underlines this in Stranger Visions (2012–2013) where she collected DNA samples from discarded objects in public spaces — such as chewing gum, hair, and cigarette butts — and used this material to create speculative portraits of anonymous individuals. By visualizing these genetic traces, her work critiques the hidden ways in which bodies are surveilled and classified. AI is central to these processes, as algorithms are often employed to analyze genetic material and draw conclusions about identity, race, or even behavioral predispositions. Through this work, Dewey-Hagborg reveals the subjective nature of these interpretations, exposing the biases and assumptions encoded into both scientific methodologies and the AI systems that amplify them.
While Dewey-Hagborg’s work focuses on the technological processes underpinning genetic surveillance, Mary Maggic shifts the critique to biopolitical systems, exploring how pharmaceutical and institutional control restrict bodily autonomy. In their project Open Source Estrogen (see manifesto in video below), Maggic asks the speculative question: “What if it were possible to make estrogen in the kitchen?”. Maggic critiques the monopolization of hormone production by the pharmaceutical industry and its role in enforcing normative gender binaries. By turning hormone synthesis into an accessible, do-it-yourself process, they transform biohacking into a participatory act of resistance.
Maggic’s practice resonates with Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie, which explores the ways in which the body is shaped by pharmaceutical and technological systems under capitalism. Like Preciado, Maggic critiques the regulation of gender and sexuality by these systems, adding a speculative and communal approach. By queering the processes that control bodies and identities, Maggic offers alternative futures where autonomy and fluidity disrupt systems of control.
Together, Dewey-Hagborg and Maggic use biohacking to interrogate the systems that regulate bodies, identities, and biology. Dewey-Hagborg’s work directly critiques the intersection of AI and genetic data, exposing the biases and limitations of these technologies. Maggic, meanwhile, focuses on the biopolitical regulation of bodies through pharmaceuticals, expanding the critique to include institutional gatekeeping and bodily autonomy. Both artists challenge normative frameworks, where identity is no longer reduced to data or binaries but reimagined as fluid, complex, and resistant to control.
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Algorithmic Violence in Palestine
Gaza has been the setting for such recent devastating uses of AI technologies, such as ‘Lavender’, a database used by the Israeli army to kill some 37,000 Hamas targets. Lavender has been reported to have an error rate of 10% with little regard to the error rate of this technology.
An extensive facial recognition program based in part on Google Photos has also been deployed in the area, as well as Google’s Project Nimbus that has brought up public outcry for the unlawful collection of personal data of Palestinians.
Watch PalCoreCore by Dana Dawud
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