Transparency Machines explores the relationship between technology and the subtle forms of violence which – based on their invisibility, social acceptance, and apparently harmless incursion into all areas of social life – come to define culture and interpersonal relationships, as well as power structures. From different points of view, four audiovisual programs will question the role of technology, and more specifically technological images, in the digital context and within the paradoxes of the technosphere: visibility and invisibility, transparency and opacity, control and optimization, utopia and dystopia.

Program 3. Hyperoptics: visibility or invisibility

Digital footprints: in/visibility and the right to be removed from the Internet. Reflection on digital materialism and data farming. Social, political, and military false alarm following the substitution of the American flag for a white flag on the Brooklyn Bridge in New York (Matthias Wermke, Lutz Henke and Mischa Leinkauf). Metadata storage in outdated 19th century New York architecture (Emma Charles). Democratic resistance against monitoring systems and the accessibility of information in the age of mass surveillance (Metahaven). Trip to a future Google mega datacenter, inspired by Jan Dibbets’ nature art, copying the images from Google Earth by hand (Michiel van Bakel). A visual essay on customer modeling based on compilation and analysis of online data (Donna Verheijden). The omnivision of cameras and the regime of real-time emission/control of images: the ubiquity and instantaneity of closed circuit images and their global distribution (Chris Marker).

Symbolic Threats, Matthias Wermke, Lutz Henke and Mischa Leinkauf, 2015, 15 min, Germany, English

Black Transparency, Metahaven, 2013, 14 min, Netherlands, English

Fragments on Machines, Emma Charles, 2013, 15 min, United Kingdom, English

Road Trip to the Dutch Mountains, Michiel van Bakel, 2015, 3 min, Netherlands, no dialogue

Land of Desire - Happy is the New Black, Donna Verheijden, 2016, 18 min, Netherlands, French and English, English subtitles

Stopover in Dubai, Chris Marker 2011, 27 min, United Arab Emirates, no dialogue, subtitles in English

Photo: Fragments on Machines, 2013 © Emma Charles

Acknowledgements

LIMA, Amsterdam

And all the artists