Experiments in Surveillance Capitalism - Garnet Hertz

This piece under development (as of October 2019) involves two dozen Google Home smart speakers, a disassembled and hacked television/VCR combo, and — just maybe — The Department of Homeland Security.

This new large-scale robotic art installation is a machine that talks to an array of Google speakers with voice recognition. The system, which consists of a modified cathode-ray-tube television from the 1990s melded with custom electronics and robotics, spins around a large circular arrangement of speakers that resembles a form of technological séance. The system emulates a person speaking into a smart speaker, but programmatically inputs information as a tool to reverse engineer how personal data profiles are constructed and shaped by companies like Google.

From a technical standpoint, a large (~3m) cantilever arm spins around the center of the circle, with a bare CRT screen at the end of the arm. The screen seeds data by voice, played through a speech synthesis circuit, that triggers the chorus of smart speakers to start babbling. The multichannel sound experience resembles David Rokeby's n-cha(n)t from 2001. The mechanism works with the arm spinning quite slowly — approximately one 360' revolution every 5 minutes. The Google Home speakers hear the audio samples differently and at slightly disparate times, which results in a somewhat creepy robotic flock of voices that sometimes converge and sometimes differ.

"Experiments in Surveillance Capitalism: Machine for Calling the Department of Homeland Security" makes the smart speakers search for controversial search terms that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are reported to monitor. The idea is that these "red flag" keyword Google searches will attract the attention of the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI or CSIS. This system plays with the fear that individuals have about privacy with contemporary smart devices. Related to this, in Canada (and in several other countries) there have been many recent concerns about Huawei having ties to the Chinese government in regard to 5G network infrastructure — but it is worth also considering how companies like Google collect, synthesize, sell, and swap our private datum.

Full online documentation is forthcoming and will be uploaded here, but in the meantime read a description of the project at https://www.ecuad.ca/news/2019/meet-your-critical-maker and listen to an interview I did about the piece at https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/43-north-by-northwest/.

Current search terms:

Search terms have been collected from various online sources that claim to possess a list of search terms obtained through freedom of information requests that American security forces and institutions actively track.