Many people don’t seem to care about privacy protection. Their lives seem like an open diary where they share intimate details and cringe secrets, living the post-privacy principle that we should not delete and forget but forgive. However, a lot of what is shared with friends and strangers, coulnd’t be further away from truth. Digital lies and sugarcoated wishful ideals dominate the data of the masses. Unwelcome sights are getting silenced or only shared privately with those that share the same views. The spiral of silence also reigns online ( “Auch im Netz regiert die Schweigespirale,”) as Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung put it.
Several artistic projects explore these phenomena. A “Fakebook” by the Dutch artist Zilla van den Born features a credible but invented report about her alleged travel to Asia. Manipulated photo montages and chat metting backgrounds even deceived her friends and parent. Zilla “fakebooked” to criticise the gullibility that may make us victims of varnished imagery and advertising claims.
While political transparency lacks, fashion features transparency everywhere. The art project Intimacy 2.0 by Daan Roosegaarde played with self expression and voyeurism, presenting fabrics turning transparent when detecting sexual arousal.
Voluntary Transparency or Unintended Exposure?
Xuedi Chen und Pedro Oliveira highlight unintended transparency Their Data Striptease x.pose wants to raise awareness about perpetual unintentional exposure by tranforming it from the seemingly virutal world into material reality. The artwork is an interactive dress made of elements that represent neighborhoods of New York. Each element becomes transparent when the arists visits the respective part of the city.
Claims about transparency and open data do not necessarily justify the exposure of private information or the use of personal data for commercial, authoritarian or other purposes.
Concerns about a society in which individuals are expected to share feelings, nude skin, and extensive personal information have been explored in literature. For example, Dave Eggers addressed this theme in the dystopian novel The Circle, which portrays a culture that promotes radical transparency while downplaying its risks.
Similar critical perspectives can be found in earlier dystopian and allegorical works such as Animal Farm by George Orwell.
Critical Art and its Ambivalence
Critical art of the 2010s not only makes the loss of privacy visible but also questions the desire for visibility itself. An ambivalent space emerges between self-presentation and control, emancipation and exploitation. A space where transparency can signify both liberation, manipulation and exposure. Works such as x.pose therefore do not merely depict a dystopian future; rather, they reflect a present in which people actively participate in the systems that collect and exploit their data.
What fascinates about artistic transparency fashion isn’t the alleged provocation of nudity, but the voluntary vulnerability when playing with barely controllable physical reactions. This also applies to contemporary short films with artistically erotic content, such as “Undress me”, “Kissing strangers”, oder “Hysterical Literature”.
Perhaps innovation and criticism do not go far enough, though. Hysterical Literature places the female performer at the center, prioritizing aesthetics over erotica, yet the film series still has viewers watching an attractive woman reading a book to an audience, while trying to ignore sexual stimulation happening beneath the table, only to finally succumb to it in a positively theatrical manner.
Real or fake, many viewers found watching the scene deeply arousing. What’s actually fake is pretending you’re only watching it for art’s sake.
Authentic fiction is sometimes more honest than facts, for even facts can lead to false conclusions. A harmless obvious deception can draw attention to dangerous manipulation. Amidst truth, broken trust, and gullibility, artists sought answers to the question of truth in the age of digital images and virtual worlds, long before “fake news” became a topic of discussion.
Staycation Fakation
A culture editor once portrayed a real trip online as more beautiful than it actually was. Not only her, but she did it ironically. She dined at the restaurant just once and photographed the plates of all her fellow travelers. Then, every day, she posted one of them on Instagram as her own. The same went for the paintings in the museum foyer, which could be photographed without an admission ticket.
In the era of professional video calls, it eventually became possible and commonplace to digitally swap one’s background and create the impression of being in the office, on vacation, or anywhere other than one’s untidy home office.
After all, the final case closes the circle back to the first, to Zilla and her fakation, as I would like to call it here.
