Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
Screening Surveillance (https://www.screeningsurveillance.com/) is a series of short near future fiction films that aims to raise awareness about how different inter-operating surveillance systems -- educational technology, social media, wearable devices, smart cities -- use our data to analyze, shape, and often disrupt our lives in different ways. We need to consider the implications of these systems on society and critically examine the logics and practices within big data systems that underpin, enable, and accelerate surveillance.
Intended as public education resources to spark discussion and extend understandings of surveillance, trust, and privacy in the digital age, each film focuses on a different aspect of big data surveillance and the tensions that manifest when the human is interpreted by the machine.
- #tresdancing (22 mins, 2021) speculates the effects of escalating surveillance and control through educational technology.
- Blaxites (12 mins, 2018) imagines what would happen if our access to much needed healthcare is dictated by our healthcare provider’s surveillance of our social media activities.
- A Model Employee (16 mins, 2018) tackles the issues of workplace surveillance through wearable devices.
- Frames (11 mins, 2018) imagines an all-knowing smart city as it fails to understand the actions of one of its citizens.
The films speak to the AoIR2023 theme, Revolution, in that the films highlight the ways in which surveillant systems of control oppress marginalized communities, and encourage us to come together to resist these systems. It is important to note that each of the protagonists in the films is a woman of colour, further highlighting how interconnected systems of surveillance often fall hardest on people of colour.
In this session creator of the Screening Surveillance project will screen the films and engage in conversations about:
technologically mediated surveillance in the contexts of each of the films,
speculative pedagogies and speculative methods
the filmmaking process -- film as research creation and knowledge mobilization, collaborating with non-academic partners, translating scholarly work into creative works.
