The Emergent City and Invisible Agency

Stanza focuses on the landscape of monitored and networked real-time information flows, and the artworks created reflect this. Underpinning his artworks are a whole series of potential problems about observation, invisible agency, and the ethics of the control space. Stanza\’s digital artworks are experienced as fused mashed-up data cities and real-time performative city experiences, all re-presented online as systems of control and systems that demonstrate how these systems control. Furthermore the artwork demonstrates how we are complicit and thus entangled in the surveyed and monitored technological layers that the artworks are communicating and fit seamlessly into what he calls panoptic aesthetics. What becomes real are the art installations, sculptures, and paintings Stanza exhibits. The work asks how new technologies can imagine a world where we as citizens are liberated and empowered by using new technologies in an inclusive, connected, collaborative, and shared experience. The artwork merges online virtual data layers to create The Third Space, enabling new possibilities in the virtual world of shared data. This leads to new questions and new economic possibilities, and a new perspective on understanding the world around us.

This city governs itself and its actions, and the intelligence is completely controlled by the data interactions of the system. The different ‘districts’ of the artwork act as a frame for the different expressions of data which in effect make up a connected city. Imagine walking out the door, and knowing every single action, movement, sound, micro movement, pulse, and thread of information is being tracked, monitored, stored, analyzed, interpreted and logged. Selected artworks explore these concepts relating to the behaviours, activities, and changing information, of the world around us using my networked devices and information across the internet. https://www.stanza.co.uk/about/index.html

Dataveillance and Panoptic Aesthetics.

Can we use new technologies to imagine a world where we are liberated and empowered, where finally all of the technology becomes more than a gimmick and starts to actually work for us or are these technologies going to control us, separate us, divide us, create more borders?

As individuals we have been reduced to bits of code. We are either zeros or ones in the global information system. The whole world is penned in by algorithmic functions from corporate systems like Amazon, Google and Facebook, to a newer total surveillance system in China that tracks everything as a social status system ranking people for all to see completely on stage and in public. Whether by design, intention or desire, we have nonetheless brought ourselves to this position by our own agency.

Stanza will show several artworks representing data in new and different ways. The purpose is to put the user in control of the data, creating a public engagement artwork within urban space, and to create a new artistic context where such collaborations might lead to a new understanding of the shared networked technological landscape and our future relationship to it. Thus the process of engagement allows one to once again become aware of one\’s actions in the system and the complicit and entangled nature of this behaviour.