Artistic Challenges within Control Societies: Big Data and Democratic Resistance

Abstract

This paper will first briefly map out the shift from disciplinary to control societies (what I call designer capitalism, the idea of control comes from Gilles Deleuze) in relation to surveillance and mediation of life through screen cultures. The paper then shifts to the issues of digitalization in relation to big data that have the danger of continuing to close off life as zoë, that is life that is creative rather than captured via attention technologies through marketing techniques and surveillance. The last part of this paper then develops the way artists are able to resist the big data archive by turning the data in on itself to offer viewers and participants a glimpse of the current state of manipulating desire and maintaining copy right in order to keep the future closed rather than being potentially open.