There are two themes in this section; the contribution arts makes to privacy and the contribution computational sciences may make to the arts. ‘Art’, ‘artist’ and ‘fine arts’ in another value laden, cultural specific term, one that I am wholly unqualified to discuss. I suggest you start here.
Meanwhile, I can say that artists often engage in critical social commentary. Surveillance artists help inform expectations with data subjects (aka all of us). This comes at a time when a critical eye is turning towards artistic endeavors that invade traditional privacy norms. Most recently, there was a short film produced by two directors using a drone to film actors having sex on a rooftop in Brooklyn. Although it was staged, it brought to bear a social conversation about the potential use of drones and how they may capture our data. See below as an example, and the comment threads in particular.
Unlike traditional surveillance cameras that usually identify an owner (e.g., the camera I am holding while I record a video, or the name on the building on which the surveillance camera is mounted) drones do not clearly identify who the owners are by virtue of being. Another example is Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s portraiture of DNA samples from discarded hair, cigarettes and gum that she collected. Other artists deliberately use surveillance tactics themselves, Conversnitch is a project that tweets overhead conversations collected from an eavesdropping device placed in public spaces. These examples, and many others, raise the question of whether this type of art is ‘fair game’ (Maass, 2014).
A formal model (in the computational sense) can help in this domain as well. For example, artists can utilize the model to identify the various types of personal information and sources for their projects to understand the impact on the data subject’s privacy, they may make different decisions. In any case, the model makes visible the impact of such work through the use of the factor sets. Such artwork is a valuable social commentary and the model may address some of the growing privacy concerns over its contribution to the conversation on privacy…