A Memorial for the Still Living. Premiered at John Hansard Gallery in Southampton. Upcoming show at the Horniman Museum in London.
BOOK
Tactical Biopolitics: Art, Activism, and Technoscience. MIT Press; Leonardo Book Series. ed., Beatriz da Costa & Kavita Philip.
WORKSHOP
Invisible Earthlings Workshop. [as part of "Species We Live With"]
Pigeonblog [documentation & ephemera] on view at Sweeney Art Gallery in Riverside, CA.
REVIEWS/INTERVIEWS I LIKE
The Place of Art in the Age of Biotechnological Reproducibility. (pdf) [Review of Tactical Biopolitics in "BioSocieties."]
Processes, Issues AIR: Toward Reticular Politics. (pdf) [Full fledged article about Preemptive Media's and my work in "Australian Humanities Review."]
Interview with Beatriz da Costa. (pdf) [by Alessandro Ludovico, "Neural Magazine."]
COLLABORATIVE
Preemptive Media Preemptive Media is a collaborative operating at the nexus of art, activism and technology.
BEATRIZ DA COSTA
Beatriz da Costa is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. She works at the intersection of art, politics, engineering and the life sciences.
Swipe 2002-04
Swipe addressed the gathering of data from drivers' licenses, a form of data-collection that businesses are practicing in the United States. Bars and convenience stores were the first to utilize license scanners in the name of age and ID verification. These businesses, however, admit they reap huge benefits from
this practice beyond catching underage drinkers and smokers with fake IDs. With one swipe—that often occurs without notification or consent by the cardholder—a business acquires data that can be
used to build a valuable consumer database free of charge. Post 9/11, other businesses, like hospitals and airports, are installing license readers in the name of security. And still other
businesses are joining the rush to scan realizing the information contained on drivers' licenses is a potential gold mine. Detailed database records, of course, also benefit law enforcement
officers who can now demand this information without judicial review in large part due to the USA Patriot Act.
Many people are unaware that personal data is even encoded on their license, and, if they do realize this, they probably do not know exactly what information is there.
SWIPE brings attention to these practices and enables people to see exactly what is stored on their mysterious strip.
SWIPE also illustrates how this information is used and why businesses and government crave it. Our hope is to encourage thinking beyond the individual self ("I do not care if a
bar database has my name and address and time of visit...") toward understanding databases as a discursive, organizational practice and an essential technique of power in today's social field.
With public knowledge there is a chance for public voices, and ultimately resistance.
Swipe was produced by Preemptive Media.
view original project website: Swipe website