An interview with Gasta
Digital art and privacy
Artwork by Gasta
Papercut: What are your thoughts about surveillance and privacy? Sharing on social media, tracking, etc.?
Gasta: I’ve always been an internet enthusiast and an early adopter of social networks. Coming from my experience in newsgroups, bbs, forums, I truly believed in the power of sharing, of coming together, to do something better. And to be fair, we did it. I met incredible people, I learned [how to use] software online, found a job.
But, then, something happened. The whole idea of sharing, now, seems to be deeply poisoned. Everything we do online is tracked and sold to unknown third parties that, we have seen in recent present, are going to use it against us.
The idea itself of privacy is now radically different from what it was just 10 years ago. Going offline is not just hard. With the internet of things, especially if you live in a city like London, going offline is impossible. There will always be a camera shooting us, someone taking a picture where we are the background. And with more and more face recognition software, we really are tracked every minute.
But it doesn’t really matter, since we let Facebook long ago look into our secrets and sell them. Our freedom exchanged for a bunch of likes. And that’s completely fine for us.
Papercut: How is surveillance handled by your country? Is that different from other parts of the world? How?
Gasta: London is the most surveilled city in the world, boasting 500000 cctv cameras . Every day of our life is recorded by someone. There are 309 cctv cameras in the Oxford Circus tube station alone, and over 10 in a regular bus.
If on one side the idea is to protect the citizens, on the other hand we are constantly scrutinised. According to Big Brother Watch, a non profit organisation, every day our face is seen by 300 cctv cameras.
Papercut: How does your work explore the idea of surveillance?
Gasta: I tried to play with the topic of surveillance by creating surreal worlds, a sort of visual metaphor of my increasing fears about how we use social networks and we are constantly checked.
Looping animations that look, hopefully, funny but that hide in them a more profound meaning.
Facebook as religion, likes/lives/lies that are weighs to be lifted daily, hundreds of cctv cameras focusing on absolutely nothing like a bouncing ball, a huge speaker talking too loud on thousands of headless ears, people that are parasites to our brains, the Big Brother checking on us (are you happy? are you sad? are you happy now?)
Papercut: What do you want people to see or feel when they view your work?
Gasta: I really hope they just stop for a moment. Our eyes are more and more hungry and our attention span so little. This is why I started to create looping gifs. They seem to lock the viewer for slightly longer than a normal video or still image.
Papercut: Did you learn anything working on this project that makes you see the world differently?
Gasta: I would say that I feel very close to the theme of the project and it fueled my creativity. I really wanted to say something, how I feel about this whole mess we are living in at the moment. And to be fair, the outcome is pretty grim (as this whole “essay”, I’m so sorry!).
I’ve recently read a very inspiring and scary book by Adam Greenfield, Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life, in which he thoroughly analyses what kind of world we are shaping for ourselves, how the design is going to affect it and how it will affect the design itself.
We still have power to change the course of things. It’s just going to be hard and harder.
