Zach Blas and the Challenge to the Surveillance State
Zach Blas’s work is subversive, rebellious, unsettling, political, and modern. He creates installations, films, how-tos, and various physical objects that relate to, and challenge, the role of technology, the surveillance state, the body, and the internet.
Truly biographical information about him is hard to come by, which almost seems purposeful in his artistic quest to distance himself from internet surveillance. He is currently based in London, lecturing at Goldsmiths: University of London. He has received degrees in film, design media arts, and completed his Ph.D. in Literature at Duke University. With this background, Blas never limits himself to one form, but rather explores and utilizes film, graphic design, and technology strategically to get his message across. Blas isn’t just a political artist, but rather a politically driven artist, focused on making a statement.
One of his recent pieces that has garnered a lot of press, is the Facial Weaponization Suite. Blas is critical of the growing surveillance state, as seen in the increase in use of biometric data by Homeland Security and companies like Google, as well as in the growth of facial recognition software in cameras everywhere. In the video below, he describes the Fag Face Mask, which he created as a response from multiple studies that reported people can read the faces of queer men as queer, even when only seeing them for a few milliseconds. Instead of allowing the state to read and track people based on their faces, Blas weaponizes the face by using the facial data of queer men, to create a mask that software cannot read or track. The face therefore goes from being a data point or a tracker, to an offensive weapon, paying homage to the zapatistas, Anonymous, and other masked resistance groups. The piece is both a physical creation of the blobular pink plastic mask, and a political information tool in how he lays out his argument in an easy to share video.
This particular piece highlights Blas’s use of technology to challenge technology. To design and create the mask makes use of particular softwares, which he uses to fight the surveillance state. In part of a similar piece, Contra-Internet, he uses screen capture technology and photoshop to document his social media exodus: statements declaring he is resigning from the internet, that the information posted to the internet is removed from his ownership, that he is removing himself from digital kinship, etc. These declarations are then imported into photoshop where all identifying information is removed. This is only one part of his Contra-Internet installation/how-to guide in which he is focused on challenging how the internet functions as an “instrument for state oppression and accelerated capitalism” (http://www.zachblas.info/works/contra-internet/). Again, he uses technology to make a point about the technology that rules our lives and how information about us is collected.
Blas’s other work focuses on similar themes of getting outside of the technological sphere and surveillance state. His films and utilitarian creations highlight how technology can particularly harm minorities and how technology can be inverted or turned on it’s head to challenge the state. This state interference is inscribed on the body and therefore the body must become part of the resistance, and shown in his work that emphasizes the body and the face. Blas is a modern artist unafraid to make leaps, take risks, or to address to the elephant in the room when it comes to technology and the role it plays in our daily lives.
Information and pictures taken from: http://www.zachblas.info/ and http://www.gold.ac.uk/visual-cultures/staff/blas-zach/
