Terms and conditions /Termeni si conditii

Terms and conditions, video installation, Windswept: Art Encounters Biennial, Timisoara, 2019; images by Andrei Infinit, Adrian Catu.

Working with a group of teenagers, the artists together with the playwright Mihai Lukács explored within a workshop held at the Youth House, the relationship between social networks, data collection, and surveillance technologies. In the act of consent to terms and conditions of any digital service, what are the implications in terms of individual sovereignty? The starting point of the work is an excerpt from Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism published in 1951. Arendt describes a simple graphic system employed by the Czarist secret police, The Okrana Guard (operating between 1881-1917), in order to produce a social mapping of an individual by studying one’s close relationships, contacts, and interactions. A density of information can derive from the cartographic representation of social interactions. Only technical limitations, suggests Arendt restricted this endeavor to be applied on a larger scale and fulfil the dream of a totalitarian police. In the current digital era, Arendt’s anticipation of an extensive social mapping as a tool for control reads like a prophecy. Passages from Arendt’s text were pasted as vinyl stickers on four large canvases, with the sentences being peeled off letter by letter during the workshop. Although the text was removed, it left permanent and visible traces.  Around and across the text, circles drawn by the artist evoke the surveillance system described by Arendt and point out to the shared perceptive principles between the language of abstraction in art and data visualization. Inserted in the rotunda hall of the Youth House, the textiles become part of its architecture. The communal reading of an excerpt from an internet agreement repeats in the space in loop. The voices of young performers overlap in a choir treating the click-to-agree terms the same way they are  written – close to unintelligible for each one of us. Anca Rujoiu

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