internet insurgent: an interview w/ zach blas
How can an artist go about making revolutionary work in the internet age?
In this era of hyper-saturation, viewers have seen all there is to see, clicked all there is to click, and paradoxically, are so immersed in the web that the overload of information has dulled the capacity for criticism rather than granted any kind of meaningful political scope.
Cue Zach Blas, an academic and artist with a profound knowledge of emerging technologies, the capacities of the web, and their social implications.
He views data-mining as more than a creepy annoyance curating eerily relevant ads as we surf the web, but rather the tip of a vast sinister iceberg, the peeping eye of a Panopticon that is responsible, in large part, for the tumultuous and violent social landscape of our age. Tackling the paradox of comfortable consumerism, rapidly accelerating technology, and glaring oppression is his bread and butter.
You may recognize his Facial Weapnoization Suite—the gooey pink masks formed from facial aggregates meant for protests and counter-surveillance, or his militant Contra-Internet Manifesto, but despite his insurgent persona, Zach Blas’s MO is crafting a commentary whose quiet power educates viewers and readers about their own agency in a world bent on preemptively placating them.
I chatted with Zach Blas about queerness, surveillance, biometrics, and what it means to be post-internet. Join the conversation in medias res:
Was there any public event pre-Snowden that really inspired you?
What really got me doing that mask work was actually just kind of a very very very long-standing interest in the face, and the face in queer culture, and just thinking about the face as this site of performance, whether it’s using makeup in drag…I was always just really struck by that.
From a queer perspective the face—it’s about identification, it’s about communication but it’s also about transformation, changing—all about the “look”, there’s so much there but I never knew how to approach it.
What do you think about the whole visibility of trans surgeries and changes has gone from being something that’s very much supposed to be under the radar and unseen but is now surveilled in a very public way, and sort of monitored and policed by the public?
That’s a good point, and I think it connects to maybe how you would think about these issues of growing problems around surveillance…visibility is kind of a trap today. You know, that’s actually a famous line from Foucault, in his book Discipline and Punish. This is what got me really interested. I mean basically I started reading more and more about biometrics.
After Snowden, everyone just wants to think about the mask around surveillance and privacy, but that wasn’t the focus for me with the project. For me it was actually about, what does it mean that you have a technological system that all these governments around the world are implementing that’s actually based on standardizing identification… that’s the whole project of biometrics, it’s creating a global technical standard for how to identify everyone.
What happens is the non-normative people, or the minoritarian people that don’t match these standards… it doesn’t work. And the important thing about that—the biometrics not working, is that it can actually cause serious political harm or violence. I mean, my work is guilty of that, but this why I talk about it this way. You can’t just have this kind of romance of escaping and getting out of all that, you also kind of have to understand that some people are misrecognized…
A lot of these biometric technologies when they were first coming out had a really difficult time even detecting dark skin. There’s actually a whole book on this called When Biometrics Fail, by a feminist communications scholar—
Isn’t that just an extension of the white dominant gaze? White men who are police officers often can’t distinguish between black men, and they’re not machines.
Of course, like you said, humans are the ones programming these algorithms. One thing you would think about then— OK, if this technology is failing to detect dark skin, maybe that means…they probably didn’t factor in a lot of people with dark skin, because a lot of these forms of detection are built off of collecting massive amounts of images—
Why do you think that the technology and biometrics are more sinister than the human function, and the authorities that do the exact same thing?
One way to think of that is, of course it’s all kind of connected.
Systematized now.
Yeah, so then you have different kinds of concepts for thinking about, well, what is governance today? The fact that it moves into biometrics a little bit more intense is this point that it operates at a global technical scale. That’s kind of the intense part about it, is that, not only are biometrics about standardizing identification…I mean, it’s a model of identification that’s based on disembodiment, right, because it’s supposedly like, “OK, I’m gonna scan your face and take that data, it’s an aggregate, and now it’s going to circulate through all these transnational networks.” If you go this country they can read the biometric data on your passport, if you go here they can do it…that digital component allows it to kind of exponentially accelerate and circulate around the world at a different scale.
That’s never comforting to you?
No.
As something that protects us against criminals?
That’s also what does comfort a lot of people, right, is that biometrics is about preemption.
You think it’s all guise?
I can’t remember off the top of my head right now, but if you look at some statistics about, you know, the U.S. government preventing terrorism by preemption, it’s pathetic. Super low.
For me these are larger ethical and philosophical questions about well, what does it mean to be living in a world where, actually this is what identity is becoming?
I’m writing two books right now: one I’m doing with Rhizome, and the other is a theoretical book. And the theoretical book—there’s another short essay you can find online about this, it’s called “Informatic Opacity”—but it’s kind of this idea that passes as a political and ethical concept that relates to feminism…and all this stuff, but this biometric understanding of identification, you know, it’s permeating in the world all these ways that totally go beyond police and government, and you’re actually seeing, cultural shifts.
So for example, you know this book—I’m really focusing on the face, so what I’m really interested in…actually you’re seeing a total shift right now in literally how people—in almost an everyday sense, what they think a face is, what they think it communicates.
How so?
For example, new technology on our phones that uses your face to unlock. That’s really interesting then, because, you know, here you have the face implemented in an everyday use on your phone as a security code. What’s interesting about the face is that the face has a long history in philosophy and art as being this prized site of otherness.
The person who’s most famously written on this is Emmanuel Levinas, this Jewish philosopher, and his whole thing is when you encounter the face of the other…when you see the face of another person, it’s this ultimate ethical demand that kind of makes you understand you’re bound to another person. That is so profoundly at odds with how faces are understood and mobilized today. Faces now are mobilized as surface codes, on a quantitative level.
Isn’t a face being unique enough to lock a phone just a validation of the uniqueness of that face?
That’s a good question. Maybe. Maybe. But it’s not just about uniqueness, it’s also kind of about ethical obligation. It’s also like, “What is a face?” Is a face something that’s quantifiable? It can be unique, but is it quantifiable, right? It has to be quantifiable when it becomes a code.
The mask project was so much more about this issue of identification standardization, because that to me seems to really be— that’s a queer feminist question.
Absolutely.
The project was never just about, oh, “hiding”, that’s not it at all. So for me, the reason I make mask as opposed to other people who have done stuff with fashion and make-up, is I really care about my work intersecting with the aspirations of social movements.
One thing that was really striking me was you have this kind of coterminous progression of the biometrics industry continuing to develop and an acceleration of mask protests all over the world.
Particularly when you look at those examples of mask protests, you know, I’m thinking about Zapatistas in Mexico, or you know, Pussy Riot, Anonymous…what’s so interesting there is yeah, of course, in those instances, they’re practically hiding their face, but that’s not just it.
I think it’s a mistake if you only kind of read those instances as trying to negatively hide, those are also about people coming together in some kind of collectivity to positively change. In those examples of social movements, they’re using masks as a way to actually collectivize. And so they’re using the mask to try and make some positive transformative demand…”We’re not going to let you reduce our faces to how you want to reduce them to, we’re going to refuse that,” and this gets back to this much larger question of visibility, which is really interesting because biometrics is just a single node in this larger question about visibility today. But of course it’s connected.
I’m trying to localize where your sinister perspective comes from.
I actually consider myself a pretty utopian thinker. To have that utopian projection, it requires real critique…so for me, I don’t have anything against the idea of what social media offers, but I do think Facebook is evil.
We’ve lost the vision of the alternative there. The mask project and the contra-internet project are very much connected because it’s really about thinking about how, you know, certain minoritarian persons are affected by forms of technological control.
The idea of the mask and the idea of contra-internet is like putting up this wall to the technological world and saying, “I’m setting boundaries in an environment where all of my privacy and all of my natural boundaries are being violated.” But what does that entail for a person to successfully do that in a world where technology is more than just having a Facebook page? It permeates daily life.
This can be a question that actually depressed you and derails you.
Yeah.
This is actually why I like making artwork. This is an important point: the artwork isn’t necessarily giving the practical solution. That would be incredibly arrogant, to think that I could come up with that on my own.
It’s more that, you know, the way I see the artwork, especially the mask, is that it kind of wobbles in this place between a practical tool and something conceptual.
A lot of what I’m invested in with the work is actually finding ways to visualize certain possibilities and pathways, and that doesn’t mean I have to power or the ability to see that all the way through. That’s going to take, you know, a lot more than me. There’s a whole group of artists who are doing different variations on this kind of work and I think it’s important that it’s understood that a lot of people are doing this, and that’s how things are going to move forward.
I guess that’s how I approach the contra-internet project. For me, one thing that just really, really struck me is this kind of language of post-Internet today. This mask work started getting a lot of attention, and then there was this kind of survey of post-internet art that came out in Frieze, which is this art magazine…and I have a full-color page in that article, and so I was kind of like, “Why am I the poster-child, poster-artist, for post-internet art, when it’s something that I have no connection to?” My genealogies are more cyber-feminism and tactical media—
You’re more anti-internet than post-internet.
Because I’m also so theoretically trained, and I care about the discourse around the work, I decided to kind of write a take-down of post-internet. Which is how the contra-internet essay— it actually emerged out of a more reactionary place, but since then it’s kind of changed into its own thing.
For me, the internet kind of operates like something of a totality today, and what I mean by that is, it’s very hard for people to imagine what the internet offers, what that could be beyond the internet. They have this particular idea of the internet that isn’t even necessarily bound to its technical specificities, and if you would tell someone that you’re against the internet, they would literally think you’re fucking insane. They would also think that’s a Luddite position. That attitude collapses the distinction between networks and the internet. The internet is made up of networks, but a network is not the internet, necessarily. I think there’s a lot of confusion with that.
I think this whole idea of post-internet— we’re living in this moment that has been indelibly marked by the internet. And first off, that’s just sloppy theorizing, and its incredibly geopolitically insensitive. You can’t begin to have some kind of militant vision or utopian vision from post-internet after the totalization of the internet. A lot of my work is about trying to find alternatives. Thinking from a queer feminist perspective, you know, queer culture has a rich history of alternative spaces, of safe spaces, and that just doesn’t translate into that digital network sphere.
You don’t think that it’s a safe space?
I don’t think it’s a safe space in the same way that a physical safe space means in queer culture.
That’s so interesting, I have the exact opposite perspective.
A lot people that I see that would be in those queer safe spaces in the physical world, they’re on these corporate social media outlets in the digital sphere. I find that really interesting, because Facebook is kind of like hanging out in Walmart.
But what about someone who goes to a gay bar--maybe it’s the 50’s, let’s say. And that bar is under siege by the police. Versus someone who’s living in the 2000s and they have access to internet pornography that helps them realize their sexuality, or access to information about celebrities who are queer or gay that helps them realize about themselves. I would consider an article about a queer person that is positive and informative to be a digital safe space.
I think that’s a fair point. This is also why it’s an art project, I think that in real day-to-day life, obviously the situation is a lot more compromised, and I don’t think the contra-internet project is calling for us to literally destroy the internet. For me it’s about actually trying to articulate alternative visions of networks.
First off that’s actually learning and understanding that the internet is not congruent with governance…it’s not how it necessarily was…the techno-utopianism of the 90’s and all that.
One thing that the work is focusing on is examples in countries when governments turn off the internet. In moments of really extreme uprisings, and that to me is really interesting, because those are such powerful crystallized moments of the internet being an extension of governances. So China, Turkey, Egypt…
I wrote down a quote that you had said, that “the internet is a premier arena of political control,” and I wanted to ask you how you reconcile that fact with countries that have highly restricted internet are the least politically autonomous?
Even those places though, where the internet is highly controlled, there are still places of surveillance. Even in places where they’re highly controlled there are probably even more factors of, surveillance and governance and all of that kind of happening, with securing data and information on citizens. So here’s my thing with that, what I’m interested in: in those moments, what happens? What happens when it’s just, no more internet? One thing that I’ve been really interested in is activist groups that have been experimenting with network alternatives, so you know, here I’m thinking of mesh networks— autonomous mesh networks--digital networks that don’t use the infrastructure of the internet.
So it’s literally a way of digitally networking that doesn’t use the internet. Maybe they don’t work that great, maybe they’re still under surveillance—
What’s really interesting about those moments to me is that they give glimmers, right, these kind of small, local, utopian flashes of networks after the internet. And see to me, I kind of read post-internet against itself: it’s not after supposedly the internet has totalized the world, it’s more like after the internet in the sense that now we can see something beyond the horizon of the internet.
A branch off.
I feel like that’s very hard for people to wrap their head around.
For so many people the internet is kind of just boxed around them. What would it mean to think beyond that…imagine the political alternative. And that is such a queer project to me.
Do you see the internet and surveillance as synonymous?
I mean, they’re definitely connected, yeah. For sure. And I think surveillance is a shitty word.
Why?
It’s just not adequate. Technically the etymology of surveillance means— it’s from the French, it means “seeing from above”. That word just doesn’t really encapsulate the technological complexity. You think surveillance you think a camera looking down at you…it’s so much more complex. That’s why there are terms like dataveillance, or even information scientists use words like “capture”, you know, and I think those words are a bit more accurate.
What does a utopian post-internet future look like to you? Or even just a utopian future with internet.
I think that’s a hard question to answer, but...maybe it looks like communism.
Do you think that’s favorable? Or preferable to what we have now?
Yes. I mean, not, you know, communism as it’s historically been acted out in places like Russia. But you know,actual communism. Theoretically, what communism means on principle, yes. Because it’s the commons, it’s sharing.
Would you consider yourself a communist?
I would consider myself, uh…
This is gonna be the title of the article, by the way.
No, please don’t put that kind of pressure on me!
I’m totally kidding.
You know, you try to practice that in a lot of ways that you can, but you live in a capitalist society.
But I think as an artist that’s so fascinating.
Well of course, this is why I like making artwork, because think about it: if I was doing this and I was someone working in policy change, all the politics would have to be functional at this level of the state. Being an artist allows you to think about politics and social change at these different scales and it doesn’t mean—again this just gets into that annoying, like, “oh, art doesn’t do anything”, I hate that conversation, I don’t believe it does something or not. But it can offer certain visions and impact people in different ways. And I feel like when I was young, living in the middle of nowhere West Virginia, with no internet, super disconnected from the world, you know, art in the form of music or books or film, whatever, like, those were kind of my alternative visions to know that there could be something else.
When did the idea of the internet turn into something dark for you?
Gosh. Probably…I mean, probably recently. Maybe in 2008. When I just started studying technology a little bit more critically, getting that training in school…
I mean, it’s complicated, I don’t want to come off completely anti-internet, I feel like that’s not the point of the project. The idea of contra-internet for me is supposed to be a provocation, and that idea of “against” is a little bit more jarring. I think it works better than just trying to articulate the alternative, because I don’t really know what that is. And I feel like we’re in a moment right now where it’s a bit more powerful to take the position against.
Totally. If you’re jarring people and provoking them, what’s the ideal response? What do you want people to get out of contra-internet?
What I want people to get out of contra-internet is to actually, you know, understand that there are possibilities beyond the internet. That idea of post-internet is this larger symptom of not being able to think or imagine beyond kind of what we’re already in. Oh, we have Facebook, oh, we have Twitter, oh we have all these things that just data-mine us— use us as marketing data.
Contra-internet is happening within the context of the internet though because you’re resisting it but literally the screencaps that you wrote it on are within this framework of the internet.
And I kind of like that idea that contra-internet actually has to emerge—
From the internet.
I’ve actually been really conscientious about building it from, yeah, the place of social media. Or I’ve made these videos where I’m doing stuff from the desktop…a site of play and work, where everything happens.
But I like the work to be connected to radical politics.
The other thing that people always want to talk about is privacy. The mask for me is not about privacy. I don’t want to name their names, because I like these artists, but I feel like there’s other artists that do a lot of surveillance work, and it’s all about privacy. But to me, again, when you think about social movements or more radical politics, it’s hard to imagine privacy as kind of an endpoint. Maybe privacy is something you use along the way, but it’s not the endpoint of the political struggle or the political vision.
It’s not the point of pleasure.
Yeah, and it’s why for me, those masks, like I was saying, it’s way more about collectivity.
Well, that’s funny that you say collectivity, because that’s the positive version of the word. I would say the masks are homogenizing.
It’s interesting you brought that up, because people have talked about this in the past, where the masks are this one frozen instance, and everyone’s wearing the same one. But that’s just kind of the practical, tactical utility of the masks. But what’s great about masks in protests is that they’re often used to find one another. You know who your people are. The mask is really fun because it’s hyper-visible.
But that’s sort of the paradox of the mask--you find your people but you never distinguish them from one another. Everyone is together, but no one is anyone.
It’s more that, you know, who are you someone to? When you think about the masks, when you’re wearing them, you have formed this kind of collectivity, with a group of people, and you know, maybe a camera can’t pick you out, whatever.
But then the protest ends, and you go with your people, and you take off your masks. It’s a collective articulation.
Thinking about the concept of queerness, I see it so much as a term for the individual, absolutely unique…you can’t find another person who has the same kind of queerness as you. So the idea of a collective queerness is interesting because I think that it paradoxically homogenizes a group of people whose whole mission is to not be homogenized.
That can be the trouble with that term…there’s a lot of historical weight to that term that I think is really important. And you know, that term did historically collectivize people in very radical ways, like in the 80’s during the AIDS crisis. But now, that term has been modified, and it doesn’t have the same purpose. So I think we’re kind of in this funny moment where there’s a lot of people that still use it, but it just doesn’t seem to have the power and the punch…and it does feel like a lot of people use it much more as an identity category, which I kind of agree—does kind of homogenize in this weird way. I’m actually not the biggest fan of it.
I’m also thinking about language in relation to biometrics, and how it kind of surpasses language. It creates this landscape of all bodies that doesn’t distinguish between queer and not queer, and it’s post-language in that sense.
I think biometrics just makes a lot of really kind of hard-lined calls about certain aspects of the body that really are incredibly anti-queer. And also this is something that is constantly in flux, because, of course, the software programs are always changing.
What does it mean to develop some sort of literal algorithmic standard that’s very black and white?
You’re either male or female. And there are examples in the past, the way that they would try to determine that was well if the camera detected longer hair, it would assume you were female, right?
Well, if you gain access to something through an eye-scan, that information doesn’t know anything about your desires.
Yeah that’s true. Well, possibly true.
Once you’re in, you can do whatever it is you want, but that’s sort of an opportunity that doesn’t exist in a non-biometric world, necessarily.
That to me is a question of subversion— how do you gain access? I mean, that even makes me think of sci-fi films, you get someone else’s eye or something.
Minority Report.
Exactly. If that gets implemented, you know, if that moves from sci-fi and gets implemented in some political program, what is that going to look like? It’s just really hard to say. I feel like my kind strong, gut-reaction, negative impulse around these things is marked by reading a lot of case studies, just a lot of examples.
And you can Google some of this…when a lot of biometric technology— like, different kinds of airport scanners were added—
Oh, is this the transgender issue, where they were seen as terrorists.
Yes. This is a really, really good example of you know, when you try and do these biometric matchings of bodies and identification, it just sets off these crazy alert signals for people in these contexts.
That’s so wild.
If you look for this essay that I wrote— it’s super short, just like contra-internet, it’s called Infomatic Opacity, it’s kind of the essay version of the book I’m working on. But yeah I’m working with this idea of opacity which was first developed by this Caribbean philosopher Edouard Glissant. And his idea of opacity, I think really, for me, very much aligns with a queer idea of identification. And a really simple way to understand what he means is that, no one should be reduced to some kind of universal scale of judgment, some kind of universal metric.
That’s very queer.
His famous line, he says, “We must struggle for the right to opacity for everyone.”
What’s the different between opacity and privacy in that context?
OK that’s kind of why I was saying— it doesn’t mean privacy. Opacity means…for him it’s definitely something ontological. We are opaque in the sense that there’s aspects of ourselves that we don’t know to ourselves, but there’s also fact that we cannot fully know another person…
What I’m trying to get at here is that, you know, biometrics are fundamentally anti-opaque, in the sense that they’re a modality of identification that’s rooted around capture, which is the technical terminology, and capture is the opposite of opacity, because you can’t capture what is opaque. It’s opaque.
But doesn’t that depend on a locus of identity within something that can be quantifiable?
For opacity to work, you mean? Or capture.
For capture to work. The idea that someone can capture your identity means that your concept of identity is existing in a space where it’s capturable.
Yes, exactly.
Yeah, so that’s why you can pit opacity and capture against each other. In the sense that they’re kind of two different models maybe of identity. But maybe opacity is more anti-identity…in the way that historical and queer theory first emerged, it was an anti-identity project.
When queer theory first came on the stage in ‘89/’90, the whole point was a deconstruction of identity. This is what we were talking about earlier, how queerness is an identity. When queer theory first hit the scene, it wasn’t that. The whole point was a breaking-off point from gay and lesbian, and kind of calling out the whole project of identity.
At the end of the day with all the surveillance stuff, what I’m really interested in is the way surveillance works is through things like identity through things like visibility. And that’s really interesting because histories of queer politics have been all about engaging, thinking through working with identity and identification and also struggling for visibility.
Do you think that queer people are maybe even presently post-visibility?
I mean, I think some people are getting more interested in that, and I’m definitely one of those people.
Think of all the different political struggles in the 20th century, like gay rights, women’s rights, civil rights. All of these different examples where it was a struggle to gain visibility to the state.
Yeah.
But we’re in such a different moment now. Think about queer responses to gay marriage before it was legalized, those radical queer critiques of gay marriage, and it was all about, they don’t wanna be legitimated, made visible to the state that way. So, I think you’re seeing different projects emerge around this topic.
Tell me a little bit more about the projects you have going on right now. What’s in the forefront of your work right now?
Just working on the contra-internet project, but I’m doing smaller bits of that work right now. I think the next big contra-internet installation will be at ZKM, which is a really big media-arts museum in Germany, in the fall. I am, you know, working on these two books. One is an artist monograph, and that means other people are writing on the biometrics work, and that’s with Rhizome. And I’m writing this theoretical book on infomatic opacity.
So just nothing really.
Yeah, it’s a lot…