{"id":2033389,"date":"2024-07-11T21:17:50","date_gmt":"2024-07-11T20:17:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/?p=2033389"},"modified":"2024-07-11T21:17:50","modified_gmt":"2024-07-11T20:17:50","slug":"english-to-be-a-witch-in-the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism-by-ginevra-petrozzi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/szabad-kez\/english-to-be-a-witch-in-the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism-by-ginevra-petrozzi\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201eTo Be a Witch in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism\u201d by Ginevra Petrozzi"},"content":{"rendered":"

R\u00f3za El-Hassan<\/strong>: The group show titled Maleficae<\/em> in the Budapest Gallery in the \u00d3buda district is about witchcraft. We have selected one work from the show that we have found especially interesting and would like to write about: To Be a Witch in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism<\/em>. The artist, Ginevra Petrozzi, is Italian, she was born in Rome, and lives and works in the Netherlands.<\/p>\r\n

This work has two versions, a performance and a video. At this exhibition we could watch the video, in which a fortune teller, sitting at the table forecasts the future to a young woman who sits across the table. The fortune teller is the artist herself. The table is covered with a cloth used for tarot cards, embroidered rectangles mark the place of the deck of cards. What is special in the scenery<\/a>? She doesn\u2019t tell fortune from a deck of cards, but puts a mobile phone on one rectangle, and then places it on another. It is the young woman’ phone, who asked her to predict the future.<\/p>\r\n

First she places the phone on the field of the past and offers an interpretation<\/a>, then she puts it on the present, and then on the future field.<\/p>\r\n

The past is symbolized and interpreted through a random YouTube video. We see a concert. On the field of the present, it is a random Instagram GIF, from which the fortune-teller draws her knowledge. It is an advertisement depicting various clothes and persons of different color, gender and style.<\/p>\r\n

But wait just a moment! Are these really \u201crandom\u201d video matches? Or maybe they are part of a flow of images generated by the app, \u201cwho\u201d has a predictive nature, especially because it knows the user (each user) personally very well: her or his habits, past, taste. All that is described with the technical term \u201cpreferences\u201d.<\/p>\r\n

According to the fortune teller, the small GIF with variations of clothes is a hint of an identity crisis: how should the user, the object of surveillance, dress and behave in the future?<\/p>\r\n

The video, which also had a performance version at Stedelijk Museum, where the visitors could ask the fortune teller artists personally to predict their future, speaks about the immense knowledge of this application about each of us. The question arises: if knowledge is power, how will the accumulated knowledge about our personality be used? The fortune teller offers interpretations of the data, and advice. Through this, she guides \u2013 and even controls \u2013 us.<\/p>\r\n

In this case, the person of the artist has its transparency: we know who offers advice and controls our destiny. We can decide to believe her or see it as a joke. But when we trust the application’s not-so-random, only seemingly accidental routines, we may realize that we are surrounded by a digital wall: we do not know the algorithm which takes control of us to some extent. The question arises, regarding extreme cases, for example a political conflict, or media censorship, or when a real person takes control of us, who is it who operates the machine as we ask questions? That is, who is it in the position to manipulate us emotionally as we watch the stream of pictures and sound on our Facebook timeline? What an endlessly powerful device has been made possible! Manipulative space!<\/p>\r\n

In her video, Ginevra Petrozzi puts the phone on the field of the future decks. While the YouTube application was chosen the represent the past, and the Instagram application was selected to stand for the present, the choice for the future falls on the Notes application, a small text editor, which offers predictive writing mode. The woman types only a few characters, and the predictive mode offers complete words and sentences for her to take. In the sentence offered by the machine, her mother, who recently died, is being mentioned. The total lack of distance between the machine and our fate is scary. The woman is supposed to avoid something\u2026 that has to do something\u2026 with her mother\u2019s relations to an other person \u2013 says the fortune teller.<\/p>\r\n

Eszter Rajz Helga<\/strong>: This work by Ginerva Petrozzi brings an early work of yours to my mind from 1998, Image Engine<\/em>. It also involves models for scientific hypotheses, only it is somehow more mystical, but the attitude towards \u201cthe algorithm\u201d was the same. The algorithm seems to be an independent actor in the evolution of cyberspace.<\/p>\r\n

The work Image Engine<\/em> was based on a short and very personal letter fragment, which was being read out, again and again, in an endless loop in the exhibition space, while the algorithm was crawling the web, returning periodically image results for the search phrase \u201ca bus trip, the father visits his son\u201d.\u00a0 The personality<\/em> is dissolved in an almost mystical way. The story in your work became especially interesting, too, cause we would arrive at more abstract concepts. Ginerva Petrozzi subordinates her work formally to one sentence only: “What will the future bring to me?”<\/p>\r\n

Now another work also comes to my mind: the letter exchange in the 70-s between G\u00e1bor Attalai and Tibor Csiky, an artwork of theirs. Although they had no vision about the world wide web yet, they found \u201ca tendency in the medium\u201d. Csiky was like a fortune teller, who foresaw that in the future people would tend to communicate through written text- and picture messages instead of talking. He predicted that a unique folklore activity will arise.<\/p>\r\n

Csiky himself was probably not privileged enough to even have a landline at home during the times of socialism in Hungary. Still, he was the first one to drive our attention to the fact that in the future taking photos may become a popular folkloristic activity for the masses, and that we should keep an eye on this tendency.<\/p>\r\n

R\u00f3za El-Hassan<\/strong>: I am still interested in the question, what do you mean by\u00a0 The Algorithm, which you mention often, do you mean a \u00a0\u201cCommon Algorithm\u201d? Do you believe in the evolution of the \u201cgeneral intellect\u201d? The \u201cgeneral intellect\u201d is a term frequently used by Marx for humankind\u2019s common technological and social knowledge and their combination, which has a bigger and bigger role in society. We can already also read Hegel\u2019s texts about the \u201ccommon conscience\u201d of humankind as a more and more independent autonomous entity.<\/p>\r\n

Are you suggesting that \u201cThe Algorithm\u201d, that you mention as a decisive motif in both Petrozzi\u2019s and my work, is a new form of the enigmatic Hegelian \u201cgeneral intellect\u201d, as it \u2013 after residing for so long hidden deep in the system of world-wide-web \u2013 now appears on the surface?<\/p>\r\n

Helga Eszter Rajz<\/strong>: I think a historical principle elucidates all these things. Cyberspace can be described through numbers and digits, which is so different from our reality: we cannot imagine it. Each time, when we push the like button, we vote, by which we shape our cyber personality. We have a parallel personality in cyberspace, which was formed through our preferences, and can be described through digits.<\/p>\r\n

The basic difference between the fortune teller and the psychologist is that the fortune teller offers advice while the psychologist opens the space to a guided knowledge of the self, and to a learning process. The cyberspace is very much like a fortune teller. We might imagine mystical interpretations, and they will all seem irrational for us, because they are visualizations of vast arrays and sets of digits stored about us in cyberspace. We are simply not grown up enough to be able to grasp and interpret all these new streams of images. We do not have the tools for a visual analysis yet.<\/p>\r\n

To be more exact the possible tools of analysis and transparency are hidden from us directly, for business reasons in the West, for disciplinary reasons in the East.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

R\u00f3za El-Hassan: The group show titled Maleficae in the Budapest Gallery in the \u00d3buda district is about witchcraft. We have selected one work from the show that we have found especially interesting and would like to write about: To Be a Witch in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. The artist, Ginevra Petrozzi, is Italian, she […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2033401,"parent":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2033389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-szabad-kez"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2033389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2033389"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2033389\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2033404,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2033389\/revisions\/2033404"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2033401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2033389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2033389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2033389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}