Discoverable


	Artists: Owen Chapman; Tagny Duff; Mél Hogan; Andra McCartney; Robert Prenovault; Tim Schwab; Rae Staseson; Maroussia Lévesque, Jason Lewis, Yannick Assogba and Raed Moussa (Obx Labs)
	The Discoverable campaign features the work of eight artists whose pieces highlight and address the contradictions of contemporary surveillance technologies, norms of security and safety, and our ideas and ideals of privacy and bodily integrity. These works are delivered to nearby users’ cellphones, PDAs or laptop computers via a Bluetooth server. They can also be accessed via the internet at this site by clicking on the images, appended below. The term ‘discoverable’ is derived from the vocabulary of Bluetooth, where users must set their mobile devices to discoverable in order to receive content from a server. Bluetooth is but one of these new wireless communication carriers. It transmits information in fragments over a secure, globally unlicensed 2.4 GHz short-range bandwidth. While the Bluetooth server has typically been envisioned as a marketing tool, noncommercial cultural practices, such as Bluejacking, and artistic interventions, such as Portage’s Wall of Sound, have also arisen with the technology’s arrival on the consumer market. The use of Bluetooth as a device for the delivery of art raises a number of critical questions. Through technologies like Bluetooth, devices provide not only connectivity, but the potential for surveillance and the invasion of what have been seen as the inviolable spaces of personhood. Our complicity with certain kinds of technologically enabled surveillance is what is at issue here; as Miya Christensen points out, complicit surveillance is a key trend in the world of Web 2.0: subjects desire access to social network sites, but the terms of agreement for participation in these sites often involve the relinquishing of so-called ‘personal information’ either knowingly or unknowingly. At its basis, social networking depends on making oneself visible to a wider circle; but it also means that data can be collected and sometimes sold as third-party information to companies that practice targeted marketing – aka data mining. The term discoverable highlights this contradiction between visibility and surveillance within contemporary subjectivity. With regard to surveillance, privacy and security, there are a host of issues on the public agenda for Canadians to contemplate, including: data mining by corporations; data collection by government agencies; no-fly lists and racial profiling; the placement of CCTV cameras in private and public space; but as well, people’s multiple and very different experiences of surveillance technologies in everyday life. The video and audio pieces included in this exhibition attend to these multifarious aspects of surveillance, privacy and security, in the spirit of the President’s Conference Series that stages these questions for debate and discussion. The art works, biographies and artists’ statements of the participating artists in Discoverable are:


			artist: Owen Chapman Out My Window + Everyday Law

			artists: Tim Schwab and Mahmoud Kaabour BEING OSAMA

			Tagny Duff Untitled (2009)

			Robert Prenovault 48º50’50.18″N 2º20’26.08″E

			Rae Staseson When Owls Dream

			Obx Labs Passage Oublié