Security Gate 26.11 is an Arduino-based, interactive, electronic art work that detects wireless emissions given off by individuals, including cellular and smartphone transmissions, wifi, bluetooth, RFID, and others. Security Gate 26.11 produces individualized audiovisual responses to these transmissions. Our lives are subjected to daily forms of surveillance via mechanisms that are less recognizable to us as such precisely because they are not visible. Today, wireless transmissions are the corpus of control and repression, as evidenced by sophisticated governmental systems of mass surveillance and snooping (Carnivore and its variants) and corporate monitoring (data-mining and software recommendation systems).
Security Gate 26.11 demonstrates how we voluntarily participate in tyrannies of our own creation. Various critical theorists have commented on how interactive participation is the ideology of capitalist consumerism over information networks. By our participation in informational networks (including cellphone usage, online browsing, email, SMS and others), we actively volunteer information about ourselves to forms of governmental and corporate surveillance. Data are directly and indirectly collected about us in our use of these networks. Security Gate 26.11 renders visible these invisible mechanisms of discipline and control and documents our participation in possible tyrannies of our own creation.
Presented at Northern Spark Festival, Saint Paul, MN and ISEA 2011, Istanbul, Turkey.
Created by John Kim, Anthony Tran, Vasily Trubetskoy
