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From closed circuit TV and video monitoring, email snooping software such as Carnivore, tracking through credit card usage and location mapping via GPS enabled cell phones; surveillance is omnipresent. It may not be the act of surveillance but rather the collection, storage and use of our ‘data identities’ in a centralized database that presents the greatest threat. Who will have access to the database? How will the data be used? How will people be protected from data profiling and marginalization? Widespread concern for public security is generating significant support for surveillance, authentication and information gathering systems. The possibility of the convergence of databases of collected surveillance and other information presents serious threats to personal privacy and freedom.

“Pop! Goes the Weasel”, an interactive art installation exhibited in Nagoya, Japan in 2002, explores resistance to the use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) as a human tracking system. Identities are blurred as RFID tags are shared. The significance of the collected data is shifted as visitors repeatedly interfere in the system. A video projection containing the implantation of an RFID microchip into the artist’s hand and a visible real-time reflection of visitors being tracked accentuates uneasiness.

This installation aims to remind participants of the ubiquity of surveillance structures and to encourage visceral responses to implanted RFID tags as a potential future mode of surveillance. Although the installation appears to require visitors to follow certain ‘rules’, the observance of these rules stems from participant’s own respect or lack of respect for these rules. The system is really quite leaky and allows motivated visitors to avoid surveillance and develop other ways for engaging the work without accurately being tracked. This art installation presents visitors with opportunities for experimenting within an RFID system by allowing them to avoid it, to subvert it and to intervene in it as possible strategies of resistance.

Pushing beyond the spectacle of implanting two RFID microchips into my body, I make a bold and playful entrance into resistance of sanctioned surveillance. I challenge the authentication systems assumptions regarding identity. Is a person’s identity singular? Is it constant? What is its connection to the body? Is identity positively ascertainable? In the installation identities are distributed as visitors share their ID badges; one badge is no longer connected to a single person but some anonymous group of users. In the case of my own ‘identity’ the implantation of two unique microchips allows for a multiple identity; which ID number is the authentic one? By provoking questions concerning authentication systems I aim to encourage resistance and challenge both developers and governments to ensure the protection of personal privacy and freedom.

Biography

Nancy Nisbet is a practicing artist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at The University of British Columbia. Through various artistic media Nisbet seeks to investigate and challenge the influence of computer technologies and surveillance systems on understandings of identity.