Challenging the “Data Body” in New Media Art, 1990s–Present

Abstract

The 1990s offers a rich history of innovation through various technologies like the World Wide Web, the continuation of progress in biotechnology, and continuing advances in surveillance and artificial intelligence. Despite this, we have seen how these algorithmic technologies render users hypervisible while they remain opaque. In addition, these technologies also transform the individual into a data body—a being made of code, data, and information. Therefore, the body becomes ripe for extraction, manipulation, and the predictive logic of algorithmic technologies where we are no longer beings but simply understood as data. While many scholars have identified this phenomenon through the sciences and theory, it also stems from the field of art with artists and artist-activist collectives such as Critical Art Ensemble. Analyzing this often-forgotten history reveals the way that artists and activists were responding to this technological change by conceptualizing forms of resistance through artworks, performances, and activist projects. By looking back to the 1990s and the legacies of artists-activists as predecessors to many recent examples of algorithmic resistance by the recent generation of artists, we can think about how power persists and has evolved, how we are continuously rendered data bodies today, and what new forms of resistance may look like now.