Tracing You: How transparent surveillance reveals a desire for visibility

Abstract

Tracing You is an artwork that presents a website's best attempt to see the world from its visitors’ viewpoints. By cross referencing visitor IP addresses with available online data sources, the work traces each visitor back through the network to its possible origin. The end of that trace is the closest available image that potentially shows the visitor’s physical environment. Sometimes what this image shows is eerily accurate; other times it is wildly dislocated. This computational surveillance system thus makes transparent the potential visibility of one’s present location on the Earth, while also giving each site visitor the ability to watch other visitor “traces” in real time. By making its surveillance capacity and intention overt, Tracing You provokes questions about the architecture of networks and how that architecture affects our own visibility both within and outside of the network. Further, reactions to the work reveal attitudes towards surveillance post-Snowden, including, in some cases, an angry desire for more visibility than Tracing You currently provides. This commentary describes how the artwork functions, presents and discusses visitor reactions, and briefly theorizes origins for these reactions within the contexts of surveillance, sousveillance, and transparency in the age of ubiquitous online social networks.