why this project?

The use of AI systems that monitor and identify us while we are walking on the streets, out protesting or playing in the park, might have felt like a distant future that is slowly turning into reality. At the moment real estate developers are experimenting with the use of facial recognition systems to monitor those who walk past their property in central London. Drones are used in Brussels to help enforce the Covid 19 lockdown, or in some countries even read our body temperature while walking to the shops through thermal imaging.

Questions about the social costs of these technologies are often brushed aside as being backward or against progress. Obscuring the political and economic interest behind the turn to surveillance technologies and dismissing opportunities for much needed public debate on its use, from which there is no clear understanding of the long term unintended consequences.

It is time to reclaim the word resistance, and see it as a key strategy to ensure that human well-being - not technology - is at the centre of what we want society to look like. Here we take lead from earlier movements like the Luddites whose tactics provided the necessary space for ‘collective’ negotiation at a time where strong unions did not exist. 

This creative intervention should give us the tools for everyday acts of resistance. To engage in negotiation tactics that allow us to join the discussion and expose, challenge and transform the ideology and social norms that are enshrined in technology.