,
2005 — WiFi, mobile phone cameras, and RFID are ubiquitous,
invisible, and often-at least for the average cable TV surfing,
iPod shuffling media user--incomprehensible.
The Preemptive Media Collective (PM) reengineers your thinking about mobile digital technologies imbedded in everyday environments.
In live performances and real time actions, the PM art, technology and activist collective disturbs, dislodges, and redesigns new media technologies that we often ignore, like the bar codes on driver's licenses or radio frequency information devices used for EZ pass on highways.
Preemptive Media demystifies all the digi-fetishist, Wired magazine technobabble shrouding new technologies. And they empower participants to feel like they can actually understand wireless and radio frequency identification devices (RFID).
"If there is a sense of elation people get from the work it is because they go "ah ha!" and are eager to enter important conversations that previously seemed remote or
unimportant, " Brooke Singer, a PM Collective member, explains.
At the forefront of what is called locative media, Preemptive Media repositions highly specialized technologies within the democratic discourse of low-tech amateurism. The emerging locative media movement has gathered steam and attention since 9/11 and the 2001 Patriot Act, which authorizes unprecedented data mining, invasions of privacy, wiretapping, and internet surveillance.
In SWIPE (2001), Preemptive Media investigated how bar codes on the backsides of driver's licenses activate data collection most people are oblivious to. Bars and convenience stores use license scanners to determine age--and to build free-of-charge but enormously valuable databases on their clients.
Last fall in Irvine, California, PM set up a bar at an arts event and swiped driver's licenses of every drinker. A monitor over the bar visualized the scanned information with computer matching to census data, demographics and voter information. Customers received a data receipt detailing their buying preferences, philanthropy, income, profession, housing.
SWIPE foregrounds issues of privacy in data streams, demonstrating the invisible and discreet nature of automated identification data collection (AIDC). AIDC not only lacks prior notification and consent but is largely unregulated.
Although the mainstream press highlights individual criminals who pirate cyberidentities, SWIPE suggests that the real issue of data mining resides in the increasing interdependence between corporations and the government. Data mining companies are now more efficient than the FBI.
Preemptive Media reverses and makes visible how data mining and surveillance technologies create a new ecology of consumer social control-not simply privacy invasions. Their tactics resonate with the war on terror where cyberwarfare, information gathering, tracking, and networked technologies have been mobilized by the Patriot Act, the military and retail outlets.
"Preemptive Media has offered a range of solutions for people to take back their data and resist the constant identity theft and data abuse by the real criminals, businesses and government," observes Singer. "Our suggestions range from writing away for one's own data file to jamming databases with noise and slogans. If more people undertake such actions, there is possibility for change."
ZAPPED! (2005) foregrounds radio frequency identification tags, first used by the British military during World War II and then to track wild animals in the 1960s. In the last 20 years, RFID has been utilized for electronic tolls like EZ Pass, pets, prisoners, dance clubs, kids, border control, the Department of Defense and Wal Mart, the largest profit making enterprise in the world. The Spring Independent School district in the Houston area uses RFID tags on elementary students to track their school bus rides.
The ZAPPED! Project features workshops for kids and adults on how to alter the remote wireless detection chips. Phrases like "help me! I'm a consumer!" "This is GOD. You have sinned. Be prepared for eternal damnation!" and "Don't hire me - I'm a felon" are programmed on the chips to pop up on scanners.
The RFID School Kit consists of a lunchbox and a key chain detector to locate RFID hotspots. Roaches with clandestine RFID tags attached to their backs are concealed in the lunchbox. Activists sporting blue Wal Mart vests bought on E-Bay release the roaches into Wal Mart storage areas.
Comprised of artists Brooke Singer, Beatriz da Costa, and Jamie Schulte, Preemptive Media rethinks a wide range of mobile technologies. Their name ambushes George Bush's argument for war and remixes it as a defensive democratic tactic against invasive technological control.
With MoPort.org (2004), a free service for generating, sharing and distributing images and reports, Preemptive Media asked protesters and moles at the Republican National Convention last August to take pictures with the cameras on their mobile phones. This process created collective reporting from over 300 participants about the demonstrations, counter-protests and arrests of activists in real time-images that big media ignored.
Preemptive Media veers away from a fascination with the aesthetically constructed image to an interrogation of the mobile interface. The collective's skill set includes an alchemy of programming, graphic design, robotics, photography, electronics, video, carpentry, data visualization and data mining.
Locative media represents a new global independent media movement interested in the convergence between digital domains and geographic spaces. It anchors the digital, often viewed as ambling around in a place-less realm, in geographic space. Artists marshall portable, networked computing devices like GPS, mobile phones, RFID as well as wearable technologies to map space and intervene into data streams.
Locative media theorist Drew Hemment has argued that locative media focus on horizontal, user-led and collaborative projects to interrupt and interrogate "a whole new ecology of observation and control."
Some academics have questioned whether locative media is actually just another name for sabotage, civil disobedience and illegal hacking--charges locative media artists like Preemptive Media might find a bit old fashioned for the reverse engineering and political consciousness raising their projects unfold.
The Preemptive Media Collective rallies a resolutely mobile, malleable, contingent, and public tactical media practice.
And once you participate in a located and interventionist Preemptive Media performance, you won't view your EZ Pass and driver's license as innocuous documents anymore.
Instead, you will know they are politically charged interfaces, booting you into the data streams of surveillance, control and consumer capital.
— Patricia R. Zimmermann is the author of Reel Families:
A Social History of Amateur Film, States of Emergency: Documentaries,
Wars, Democracies, and co-editor of Mining the Home Movie: Excavations
in Histories and Memories.
