Listening back

Abstract

Listening Back is a practice-based research project that develops a critical mode of sonic inquiry into a technique of contemporary Web surveillance – the cookie. Following creative sonification practices, cookie data is sonified as a strategy for interrupting the visual surface of the browser interface to sonically draw attention to backend data capture. Theoretical scholarship from surveillance studies proposes that visual panopticism has been largely superseded by automated technologies of humanly incomprehensible data collection. Scholars such as Mark Andrejevic have observed how the operations of algorithmic surveillance have become post-representational. Listening Back aims to address the post-representational character of Web surveillance by asking: how can artists critically render an online experience of continuous and ubiquitous surveillance?

During this PhD research, I have created the Listening Back browser add-on that sonifies Internet cookies in real-time. The add-on has been enacted across both live performance, installation, and personal computer usage. As a sounding Web-based arts practice, it deploys artistic approaches to browser add-ons and creative data sonification that I and others have developed within networked and sounding art fields during the last two decades. Artists such as Adriana Knouf, Allison Burtch and Michael Mandiberg have addressed the opacity and normalisation of the Web browser by creating artistic browser add-ons. These ethico-aesthetic strategies of awareness adopt Web protocols and data mining techniques to re-navigate and expose ordinarily obscured data logics and repurpose the browser as a site for artistic practice. In addition to repurposing and exposing hidden cookie data, sonification aims to situate an embodied listening within the real-time dynamics of Web surveillance and facilitate an engagement across critical analysis and sensing modes of online surveillance.

By providing the opportunity to listen back, a human-level connection to real-time data capture is facilitated as an aesthetic sounding strategy for making the capture of surveillant data online tangible. Listening Back, as practice-based research, contributes a new artistic strategy to creative browser add-on practices by engaging an embodied listening experience that deploys time-based and experiential aspects of sound. Listening Back also uses creative sonification to situate online listening as an activity that occurs at the intersection of the network infrastructure, the Web browser, and personal computing.