Edited Projects by Gary Kafer
Surveillance & Society, 2019
This is the editorial for the special issue of Surveillance & Society on the theme of "Queer Surv... more This is the editorial for the special issue of Surveillance & Society on the theme of "Queer Surveillance." This special issue stages an encounter between surveillance studies and queer studies to reconsider the stakes of queerness in relation to monitoring, classification, and control. In doing so, the articles collected here seek to expand the ways in which gender and sexuality intersect with other marginalized identity categories within the dominant logics of surveillance. For us, "queer surveillance" names the power dynamic through which queerness is actualized as the necessary difference that adjudicates the bounds between normative and non-normative modes of embodiment, risk, and disposability. Ultimately, by assembling the range of articles in this issue, we hope to open lines of inquiry for future scholarship that traces the braided affiliations and antagonisms encompassed in the concept of queer surveillance. We also keep sight of the possibility of transforming current logics of state security and global power to magnify minoritarian life.
Book Chapters by Gary Kafer
A Companion to Contemporary Art in a Global Framework, 2024
Chapter dedicated to the topic "Algorithm." Covers literature on critical algorithm studies, cont... more Chapter dedicated to the topic "Algorithm." Covers literature on critical algorithm studies, contemporary artists engaging in algorithmic mediation, and how algorithms have transformed the exhibition and consumption of art. First page available as preview.
From Self-Portrait to Selfie: Representing the Self in the Moving Image, 2019
In her Instagram-based performance Excellences & Perfections (2014), Amalia Ulman scripted a seri... more In her Instagram-based performance Excellences & Perfections (2014), Amalia Ulman scripted a series of photos, videos, and text over the course of five months in which the artist adopts fictional personalities commonly visible on social media. Over time, the content on Ulman’s Instagram has generated an archive of likes and comments that documents the various ways that users have encountered her project. Rather than advancing an argument that rehearses anxieties of authenticity in digital spaces, this paper will focus on this archive to explore how normative practices of user engagement contribute to the formation of referentiality – how selfies refer to a person – based on a politics of belief. Ultimately, Ulman’s project illuminates how issues of referentiality do not attend only explicitly fictional modes of content production online, but rather emerge in the processes of self-representation that mark our own digital personas, as well as the beliefs that make them possible.
Journal Articles by Gary Kafer
Cultural Studies, 2024
This article examines the political work performed by the weather within contemporary big data pr... more This article examines the political work performed by the weather within contemporary big data predictive analytics. As a sociotechnical construction, the weather has long served as a predictive medium for forecasting human behaviour across historical contexts in order to reinforce settler colonial and imperial projects of spatial domination. Now, within twenty-first century big data systems, the weather has become a proxy for predicting human activity. Examining industrial materials from the predictive policing software HunchLab and the social media sentiment analysis platform Social Doppler, I argue that the weather proxy underwrites claims to prediction by collapsing the distinction between correlation and causation. Key here is how the proxy remediates the mechanism of impressibility that structured the weather as a racial technique for population management within nineteenth century statistical research. Through the weather proxy, big data programmes channel biopolitical frameworks of impressibility – or impressibility by proxy – in ways that causally bind individual behaviour to group-differentiated vulnerabilities of environmental exposure. At stake is how the weather proxy serves as a universal baseline condition for predicting population-level behaviour, which aims to mitigate accusations of racial bias by deferring to environmental conditions beyond human design. As a cultural construction tied to ubiquity, the weather thus is a rhetorical device that works to legitimate predictive analytics as impartial and universal while simultaneously effacing the violence that inheres within algorithmic technologies. Ultimately, by taking a comparative historical approach to the weather, I argue that we might better grasp the transformations in data science that underpin how ubiquity operates as a site of racial violence within contemporary surveillance systems.
Media Practice and Education, 2023
This article surveys the media arts practice-based research involved in the South Side Speculatio... more This article surveys the media arts practice-based research involved in the South Side Speculations (SSS) project. SSS was an intergenerational collaboration among Chicago-based high school students, arts and humanities scholars, and practicing artists and storytellers facilitated by the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois Chicago that sought to reimagine the pasts and futures of local neighbourhoods in Chicago’s South Side with the aim of rethinking political systems for social justice. In particular, SSS participants interrogated the interplay between forms of racialised structural violence and emergent surveillance technologies. The youth-led projects resulted in three major contributions to the field of speculative design. First, futures can only be imagined by also reimagining the past and the historical narratives that make any kind of future possible. Second, futures must engage hyperlocal contexts to consider concretely how speculative design objects will exist in specific material realities. Third, young people can use speculative design to interrogate the role of institutions in their communities and increase the agency they have in their futures. Ultimately, this article argues that speculation can enable forms of community-building through media arts practice in ways that draw from and contribute to broader collective social justice organising and activism.
American Literature, 2022
Game media have long participated in projects of nation building by remediating historical, polit... more Game media have long participated in projects of nation building by remediating historical, political, and social relations in ways that reinforce affective processes of national belonging. The genre of border games in particular is well-known for staging the discursive and symbolic value of national boundaries through the deployment of specific gameplay mechanics and storytelling elements. However, as this essay argues, border games do more than merely represent borders in games; they reflect how borders themselves might be experienced as games within the cultural logic of gamification. Through an analysis of Lucas Pope’s independently produced American video game Papers, Please (2013), this article interrogates gamification as a rhetorical process that communicates how play dynamics sustain the procedural logics of border security and citizenship. Such logics, the game suggests, are marked by the installment of a series of rule-based interactions that modulate affect within the sociotechnical mechanics of state-sanctioned racism to enable the proper flow of both play and mobility. However, through failure, the game also reveals gamification to be an incomplete diagram of control, one where the priming of affect rubs up against the sociopolitical frictions that shape individual play experiences. Ultimately, this article argues that border games like Papers, Please enable players to experiment with the forms of national belonging that subtend our experiences of gamification.
Jump Cut, 2021
While Zoom claims to make us increasingly present to each other, such a promise fails to register... more While Zoom claims to make us increasingly present to each other, such a promise fails to register how video teleconferencing is unevenly experienced across lines of sociopolitical difference in times of crisis. Rather than the temporality of the present, this essay tracks another tense—the past conditional— that better exposes the systems of power that make networked connection possible.
Digital Culture & Society, 2019
This article considers the medial logics of American terrorist watchlist screening in order to st... more This article considers the medial logics of American terrorist watchlist screening in order to study the ways in which digital inequities result from specific computational parameters. Central in its analysis is Secure Flight, an automated prescreening program run by the TSA that identifies low- and high-risk airline passengers through name-matching algorithms. Considering Secure Flight through the framework of biopolitics, this article examines how passenger information is aggregated, assessed, and scored in order to construct racialised assemblages of passengers that reify discourses of American exceptionalism. Racialisation here is neither a consequence of big data nor a motivating force behind the production of risk-assessment programs. Both positions would maintain that discrimination is simply an effect of an information management system that considers privacy as its ultimate goal, which is easily mitigated with more accurate algorithms. Not simply emerging as an effect of discriminatory practices at airport security, racialisation formats the specific techniques embedded in terrorist watchlist matching, in particular the strategies used to transliterate names across different script systems. I argue thus that the biopolitical production of racialised assemblages forms the ground zero of Secure Flight’s computational parameters, as well as its claims to accuracy. This paper concludes by proposing a move away from the call to solve digital inequities with more precise algorithms in order to carefully interrogate the forms of power complicit in the production and use of big data analytics.
qui parle, 2018
As programs of internet surveillance have increasingly pervaded our contemporary social and polit... more As programs of internet surveillance have increasingly pervaded our contemporary social and political lives, resistance has become necessary for those seeking to evade online data tracking. This article interrogates such resistance through an examination of Trevor Paglen and Jacob Appelbaum’s Autonomy Cube (2014)—an installation that initiates a public Wi-Fi hotspot using the open-source anonymizing Tor network. Allowing connected viewers to retain their independence from internet surveillance, this work is often discussed as offering a model of resistance in terms of self-determined autonomy. In its reading of the interactive installation through the lens of systems theory, however, this article qualifies autonomy as at once distributed and communally managed yet sensitive to the ways in which infrastructures of wireless technologies are deeply imbricated in lived social realities. Ultimately, this article gestures toward a model of resistance that acknowledges the dissensual shifts between the local public Wi-Fi network and the global internet commons.
Surveillance & Society, 2016
In response to being detained and interrogated at an airport by the INS under false accusations, ... more In response to being detained and interrogated at an airport by the INS under false accusations, multimedia artist Hasan Elahi launched the project Tracking Transience, a website designed to constantly publicize his activity. Rather than uphold claims to privacy, Elahi aims to enact a resistive posture to contemporary techniques of digital surveillance by releasing his personal information. Paradoxically, he voluntarily forgoes his privacy in order to feel more secure. This form of resistance registers his project of self-surveillance as a performance of transparency. In this context, he turns the normative flow of power in digital surveillance into a new critical posture, one in which the artist is anonymous to surveillance systems. Through anonymity, the artist participates with digital surveillance in order to avoid it. By tracing the methodologies that generate data on Elahi's activity, this paper will speculate on how creative interventions can produce resistive strategies against surveillance systems by moving beyond the historical limits of privacy into the outer reaches of anonymity in our contemporary age of transparency.
Contemporaneity, 2016
Taken from up to forty miles away, Trevor Paglen's limit telephotography images of covert militar... more Taken from up to forty miles away, Trevor Paglen's limit telephotography images of covert military bases in the American Southwest are blurred by dense atmosphere, dust and debris. In effect, his photographs are highly illegible, and thus the military bases escape any sort of revelation. Following this logic, if one cannot see these top secret locations, then these images are in fact not politically effective at disclosing confidential federal information. Rather, Paglen asserts that the political agency of his can be located not in the image, but in the practice of performing limit telephotography—standing on public land and exercising the right to photograph. In turn, Paglen relocates the documentarian potential of his images into an agency formulated by a relational aesthetic, one in which the communal effects of creating the image and interpreting it generate the possibilities of enacting further practices of political resistance.
Book Reviews by Gary Kafer
Critical Inquiry, 2023
Book review of Rebecca Boguska's Guantánamo Frames (Lüneburg: meson press, 2022)
Journal of Cultural Economy, 2023
Review of Torin Monahan's Crisis Vision: Race and the Cultural Production of Surveillance (Durham... more Review of Torin Monahan's Crisis Vision: Race and the Cultural Production of Surveillance (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022)
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 2020
Book review of Patricia Ticineto Clough, The User Unconscious: On Affect, Media, and Measure. Min... more Book review of Patricia Ticineto Clough, The User Unconscious: On Affect, Media, and Measure. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. 209 pp.: ISBN 978-1 5179-0422-7, $25.00 (pbk)
Jump Cut, 2019
This article is a review and response to Shoshana Zuboff's book The Age of Surveillance Capitalis... more This article is a review and response to Shoshana Zuboff's book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight For a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (Public Affairs, 2019). Surveillance capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff argues, was invented by Google around the turn of the century. But how does this claim efface a much longer history of capitalist value extraction, behavioral modification, and social engineering that holds racial difference as its primary operation?
Online Publications by Gary Kafer
thresholds, 2018
This multimedia essay explores the first year of the Transmedia Collage Project. This project is ... more This multimedia essay explores the first year of the Transmedia Collage Project. This project is a collaboration between two organizations. The first is the University of Chicago's Transmedia Story Lab, an initiative that explores how emergent digital media can provide a platform to promote creative practices among youth of color, influence broader publics, and improve health. The second is the University of Illinois at Chicago's History Moves, a project geared toward producing community-engaged public history through oral history and design methods.
Co-authored with Patrick Jagoda, Jennifer Brier, Ireashia Bennett, Marquez Rhyne, and Chelsea Ridley.
Arcadia University, Dept. of Media & Communication, 2014
An introduction to Nollywood Cinema with bibliographic resources for further study in the history... more An introduction to Nollywood Cinema with bibliographic resources for further study in the history of the Nigerian film industry and the position of Nollywood in Film Studies. This project was conducted in collaboration with Shekhar Desphande, Professor and Chair of the Department of Media and Communication at Arcadia University and Meta Mazaj, Senior Lecturer in the Cinema Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania.
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Edited Projects by Gary Kafer
Book Chapters by Gary Kafer
Journal Articles by Gary Kafer
Book Reviews by Gary Kafer
Online Publications by Gary Kafer
Co-authored with Patrick Jagoda, Jennifer Brier, Ireashia Bennett, Marquez Rhyne, and Chelsea Ridley.
Co-authored with Patrick Jagoda, Jennifer Brier, Ireashia Bennett, Marquez Rhyne, and Chelsea Ridley.