Blaxites - Screening Surveillance

In all aspects of life, personal information is collected and analyzed by organizations that produce various outcomes—surveillance is not simply good or bad, helpful or harmful, but it is never neutral. These three short films were created to raise awareness about how large organizations use data and how these practices affect life chances and choices. We need to consider these implications, and critically examine the logic and practices within big data systems that underpin, enable, and accelerate surveillance.

These three short films speculating surveillance futures and the effects of deeply embedded and connected surveillant systems on our everyday lives were produced as part of a international multiphase project on Big Data Surveillance, by the Surveillance Studies Centre. Intended as public education tools to spark discussion and extend understandings of surveillance, trust, and privacy in the digital age, each film focuses on a different aspect of big data surveillance and the tensions that manifest when the human is interpreted by the machine.

Each film raises issues in our understandings of trust and surveilled relations:

Blaxites, highlights issues that arise when different data systems are connected.

A Model Employee examines data ownership and the need to earn a system’s trust.

Frames exposes the problems in trusting sensor data and facial recognition to interpret human behaviour.

Watch the other two films here: https://www.sscqueens.org/projects/screening-surveillance

Blaxites is a film that follows the story of a young woman whose celebratory social media post affects her access to vital medication. Her attempts to circumvent the system leads to even more dire consequences.