10.54103/ai/19858
Today we find ourselves immersed in digital environments made available by centralised social media platforms on a daily basis. While these platforms did provide users expanded connectivity and visibility, they also confined the same user in an economic system focused on collection and commodification of personal data for profit, and in return used them as resources of free labour. In light of this analysis, is it possible to carry out an artistic practice within centralised social media platforms, therefore take an active part in them, while remaining critically engaged, in the attempt to highlight some of the structural dynamics and problems of these realities?In this paper some fundamental aspects of the aforementioned channels will be discussed through the analysis of selected works and two methods utilised by the author to avoid the culture of interveillance.
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I Stalk Myself More than I Should: Online Narratives to Disrupt and Investigate Interveillance and Digital Bodies Politics within Centralised Social Media Platforms
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Cowl, J., Floridi, L., Taddeo, M., “The Challenges and Opportunities of Ethical AI,” in J. Rogers, I. Papadimitriou, A. Prescott, eds., Artificially Intelligent: V&A Digital Design Weekend 2018 (Dundee: University of Dundee, 2018).
I Stalk Myself More than I Should: Online Narratives to Disrupt and Investigate Interveillance and Digital Bodies Politics within Centralised Social Media Platforms
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/download/19858/20015
2
                  I Stalk Myself More
                  than I Should: Online
Narratives to Disrupt and
Investigate Interveil ance and
Digital Bodies Politics within
Centralised Social Media
Platforms
by S()fia Braga
         Centralised social media platforms
                  Interveillance
                  Online narratives
                  Digital bodies
                  Subversion




                        Issue №2            Year 2023
                        → Immersions and Dives:
                        From the Environment
                        to Virtual Reality
                        Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina,
                        Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello
I Stalk Myself More than I Should:
Online Narratives to Disrupt and
Investigate Interveilance and Digital
Bodies Politics within Centralised
Social Media Platforms
S()FIA BRAGA, (artist) – https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19858

Abstract                       Today we find ourselves immersed in digital
                  environments made available by centralised social media
                  platforms on a daily basis. While these platforms did pro-
                  vide users expanded connectivity and visibility, they also
                  confined the same user in an economic system focused on
                  collection and commodification of personal data for profit,
                  and in return used them as resources of free labour. In light
                  of this analysis, is it possible to carry out an artistic practice
                  within centralised social media platforms, therefore take an
                  active part in them, while remaining critically engaged, in the
                  attempt to highlight some of the structural dynamics and
                  problems of these realities?
                                In this paper some fundamental aspects of the
                  aforementioned channels will be discussed through the anal-
                  ysis of selected works and two methods utilised by the au-
                  thor to avoid the culture of interveillance.



Keywords          Centralised social media platforms                                     Interveillance
                  Online narratives                        Digital bodies                  Subversion
To quote this essay: S. Braga “I Stalk Myself More than I Should: Online Narratives to Disrupt and Investigate
Interveillance and Digital Bodies Politics within Centralised Social Media Platforms,” AN-ICON. Studies in
Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 2 (2023): 144-155, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19858.

S()FIA BRAGA                                         144                                           AN-ICON
                             When we talk about immersiveness within the
                digital realm we should consider the fact that, nowadays,
                there is no longer a clear distinction between our real and
                virtual existence, since these two realities are heavily inter-
                connected and they coexist interdependently.
                             In this paper we will focus on digital environ-
                ments made available to users by centralised social me-
                dia platforms, where we witness a radical shift in terms of
                control, power and representation of the body and the self.
                             Over the past few years I developed my artistic
                research on the social impact of web interfaces and the
                subversion of centralised social media platforms by focus-
                ing on ways to avoid the culture of Interveillance,1 which
                is a participatory surveillance enabled by social media’s
                operational structures that leverage the human need of
                auto-determination, and carry the non-institutional agen-
                cies that operate on the Internet – GAFAM –,2 as well as
                the users themselves, as new objects of power.
                             Often unaware, users become an active part
                of these hidden power dynamics that are no longer based
                on control and repression of bodies,3 but on prevention
                through the promotion of beliefs and habits that take ad-
                vantage of processes of identification, and that manifest
                themselves in the form of viral trends.

                                 The evolution of the web and the self

                             In the early web (web 1.0), users started ex-
                perimenting with HTML – Hypertext Markup Language – to
                build their own “virtual homes.” They used to see the WWW
                as a parallel world in which they could build and develop


       1 A. Jansson, M. Christensen, Media, Surveillance and Identity: Social Perspective (New York:
       Peter Lang, 2013).
       2 GAFAM is an acronym for a group of American technology companies: Google, Apple,
       Facebook (Meta), Amazon, and Microsoft.
       3 M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1975) (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1977).

S()FIA BRAGA                                    145                                          AN-ICON
                their personal space. This gave users the feeling they had
                control on the construction of a unique space, by using
                a new universal language, that offered them a chance to
                present and spread their thoughts worldwide.
                             Despite this fresh feeling of freedom, the early
                web was neither a democratic nor a completely free space,
                but the lack of user-friendly tools for web development
                put users in the position of working on an “empty canvas,”
                which offered more possibilities with less limitation.
                             For the Web 1.0 user, the web space was an
                extension of the physical one: “Welcome to My Website,”
               “Welcome to S()fia’s homepage,” a space which only ex-
                ists in the moment the computer is on and the browser
                window open. Moreover, the distinction between the two
                spaces was still very clear because of the medium. Firstly,
                because of the impossibility of connecting anywhere due
                to the technical limitations of the Personal Computer and
                access to the Internet. Secondly, because the user tend-
                ed to spend more time building their digital space rather
                than constructing their online persona due to the act of
                programming.
                             The introduction of web development systems
                in most web hosting services gave space to everyone to
                build websites through user-friendly tools which restrict
                the creativity of the user, together with the characteristic
                uniqueness of the 1.0 era web pages. With the structural
                change of the web also its final purpose shifted: with the
                advent of the web 2.0, we witnessed the beginning of the
                Social Media era, in which the focus shifted towards the
                creation of content for the platform and on the user’s online
                image. This indicates the transition between My and Me,4
                where the online space becomes an extension of the user’s
                identity based on real data, reshaping new dynamics of

       4 O. Lialina, Turing Complete User. Resisting Alienation in Human-Computer-Interaction
       (Heidelberg: arthistoricum.net, 2021). 	

S()FIA BRAGA                                   146                                        AN-ICON
               control and proving that modifying the structure of the web
               interface changes the experience of the medium radically.

                                 The Digital Panopticon

                            Nowadays we find ourselves in an economic
               system focused on the collection and commodification of
               personal data for profit, where Big Tech companies are
               gaining exponential power and control over our decisions
               and behaviour through sentiment analysis. Surveillance
               Capitalism pushes people to become prosumers – produc-
               ers, consumers and products – by using them as resources
               of free labour. This results in what can be considered a total
               collapse of the private space through the use of intimate
               human experiences as free raw material that is later trans-
               lated into behavioural data.5
                            In this context the fields of artificial intelligence
               and machine learning find themselves in a very critical po-
               sition: on the one hand AI holds the potential to be utilised
               on the way to human self-realisation by enhancing human
               agency and increasing societal capabilities, while on the
               other hand, the misuse of these algorithms by Big Tech
               corporations as data scrapers are already gaining more
               control over people, consequently undermining human
               self-determination.6
                            Today’s misconceptions surrounding the algo-
               rithm and its tendency to become even more of a black
               box as it advances, consequently leads to an animist, al-
               most magic-like, perception towards it. The fact that these




       5 S. Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New
       Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019).
       6 J. Cowl, L. Floridi, M. Taddeo, “The Challenges and Opportunities of Ethical AI,” in J. Rogers,
       I. Papadimitriou, A. Prescott, eds., Artificially Intelligent: V&A Digital Design Weekend 2018
       (Dundee: University of Dundee, 2018).

S()FIA BRAGA                                    147                                          AN-ICON
               technologies are developed by the human mind is being
               overlooked in the face of the worldwide crises we are facing.
                           People in power at tech monopolies build their
               narratives around technology in a way that give responsi-
               bility and agency to it, whereas the ethical responsibility
               relies on the ones that are developing, monitoring, using,
               and taking advantage of said technologies. Therefore, it
               is misguided to fear the machine based on the dystopic
               dispositions it has been displaying, while the focus on the
               people behind those machines, taking decisions that intro-
               duce biases and lead their direction, is lacking.
                           Within the next pages, by analysing a selection
               of my works, I will outline two possible methods I developed
               within my artistic practice as ways to subvert centralised
               social media platform dynamics and problematics to bring
               awareness to users about their role and power within these
               structures.

                           1. Data overload: appropriation and
                           manipulation of users’ personal content
                           to make data unreadable.

                            I Stalk Myself More Than I Should
                           There is a narcissistic aspect in surveillance
               which empowers internet users to monitor their behaviour
               daily, overcoming the fear of being observed. Sharing struc-
               tured, rationalised, and complex private content with in-
               timate details online places users in a digital panopticon.
               This content is not easily read and is subject to interpreta-
               tion, hence it is possible to find various starting points for
               speculative stories.
                            I Stalk Myself More Than I Should is an archive
               of expired memories that were meant to die within 24 hours.
               The work displays a selection of Instagram Stories preserved
               through the use of screen recordings. Going against the

S()FIA BRAGA                          148                            AN-ICON
                 nature of this feature, the project investigates appropriation,
                 interpretation, and representation, as well as qualities and
                 hierarchies of humans memories shared and stored online.
                                I Stalk Myself More Than I Should shows cha-
                 otic collages of short footage where users’ narrations and
                 promotional ads coexist: selfies, morning routines, semi-
                 nudes, ads, parties, concerts, complaints, ads, quotes, me-
                 mes, self-promotion, ads, exhibitions, and so on are com-
                 bined as sounds and images that hypnotise and capture
                 us in front of the screen wondering what will come next.
                 By making rather straightforward connections between
                 videos, the audience can easily read users’ stories in vari-
                 ous ways, nevertheless we progressively discover that the
                 artist is actually the exposed one: through her interaction
                 with these short stories we are able to unveil information
                 via her personal preferences just by paying attention to the
                 viewing time of each video, or to the ads recommended for
                 instance. This process highlights how the act of appropri-
                 ation is still a way to express the self.




  Fig. 1. S()fia Braga, I Stalk Myself more than I should and Meanwhile in China,
                     view of the exhibition at Ars Electronica Festival, Linz, 2019.

S()FIA BRAGA                                       149                                 AN-ICON
                             Users have made this project possible by shar-
               ing and giving permission to anyone to get a glimpse into
               their daily life, which is constructed on the foundation of
               impressions they want to convey about themselves. What
               might represent itself as a moral problem – the appropri-
               ation of other people’s “private” content – is actually an
               insolent take on how to deal with issue of data storage by
               centralised online platforms. The general misconception
               of being in control of the data we give up, because of the
               interface’s presented possibility of deletion, or because
               they will automatically disappear thanks to a feature of the
               platform, leads users to readily share an abundance of con-
               tent, increasing profits of the platform itself which stores all
               data within databases, making use of them as prediction
               products to be sold into future behavioural markets.




                            Fig. 2. S()fia Braga and Matthias Pitscher,
                             A Study on the characteristics of Douyin,
                  Xie Zilong Photography Museum, Changsha, 2019.

S()FIA BRAGA                                  150                         AN-ICON
                            The research that was initiated with I Stalk My-
               self More Than I Should was then developed further with
               the realisation of A Study on the characteristics of Douyin
               and Meanwhile in China, two video installations created in
               collaboration with artist Matthias Pitscher, which analyse
               the app Douyin, the original version of TikTok created in
               China. Within this platform users attempt to copy specific
               patterns that go viral to achieve success: the same dances
               or memes are continuously repeated using the same music,
               while the individual seeks acceptance within the platform
               by conforming to the standards set by the community. It is
               not a coincidence that the majority of users on Douyin and
               TikTok are young people, who are still developing their self
               image by being part of a peer group to begin with. In fact
               TikTok promotes different internet aesthetics and vibes in
               which young users tend to find a sense of belonging within.




                                              Fig. 3. S()fia Braga and Matthias Pitscher,
                                                                      Meanwhile in China,
                                                                    view of the exhibition
                                                               at Ars Electronica Festival,
                                                                               Linz, 2019.

S()FIA BRAGA                         151                                        AN-ICON
                            Nevertheless Meanwhile in China also focus-
               es on problematics related to freedom of speech within
               Chinese social media platforms due to restrictions caused
               by the Great Firewall, a series of legislation that enforce
               censorship by regulating internet domestically. The project
               shows different tricks and symbols users utilise within the
               platform to find ways to talk about censored topics.
                            Even if it manifests itself in different ways, we
               should not forget that censorship is not foreign to west-
               ern social platforms either, which consistently update their
               content restrictions for users.

                            Welcome to My Channel
                            Welcome to My Channel delves into the vast
               world of video sharing, in which intimate storytelling has
               become a tool to achieve visibility and gather views as
               part of a process of self-determination. Within this context,
               mental distress itself becomes a dangerous narrative tool,
               as it becomes more and more difficult to delineate the
               boundaries between reality and fiction.
                            Through the appropriation of Vlogs downloaded
               from one of the most famous video sharing platforms on the
               Internet, the video reflects on the contemporary condition
               of confiding online.




                                                               Fig. 4. S()fia Braga,
                                                           Welcome to my channel,
                                                             2020, still from video.

S()FIA BRAGA                          152                                AN-ICON
                             In this mash-up of appropriated videos, suicidal
               thoughts are alternated with promotion of online counselling
               apps, creating a disturbing combination that questions the
               reality of the narration and highlights the latest neo-liberal
               marketing trends on mental health and self-care, with the
               ultimate goal of controlling people’s behaviours by covertly
               imposing a series of habits. Thus Social Media becomes
               the most accessible tool to control bodies in a subtle way,
               leveraging the human need of belonging, and therefore
               conforming.

                           2. Online fictional narratives and
                           transmedia storytelling.

                            Die Verwandlung
                           The project, commissioned by TBD Ultramag-
               azine on the topic of metamorphosis, the human/non-hu-
               man relation, and immersivity, is a short movie for Insta-
               gram Stories in which a disturbing everyday life is narrated
               through an atmospheric mix typical of the psychological
               horror genre, found footage sub-genre, and vernacular on-
               line aesthetics such as cursed images and backrooms.
                           The short movie is permeated with a continu-
               ous feeling of alienation towards the domestic environment
               and the body, that is victim to a slow process of mutation,
               and becomes undesirable and alien. The body in Die Ver-
               wandlung is passive, and is tired of behaving conformingly,
               while trapped in the house and within a screen that manip-
               ulates its own reality. The body we witness is a body that
               is looking for its own identity within several realities: the
               physical one, the mediated one of the Instagram story in-
               terpreted by the audience, that – as in a video game – will
               be asked to choose a finale, and gameplay moments that
               become a meta-narrative tool in which the body, wandering

S()FIA BRAGA                          153                            AN-ICON
               within the walls of a virtual castle as an avatar, is desper-
               ately searching for the identity of a video game character
               affected by amnesia.
                           The atypical format of the IG Stories that were
               used to develop a traditional format such as a short movie,
               challenges and subverts the user’s fruition as well as the
               concept of fiction and credibility of images within social
               media platforms.




                                                                   Fig. 5. S()fia Braga,
                                                        Die Verwandlung, 2020, stills
                                                         from video. Courtesy of the
                                                       Artist and TBD Ultramagazine.


                             Forehead Vulva Channelling Research
                             The Forehead Vulva Channelling Research is a
               speculative transhumanist research which focuses on de-
               veloping advanced studies on the human body’s potential
               to reach lifelong emotional well-being via a re-calibration of
               pleasure-centers by channeling hidden organs through the
               use of specialised technologies. The purpose of opening
               the “Forehead Vulva” is to bring the body to an uninhibited
               state, and thereby transform it, rediscovering new poten-
               tials that humans are still not aware of.
                             Started as a series of Forehead Vulva Channel-
               ers – a specific Augmented Reality specialised technology –,
               The Forehead Vulva Channeling Research found rapid sup-
               port and success within centralised social media platforms,
               consequently creating a spontaneous worldwide online

S()FIA BRAGA                          154                                    AN-ICON
               performance: just within 24 hours of the first Forehead Vul-
               va channeller release, it was already used by 10.000 users
               and had more than 250.000 impressions.
                           The project deals with topics such as tech-
               no-gender identity and the perception of digital and hy-
               brid bodies, looking for ways to use technology to disrupt
               identity standards, while at the same time challenging the
               contemporary capitalistic propaganda of finding ways to
               reach a “higher” or “better” version of the self through pro-
               motion of specific habits and beliefs. Within this context,
               in a dark and humorous way, Forehead Vulva Channeling
               Research brings the non-compliant body within a capital-
               istic context, causing a short circuit.




                                                      Fig. 6. S()fia Braga, Forehead
                                                        Vulva Channeling Research,
                                                               2021, still from video.


                            These methods have proven that the disruption
               of the user experience within social media platforms hold
               the potential to engage with users and bring awareness
               with a non-manipulative approach, and that a system, in
               order to be changed, needs to be modified and subverted
               from within.
                             In my work, I try to make users aware of their
               relevance within these structures and invite them to take a
               critical stance by triggering subversion techniques aimed at
               disrupting and upsetting the everyday use of the platform.


S()FIA BRAGA                         155                                   AN-ICON
AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON.
The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan.



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