Post-digital Art and Privacy A Critical Exploration of Technology

Post-digital art is characterized by the process of its creative practice, which the results of this research describe in three key ways: exploring technologies, changing the experience and challenging the evolution. The exploration of technologies allies critical research and the imagination of future possibilities, while the changing of experience seeks to create an alternative and sensitive experience of technologies, making them more human and playful. To challenge the evolution means opening the technological tools, opening the power conversation around it and subverting it by creating alternative languages, while playing with the rules and counteracting the status quo. This research shows that it is through this reflexive process, a reinterpretation of technology and the development of a political scope, that post-digital art addresses issues of privacy in the digital age, such as human information, surveillance and hyperconnectivity. As a result, this research describes post-digital art practice as helping to return power to the user and change the audience’s relation to technology in response to the tech industries’ domination over its evolution and design. Indeed, this research describes digital privacy in dynamics between power and technology, where the digital realm has become nothing more than a place where progress and design are made to benefit a small group: the big tech. In other words, digital has become a place where users are confronted with tech design in which they lose their agency and autonomy, and are led to become addicted, to give away their data and be flooded with ads. Finally, this research argues that post-digital art practice could be interpreted as a new form of digital art activism, as it offers a reflexive approach to the human-technology relationship.