The Surveillance Cycle

1. The question

The technical entries in this series probe vulnerability in systems; this one probes it in citizens. Surveillance capitalism operates as exploitation at population scale — private experience extracted as free raw material, fashioned into prediction products, traded in behavioural futures markets — against a condition the watched cannot patch. The investigation asked whether the adversary’s own instruments could be inverted: whether surveillance’s means of production — its imaging technologies, its machine-learning apparatus, its euphemistic language — can be repurposed to make the concealed power relation perceptible. A society cannot govern what it cannot see; the cycle’s wager is that aesthetics is a valid instrument of that seeing. Three bodies of work carry the inquiry: Retained Reports (2019–2022), The Mallards’ Call (2017–2020), and Sans Surveillance Sans (2019).

2. Method note

Movements engaged. All four movements, in the Studio register. Conceived adversarial processes, one per work: train the surveillance economy’s own algorithmic apparatus (a GAN) on a decaying public-domain photographic archive and present its indelible outputs on powered-off e-ink, materialising the permanence of extracted data (Retained Reports); turn surveillance imaging on the operator himself — infrared illuminators as modelling lights on new-moon nights, light invisible to every mammal present, photographer included (The Mallards’ Call); weaponise typographic ligatures so that surveillance euphemisms self-translate into honest language as they are typed, then apply the typeface as subtitles to Cambridge Analytica’s own conference footage (Sans Surveillance Sans). Each process was matched to a researched subject — data permanence and behavioural futures markets; surveillance, loneliness, and coerced social participation; the marketing language of the surveillance apparatus — executed through the works, and translated across registers via juried exhibition, artist talks, and catalogue publication.

Instruments. GAN training on the Costică Acsinte glass-plate archive; electronic-ink display as medium argument; infrared night-vision imaging repurposed as photographic lighting; captioning drawn from the Man’yōshū; ligature-based typeface engineering; appropriation of Creative Commons–licensed source footage.

Exclusions. The works assert questions, not answers: no empirical claims are made about loneliness or democratic harm beyond what the works materialise. No policy prescription is offered in this register — the cycle informs, and is informed by, the agency’s research and policy work, but claims no policy outcome of its own. The Sans Surveillance Sans typeface itself has not been released (see §5).

3. Findings

1. Surveillance’s means can be inverted. Each work runs an instrument of the surveillance apparatus — machine-learning generation, night-vision imaging, promotional language — against its ordinary direction of power, and the inversion is what renders the power relation visible (artefacts 1–3).
2. Extracted data is a permanent artefact. Where Acsinte’s glass plates decay — emulsion peeling, glass splintering, allegories of the impermanence of human artefacts — their GAN-hallucinated counterparts, like personal data in the surveillance-industrial complex’s hands, do not: retention outlives the subject’s decision to stop sharing (artefact 1).
3. Euphemism is a concealment mechanism, and it can be made legible mechanically: ligature substitution translates “big data,” “smart,” “personalisation” into their operational meanings at the moment of writing, turning a legibility device into a sense-making device (artefact 3).
4. Surveillance and sociality are entangled: with social media mediating nearly every form of social participation, the platforms function as surveillance systems in disguise, and the unbearability of withdrawal makes exposure coerced rather than chosen — the condition The Mallards’ Call records from inside (artefact 2).

4. Consequence

Curatorial validation. The cycle passed juried selection internationally — the third validation system the agency is built on, demonstrated years before it was named. Retained Reports: finalist, Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize, National Portrait Gallery, London (2020); FUTURE(S), Belfast Photo Festival (2021); winner, Bangkok Art Biennale open call, CHAOS : CALM (2022); finalist, COUNTERPARTS — PORTRAITS Hellerau Photography Award, Museum of Science and Technology, Dresden (2022); Helsinki Photo Festival open-call winner (2022); Singapore International Photography Festival open-call winner (2022).

Awards. First prize, Magenta Foundation UNSTUCK Photography Grant (2021); Spotlight Award shortlist, Belfast Photo Festival (2021); Hariban Award Honourable Mention to Retained Reports (2022) and to The Mallards’ Call (2023).

Discourse. Artist talks and panels carried the inquiry into circulation: Surveillance State, with Adam Broomberg, Esther Hovers, and Anna Cafolla (Belfast Photo Festival, 2021); Anomalous Surveillance (Art Center Nabi, Seoul, 2021). The works entered catalogue literature at the venues above, among others.

No policy or standards consequence is claimed for this investigation; its register is cultural, and the record says so.

5. Artefact record

#	Artefact	Type	Venue / identifier	Date	Access
1	Retained Reports (series; GAN portraits retained on powered-off e-ink)	artwork	Exhibited: NPG London 2020 · Belfast 2021 · BAB Bangkok 2022 · Hellerau/Dresden 2022 · Helsinki 2022 · SIPF 2022	2019–2022	artwork
2	The Mallards’ Call (series; infrared elegy after the Man’yōshū)	artwork	Featured: Artdoc Magazine 2020 · Hariban HM 2023	2017–2020	artwork
3	Sans Surveillance Sans — Cambridge Analytica (subtitled video work)	artwork	Appropriated excerpt of Concordia’s CC-licensed conference recording, re-framed through the typeface	2019	artwork
4	Sans Surveillance Sans (typeface)	artwork	—	2019	Unreleased. The typeface exists and was used in artefact 3; no release has been committed.
5	Surveillance State (panel, w/ Broomberg · Hovers · Cafolla)	talk	Belfast Photo Festival, Belfast	2021	recording
6	Anomalous Surveillance	talk	Nabi Online Hackathon, Art Center Nabi, Seoul	2021	Materials not currently in the record
7	CHAOS : CALM — Bangkok Art Biennale 2022 catalogue (Poshyananda, ed.)	press	Bangkok Art Biennale	2023	press
8	Hariban Award catalogues (Benrido, Kyoto)	press	Hariban Award 2022	2022	catalogue
9	Hariban Award catalogues (Benrido, Kyoto)	press	Hariban Award 2023	2023	catalogue
10	COUNTERPARTS — PORTRAITS Hellerau Photography Award Katalog	press	Verlag der Kunstagentur Dresden	2022	press
11	Artist statements: Retained Reports	article	Pwnshow	2017–2022	article
12	Artist statements: The Mallards’ Call	article	Pwnshow	2017–2022	article
13	Artist statements: Sans Surveillance Sans	article	Pwnshow	2017–2022	article
14	Caos calmo. Ultime due settimane per visitare la Bangkok Art Biennale	press	ArtsLife	2023	press

Public social documentation of the works exists at facebook.com/escapingphotons and instagram.com/escapingphotons; these accompany but do not substitute for the canonical record above.

6. Continuity

Inherits: from INV-002, the demonstration that surveillance capability conceals itself inside trusted infrastructure; this cycle carries that concealment into the political register and makes it perceptible. Feeds: the Studio register of INV-007 — the cycle is the methodological proof that the agency’s fourth movement can traverse curatorial validation, the path INV-007’s pending Studio treatment will follow.

7. What’s next

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8. Provenance

Provenance. The production of Retained Reports was partially funded by Magenta Foundation, under Magenta Foundation UNSTUCK Photography Grant (2021); the funder exercised no editorial control, and had the opportunity to review the text before publication. No entity related to Pwnshow’s personnel has a material interest in its findings. Where this work draws on the author’s experience of vulnerability and capability markets, it relies on that general expertise and on the public and published sources cited, not on non-public commercial information.

Provenance. The other works in The Surveillance Cycle were produced without external funding. No entity related to Pwnshow’s personnel has a material interest in its findings. Where this work draws on the author’s experience of vulnerability and capability markets, it relies on that general expertise and on the public and published sources cited, not on non-public commercial information.

Added 2026/07/10 under Policy v1.0.