Renée Ridgway’s current research investigates the conceptual as well as technological implications of ‘search’, merging artistic practices of intervention and hacking as alternative methods with the researched and ethnographic based approaches of the social sciences. Referencing the past techniques of monitoring and control of the Stasi era, Ridgway is focusing now on the ‘self-governance’ of progressive ‘personalisation’ in regard to our ‘filtered’ Google search results and online behaviours. Much like the hidden apparatuses used by the Stasi to monitor its citizens in former times, nowadays the infrastructure is opaque, algorithms secretive and unbeknownst to the user. Drawing parallels from the Stasi era to the present-day surveillance society, the focus of ‘The Spirit of Monitoring’ then is to create greater social understanding and awareness of how political and social opinion is nowadays controlled and regulated by corporations instead of governmental secret services. ‘The Spirit of Monitoring’ will explore this phenomena through combining the technological condition of both ‘Zeitgeisten’. On the one hand applying a historical lens on the Stasi archive and its dearth of artefacts, equipment and archival footage in order to extract relevant visual imagery and create new landscapes of conjecture. On the other the contemporary, cybernetic condition of (self) governance through our interactions of searching online with algorithmic machines.
