Jasmine Guffond: The sounds of surveillance is something of a misnomer. I mean for me the whole point is that surveillance makes no sound, and therefore I’m giving it a sound so that we can hear some of these data collection processes that are usually obscured and operating in the background.

DJ Soeur Veillance: And there is always a problem with the word surveillance, that some people have a narrow vision of what it is, they just think it’s CCTV cameras. Maybe it’s better to mention digital or data, something that relates to digital technology and the internet.

MIA “The Message” (2010)

SV: I think it’s commonly agreed that this track is about surveillance. Some people said, ‘Ahh, MIA was explaining Snowden before Snowden.’

JG: The Snowden leaks were three years after the release date. I think it’s brilliant because it’s a song that you learn at school, “the thigh bone is connected to the hip bone”, and so native English speakers probably know it already. There is something creepy about using a children’s song and then transforming the lyrics to say our bodies are connected to the internet, Google, the government.

SV: I didn’t know about that children’s song, but it still sounded creepy and scary. And it’s nice because it’s a really short song.

Jasmine Guffond “Sonic Voyeur” (2019)

JG: This is from a sound installation where I was sonifying Twitter meta-data. For that project I had to pick personalities that had large followings, just so I could have regular data flows. It was interesting which personalities take up a lot of space in the Twittersphere. Donald Trump’s profile is so active that I could have made a sound installation just on him.

SV: It doesn’t sound like Trump. It sounds relatively calm.

JG: This was recorded in February 2019, but because I installed the work a few times sometimes the Trump Twitter feed would go totally crazy and then you’d check the tweet and he would just have announced something to do with the Iranian nuclear deal, which gave it an ominous undertone. Basically, what you hear is every time followers are replying or retweeting to each profile. And it’s not just Trump but also Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, Rhianna, CNN, the BBC, and Narendra Modi.

SV: So, this is about digital activity, sonification of data, but maybe not specifically surveillance as such?

JG: Well, the first time I installed it was in the context of a group show called The Watched. Most of the artists were more or less engaging with surveillance, like you said, as literally being watched, people following them, taking photos and videoing them or looking through peep holes. That’s when I decided to do this work about how much we watch each other via social media platforms, and also how much information can be ascertained through meta-data. I was also thinking about what it means to have ourselves as humans translated into streams of data. Which is probably something you have thought about a lot?

SV: Yes, I have been asking for my own data from Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and others and when you receive some data, the feeling is very strange. Even though it’s your own data, you don’t recognise yourself in it. Which is normal because the data is something that the company has made up, so it’s not really just your data. Or in this case, it’s not even really Trump’s data but data from his followers. It’s a different kind of thing, it’s difficult to translate.

JG: So, it’s a question of identity in a way. If we represent ourselves more and more online and it gets abstracted into data, what does it mean for us as humans if we can’t relate to these digital profiles? And of course the implications of who is creating these digital profiles. I was also interested in how we participate in surveillance by actively giving up our data in exchange for social status.

SV: There is something that I keep remembering about the lecture that you gave in Brussels. This dilemma that you had about making sounds that are nice to listen to, or sounds that are scary. And how in a way surveillance is scary and unpleasant, but it’s also fascinating to participate in it sometimes.

JG: Its difficult with aesthetics because what’s a beautiful sound for one person might be an ugly sound for another. So it’s hard to control a message through the aesthetics of sound but I’m trying to reflect the complexity of it. Like you were saying, obviously I’m critical of surveillance but at the same time the experience of it is fun, it’s going shopping, it’s sharing photos, its chatting with friends, it’s promoting yourself, its updating your website.

Cardi B “Thru Your Phone” (2018)

SV: It’s about defending invasion of privacy. It was funny that the whole record was called Invasion Of Privacy. I thought she was going to criticise people invading her privacy but not at all. It’s also about social media, taking someone’s phone and realising how we put everything on our phones and then share it.

JG: I find it interesting because it expresses a very personal relationship to privacy where as statements like “Nothing To Hide” assume there is a general relationship to privacy, that everyone has the same relationship to privacy, whereas in fact it is extremely personal and cultural. She is actively invading her boyfriend’s privacy because she doesn’t trust him. So it also brings up issues of trust that are inherent to privacy.

SV: My background is not in sociology. I tend to work with privacy and data protection as a lawyer, which is why it’s so interesting for me to listen to these pop songs, they remind me that privacy is so complex and can be many things for many people but then we simplify things by saying privacy is, for instance, about controlling one’s information. There are many dimensions and relations to privacy.

Kari Faux “Leave Me Alone” (2019)

SV: This one relates to a positive defence of privacy, this me time, me space. Asserting your privacy as a space that you need for yourself. There are a few songs about this with a more feminist perspective that are quite interesting. Privacy as a need for space.

JG: It again expresses how everyone has a strong sense of personal privacy in the context of the nothing to hide slogan that gets used. A few of the tracks I listened to from your lists position privacy in relation to some creepy ex-boyfriend stalking them.

SV: Yes, there are many songs about stalkers, perhaps this is an easy trope to write a song about. Or maybe many people have a tendency to stalk.

JG: And that is so much easier to do with smartphones and social media.

SV: Yes. I think probably many of us are in a way stalkers online.

JG: Are you guilty of stalking people online?

SV: What is it to stalk online? My mother stalks me, somehow. I’m sure we all get information about people without telling them. I don’t think anybody is fully innocent of surveilling others online.

JG: The end of the video is what I particularly like. She is so exacerbated by her ex calling her all the time that she begins to smash phones with a baseball bat. The very last shot is a close up of a phone that although it’s been clearly smashed, the screen is cracked, it starts to ring. Even though she tried to smash the phone with a baseball bat it wasn’t enough to defend her privacy. Its a good image for how pervasive these technologies can be.

Sam Kidel “Live At Google Data Center” (2018)

JG: Kidel simulated the acoustics of the Google Data Centre in Iowa to make it sound as if he has broken in to stage a free party there. It is interesting to note that these data centres are maximum security locations, that the only way that one could break is by simulating the acoustic space.

SV: It’s an original take on the sonification, not of data, but of the realities of data, these servers that we don’t get to see. Recently there is a lot of interesting information about the environmental repercussions of these server centres and AI. Perhaps if we saw all these servers and the impact they can have on the environment and we understood all these flows of data we would also have a different perception of these technologies. But everything is invisible and out of sight.

JG: Yes, the infrastructure is very much hidden.

SV: Yes, and this is an interesting way of trying to represent it.

Jenna Sutela “Nimiia Vibie I” (2019)

SV: I’m not sure this song is particularly critical but I think the fact it is about machine learning is interesting, as we are now trying to apply machine learning to everything, in some cases just to see what happens. The alien part, at least its not about human robot comparisons. With Artificial Intelligence (AI) we are always trying to define the machine in relation to the human, we compare them, for example this machine thinks like a human or even better than a human. Here at least its something different, that we are not trying to define the capability of the machine in comparison to the human. That’s interesting as an artistic approach.

JG: It’s interesting how you said that it doesn’t seem critical of AI. The project did come out of a Google arts and culture residency program so that’s maybe why it’s less critical, because of the context.

SV: It’s safer to have a commentary on AI and aliens than to explore the impact of AI on society. But it’s still interesting to listen to this and think about how technology allows you to create this imaginary language.

JG: You can always relate machine learning back to digital surveillance. We all know that data is collected from us so that we can be fed targeted advertisements but it’s also being used to train AI or machine learning because the bigger the data set the better the AI.

Een Glish “Log In” (2019)

SV: Many of the lyrics are a reflection of technology and software and there are collaborations with other imaginary non-human artists.

JG: It seems from the lyrics that there is a whole family, The Google Translate Lady, Google analytics and her sister Google Maps.

SV: There are also collaborations with Microsoft David, or Hatsune Miku. It’s another artistic device around the digital, you can sonify data, but also create artistic projects with software personalities. What is a real artist, what is a real artistic project?

Teejayx6 “Under Pressure” (2019)

SV: Here the whole thing is about scam, identity theft and online fraud. He was kicked out of the internet ‘by the government’ I think because of online fraud, but it’s not clear.

JG: What I like about this one is that he downloaded the Tor browser to get back onto the dark web to do something illegal, which is exactly the cultural baggage that the Tor browser doesn’t need or want. It is sometimes positioned against the Tor browser, that it’s used for illegal activities on the dark web when in fact it’s the only browser that we have that is by default private. Which is a great and very important tool.

SV: There is also something really paradoxical with talking about tools for anonymity and at the same time showing off that you are anonymous on the internet doing all these illegal things.

JG: Yeah, if I was doing anything illegal on the dark web I wouldn’t sing about it and publish the song. But this is what we were talking about before, where the artist has a public profile.

SV: It is easy to feel trapped by surveillance because you want to be, if not famous, at least exposed and visible.

Killer DBA “Data Protection” (2017)

JG: Killer DBA worked in IT for 20 years then starting writing songs to help him remember information crucial to his job. I had to look up what DBA stands for – database analyst. Its a great concept, I wonder if he is open to suggestions. I think if he was singing about how to install the Tor browser or use PGP for encrypted emailing it would be a nice way for people to easily access these tools.

SV: Maybe he does some training with live shows. For me it’s really the perfect Prince song about data protection.

JPEG Mafia x FREAKY “Big Data + The Internet Ain’t Safe” (2018)

SV: This song has two parts, and the first one is about Big Data. Nowadays we are always discussing Artificial Intelligence, but a couple of years ago everybody was talking about Big Data. This song expresses very well the attitude of everybody selling Big Data then, and now Artificial Intelligence: they have it, it’s Big, and it’s the solution to everything. The second part is about internet safety, data protection and security, in a more subtle way. The record was very much concerned with Trump, at the time that Trump was about to be elected.

JG: Is it relating to the Cambridge Analytica scandal?

SV: Not directly, but it’s from that period and I think if there is a critique of power and politics in the United States, it’s logical to include data issues.

Jasmine Guffond “Five Faces” (from the installation Sonic Portraits, 2014)

JG: I was doing a sound studies masters at UdK and we did a project with the Deutsche Oper, it was a sound walk. The director chose the theme of protest, because there is a history of protest around the Deutsche Oper building in Charlottenburg and apparently Berlin audiences are more prone to booing, so there is a kind of protest within the audience. At the time I had been reading about how after the occupy movement in New York, CCTV cameras with facial recognition technology [FRT] were being installed, which was calling into question one’s right to be anonymous at protests. So I thought it would be interesting to look at a contemporary technological aspect of protest culture. I discovered that all protests in Germany are videoed by the police and they have the capability to cross match the videos with databases of ID’s or drivers licenses using FRT. Also it’s forbidden in Germany to cover your face at a protest. FRT is particularly insidious because unlike an iris scan or fingerprint for which you have to actively hand over your finger you don’t have to actively do anything for FRT to identify you. You are passively identified so it’s considered to be a silent technology. I thought it was important to give it a sound.

SV: It fits well to the playlist because of this connection between protest and freedom of expression and surveillance. Technologies like facial recognition are not ‘just invading privacy’ understood as a personal space. They have a visible impact on the ways that people can protest, express themselves, mobilise. The political dimension of surveillance is very clear.

Mat Dryhurst “Surveilling the Audience @ Southbank” (2014)

JG: This is Dryhurst surveilling the audience at [London’s] Southbank. From what I understand it’s a recording of a live performance where he scraped data from the facebook profiles of attendees. It’s a patch he built that was also used on Holly Herndon’s record Platform.

SV: This is interesting as another example of art on surveillance. Something I have seen quite a lot when people make art about surveillance is that they decide to surveil the audience. But he has done it in a nice way, because it’s not just about showing you your picture.

JG: Yes, he’s abstracted their personal information.

SV: Yes, it gives you this strange feeling that we were discussing before, that you receive your data but in a very strange way. It’s interesting to see this translation: you are being abstracted, your own data sounds very strange.

JG: I’ve also, like you, requested my data from Facebook. It was data related to advertising, so a list of words. Some of the items on the list I couldn’t relate to at all and other ones made sense. They are building weird profiles on us, but it would be even creepier if it was an exact mirror of myself.

Jasmine Guffond “Dotcompound” (from the forthcoming release Microphone Permission, 2020)

JG: This is from an album that was developed over a couple of years. So quite slowly and meanwhile I’ve been researching for my PhD focused on online surveillance and sound as a method of investigation. The titles of the tracks came from this research as well as the sounds coming from different sound art projects. Like the installation that sonifies Twitter meta-data, some of the sounds from that project are used in one of the compositions. It’s like the research is one thing and the music is another thing and they have come together on the album.

SV: When you composed this track, was it related to a specific project, or did you focus more on the music?

JG: The origins of this track is music that I composed for a dancer who was doing a piece about what a future dead forest might sound like. The title “Dotcompound” is a play on the word dotcom and dotcompound suggests that the internet is a prison-like environment but actually it isn’t. I mean it depends from which perspective you appreciate it. We are being constantly surveilled which is very much prison-like, but it doesn’t feel like we are in prison. So a paradox, I’m suggesting the world wide Web is a prison but it doesn’t feel like it at all.

I think the more you know or think about how every single move is being surveilled – it’s dark, the way our information streams are curated by major tech corporations is dark, but our experience of being surveilled is actually fun, playful, it’s a communication tool and for now I can’t imagine living without it.

Jasmine Guffond’s Microphone Permission is released by Editions Mego on 6 March. She was interviewed by Abi Bliss in The Wire 419. Subscribers can read that on Exact Editions.