The Black Chamber

How did the internet go from the utopian free-for-all, open source heaven, libertarian last frontier to the current state of permanent surveillance, exhibitionism and paranoia? This duplicity is the underlying thread that links the artists, activists, and researchers in The Black Chamber, an exhibition, a symposium, an urban intervention and a publication.
The Black Chamber aims at discussing the delicate and often awkward role of art and imagination in the age of mass surveillance, stressing the multiple connections between post-studio art and independent research, grassroots reverse engineering, and new forms of political activism in the age of networks.
Not just an exhibition catalogue, this book is also an attempt to show the exhibited works as part of larger research processes. With works and original contributions by Jacob Appelbaum & Ai Weiwei, Laura Poitras, Metahaven, Zach Blas, James Bridle, Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion, Simon Denny, Jill Magid, !Mediengruppe Bitnik and Evan Roth.

Colophon

The Black Chamber (exhibition catalogue)
Texts by Domenico Quaranta et al.
Language: English
Catalogue of the exhibition curated by Eva & Franco Mattes, Bani Brusadin (Ljubljana / Rijeka, 2016)
Edited by: Bani Brusadin, Eva & Franco Mattes, Domenico Quaranta
Publisher: Link Editions, Brescia 2016
Co-Publisher: Aksioma − Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana
Design and layout: Fabio Paris
Image editor: Matteo Cremonesi
Proofreading: Philip Jan Nagel
In the frame of Masters & Servers.
This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. This license lets you remix, tweak, and build upon this work non-commercially, as long as you credit the Author and license your new creations under the identical terms. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/.
The fonts used in the cover and front pages of this book belong to the ZXX family [http://z-x-x.org/], designed as a free Open Type Font by Sang Mun [http://sang-mun.com/]. The name ZXX comes from the US Library of Congress’ Alpha-3 ISO 639-2 — codes for the representation of names of languages. ZXX is used to declare ’No linguistic content; Not applicable’. Download & disperse in your convenience: ZXX ver.1.0 [http://dl.dropbox.com/u/20517415/ZXX.zip]
The print-on-demand version is printed and distributed by:Lulu.com
ISBN 978-1-326-61205-4