Bureau de Crise
Digital privacy-focused research platform and network.
Bureau de Crise is a research network of artists, engineers, designers, and concerned citizens who map out privacy issues in our digital society governed by the opaque laws of surveillance capitalism and aim to cultivate a sense of autonomy based on aspirations for both individual and collective freedom and to act collectively on self-empowerment.
Bureau de Crise intends to contribute to a moral center of critical thinking and autonomous actions. Since privacy and security are now primarily a luxury privilege for the more educated elite, we want to make privacy accessible and visible for everyone to end the vast asymmetries of knowledge institutionalized by the private surveillance capital.
Surveillance capitalism operative systems constitute a direct assault on human rights (privacy), human autonomy, our decision rights, and the notion of individual sovereignty. ‘Chilling effects’ (i.e., behavioral changes), induced by strong social norms that lead to self-policing and self-censorship, directly impact our subjectivities and our democracies.
We are claiming the right of human invisibility and are collaborating in the art and science of hiding. Thus, Bureau de Crise aims to contribute to creating a culture of digital privacy by hacking the current general lack of knowledge and the actual dominant ‘inevitability’ propaganda.
Furthermore, our artistic practice aims to empower people’s ability to protect their data from the dark mechanisms of data/behavior commodification. Therefore, we need to invent new kinds of cultural institutions shaped by critical communities working on strategies of resistance against these architectures of oppression and techniques of cognitive and psychological captures secretly designed to alienate and make profits on remote-controlled and psycho-civilized populations.
Finally, we aim to address the need for new regulations, legal safeguards, and ethical limits to interrupt these specific mechanisms and limit data collection and misuse.
act one RESISTANCE
Participative installation, conferences, workshops, projection & seminars.
In the frame of the exhibition Bourses Berthoud, Lissignol-Chevalier & Galland, the Collectif Bureau de Crise proposes a digital awareness zone, taking the Centre d'Art Contemporain as a proxy platform to address the issues of surveillance capitalism.
Furthermore, as part of an installation providing documentation and media resources about data extraction and collection, we offer several workshops, discussions, and seminars for digital self-empowerment and the regaining of a proper perspective on the value of privacy as a serious and significant concern for the upcoming years.
DIGITAL RISKS IN ARMED CONFLICTS
Seminar by Philippe Stoll from The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)
Seminar by Philippe Stoll from The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)
NOTHING TO HIDE
Projection of the documentary "Nothing To Hide" directed by Marc Meillassoux and Mihaela Gladovic
DATA PROTECTION
A workshop by Laurent Weingart
3D FACIAL WEAPONIZATION
A seminar by Marta Revuelta
DATA DETOX
Workshop by Bureau de Crise
Photographs © Raphaëlle Mueller