Closed Circuits and Black Boxes: Artistic Responses to Technological Enclosure by Cass Fino-Radin
EAI posted an open call for essays in response to the original Open Circuits conference, and provided access to archival materials to the three selected writers to support their engagement with this history. This third essay, by media art conservator Cass Fino-Radin, traces shifts in media artists’ use of technology from Open Circuits to present. Fino-Radin addresses the stark contrast between the 1970s media landscape and the contemporary dynamics of platform and surveillance capitalism, black box technological innovation, and proprietary software, showing how artists continue to define technology on their own terms.
Nam June Paik, Good Morning Mr. Orwell (1984).
The year is 1994. A relatively new technology, previously the pet project of an idealistic physicist, is rushing into the public sphere. By all appearances, the World Wide Web seems to show early signs of embodying some optimistic dreams for the open exchange of information and research. Its newly established governing body consisted of research universities from the USA, France, and Japan, rather than corporations.¹ That same year, artist Douglas Davis created his first work of art for the web, The World’s First Collaborative Sentence, fundamentally based on the new marvel that computer users worldwide could co-create a never-ending piece of writing in real time. Surely this new technology must be the future that artists had dreamt about in the early years of video art — a technological infrastructure not occupied by commercial interests but infused with humanity. Was this the electronic superhighway that Nam June Paik spoke of?
Joseph Beuys, Douglas Davis, and Nam June Paik, Documenta 6 Satellite Telecast (1977).
Where once Paik and others saw potential for artists to meaningfully shape technology’s trajectory toward more humanistic ends, by 1994 Paik recognized that commercial forces were an immovable force, having grown powerful beyond even his wildest imaginations. One can observe a certain doubt in Paik’s view of technology in his artworks and writings from the mid ‘90s as well, such as Enlightenment Compressed (1994), Couch Potato (1991), and Main Channel Matrix (1993-96). His recognition foreshadowed the challenges contemporary artists now face when confronting increasingly closed technological systems.
Three decades pass, and it would seem that the totalizing reach of private tech companies has come to bear. The web is controlled by corporate consolidation that makes the Bell Telephone Company look like a quaint family business. Our world in 2025 is governed by impenetrable proprietary hardware, inscrutable code, and planned obsolescence against the backdrop of technological deregulation, faster and faster mass-adoption and monopolization of new technologies, endless black-box-ification, and increasingly predatory tactics in technology designed to addict the masses. Knowingly or not, the public has consented to replacing the electronic superhighway with walled gardens governed by invisible algorithms that govern not just what content we consume but quite literally govern us.² In this environment of technological enclosure, where the video signal is no longer a simple extension of physics that can be bent to the artist’s will but is instead proprietary, encrypted, inscrutable, patented, and guarded by digital rights management law, what space remains for artistic intervention? Artistic practice has evolved to respond to these constraints, moving from direct technological manipulation to strategies that make visible the hidden forces shaping our digital lives.
The spirit of the early guerrilla and activist video artists emerged seemingly with a vengeance from the wreckage of the dot-com era. In Eva and Franco Mattes’s Biennale.py (2001) and Radical Software Group’s Carnivore (2002) we see artists creating viruses and surveillance/hacking tools, respectively. These pieces exemplify an era of digital art and a mode of practice that falls thoroughly within what at the time was referred to as Tactical Media. This “hacktivist” mentality perfectly encapsulates what could be seen as the intellectual and political grandchildren of the early video art radicals, a lineage of course obvious in Radical Software Group’s appropriation of the historic video journal, Radical Software, as their ensemble’s name. A key difference, however, is the broader cultural context, with the post-dot-com era Tactical Media being born in a moment that was “patently anti-ideological and decentralized to the point of sheer dispersal”³ as opposed to the specificity of the Nixon era.
Radical Software Group, Prepared Playstation 2 (2003).
There is, too, the question of the work’s sustainability and legibility over time. The conservation of works of art that employ software is a specialization that has developed over the past few decades with a growing body of discourse around technique, tools, and concerns both philosophical and practical. Beyond the concerns with regard to the labor and resources required for museums, archives, and other memory institutions to sustain software, there too is the question of maintaining legibility. When it comes to art that exists as software or functional technology, how is it read by future viewers when its technology is culturally obsolete? This is of course if we are to even set aside the panoply of issues raised by work that falls outside the technologically radical and is instead reliant upon proprietary systems and platforms.⁴
In part as a result of these questions, as we look beyond the 2010s, there are many artists who are deeply engaged with institutional critique and socially engaged practice. However, rather than directly seeking to build alternative technologies, their practices document the repercussions of intervention and serve as historic document. Kyle McDonald’s People Staring at Computers (2011) is in many ways a bridge to this. While this project resonates practically with the “tactics” of 1990s–2000s era practice — as it involved covertly installing what was ostensibly malware software on Apple Store computers to capture images of people’s faces as they used the devices — it exists now as an archive of that moment. More important today than the software McDonald wrote, is the documentation of this “performance” and the blowback it incurred (including but not limited to an internal investigation at Apple and a visit to the artist’s home from the Secret Service).
As we move further into the 2010s and beyond, we see another shift in how artists engage with technology. Rather than primarily seeking to intervene in or subvert technological systems, many contemporary artists use their practice to explore, document, and critique the impact of these systems. Sondra Perry’s Graft and Ash for a Three Monitor Workstation (2016) is a prime example of work that directly engages the implications of the closed-circuit, or the black box, when it imposes limitations on the user or artist. Perry’s piece, which features a 3D avatar of the artist displayed on exercise equipment, delves into issues of identity, race, and the body in digital spaces. By using consumer-grade software to create an imperfect digital representation of herself, Perry highlights the deep social biases embedded in these tools and the broader role these inherent biases play in reinforcing white supremacy and toxic productivity culture. Her work reveals how the limitations imposed by corporate control of black-boxed technologies disproportionately affect marginalized bodies and identities, forcing viewers to confront the human costs of technological enclosure.
Sondra Perry, Graft and Ash for a Three Monitor Workstation (2016). Installation documentation courtesy of the artist.
Trevor Paglen’s work further demonstrates how art can function as a critical record of the social and political dimensions of the code shaping our lives. His practice moves between documentation and intervention, creating work that makes visible the oft-hidden infrastructure of surveillance and data collection. Paglen’s Autonomy Cube (2014) provides a rare example of functional intervention — a sculpture that doubles as a wireless access point routing viewers’ traffic through the Tor network. This piece functions simultaneously as both artistic object and functional intervention — a circumvention of the surveilled and centralized systems that dominate our digital infrastructure. By providing anonymous internet access within institutional spaces, Autonomy Cube creates a temporary autonomous zone — one of privacy within surveilled environments, demonstrating how visibility and invisibility can be strategically deployed as resistance. The transparent cube housing the technology serves as a deliberate contrast to the black-boxed nature of most surveillance systems, making tangible the usually hidden infrastructure of digital connectivity. It bears mentioning that the majority of art viewing audiences that encounter this work have likely never even heard of the Tor network.
Much of Paglen’s practice, however, focuses not on technological intervention but documentation: photographic documentation of surveillance infrastructure or creative engagement with facial recognition systems that don’t seek to break these systems but rather to reveal their operation and implications. Through these projects, Paglen invites viewers to contemplate the unseen forces shaping our digital lives, asking essential questions: “What is this particular technology optimized to see?” and “Who does that benefit?” His work demonstrates that artistic documentation can function more effectively as cultural memory and political resistance than any traditional means of archiving or protest.
The work of Lauren Lee McCarthy is another expression of this mode. Although her works involve digital technology, and she is a highly skilled engineer, the technology is in fact not the point. McCarthy’s work is perhaps more comfortably classified as social practice; it is the social interactions and relationships that her works require and facilitate that are central. The technology McCarthy builds (often complex, and custom engineered) exists simply as a contemporary reality of our lived experience and is the mise-en-scène for the human-to-human relationships her work makes space for. For instance, in the ongoing project LAUREN she becomes a “human Alexa,” remotely surveilling participants, optimizing their lives, and controlling their homes. Her earnestness, bordering on obsession, leaves one with a deeply weird feeling that inevitably leads viewers to reflect upon why they have been conditioned to not feel this same way about people having a codependent relationship with the “real” Alexa. This uncanny discomfort arises precisely because McCarthy’s human performance of surveillance functions makes visible the extraction of attention and data that automated systems deliberately obscure. By personifying these systems, she triggers an emotional response that automated interfaces are specifically designed to suppress—the awareness that we are being monitored, analyzed, and commodified. This visceral reaction serves as a momentary circuit-breaker in our normalized relationship with surveillance technologies, creating space for critical reflection that big tech platforms actively work to prevent. McCarthy gives viewers the space to do what Big Tech doesn’t want us to do: to take the time to reflect upon the surveillance we invite into our lives and the inherent dehumanization these products diffuse.⁵
For artists endeavoring to engage critically with technological systems, the landscape of 2025 necessitates a fundamental shift in approach, one that has been evolving for decades already. In our era of algorithmic governance, corporate digital hegemony, and vapid “immersive” digital experiences, the radical act is no longer in building alternative technologies or even directly circumventing existing ones. We’ve moved from “hack the tech” to creating opportunities for viewers to slow down and see reality clearly. The most effective artistic response now lies in making visible the invisible—revealing the human costs of technological enclosure, documenting the social repercussions of algorithmic governance, and creating experiences that provide essential contrast to systems designed to commodify our attention and relationships.
Richard Serra and Carlotta Schoolman, Television Delivers People (1973).
This shift toward revelation rather than intervention manifests in various ways across contemporary media art. When Perry highlights the racial bias embedded in “neutral” software defaults, she reveals the human decisions and values coded into purportedly objective systems. When Paglen photographs classified surveillance facilities or maps the physical infrastructure of the internet, he gives tangible form to deliberately obscured power structures. When McCarthy performs as a human version of surveillance technologies, she creates an emotional response that automated systems are designed to suppress. Each of these approaches transforms technological opacity into visibility, creating moments of recognition that can lead to critical awareness and potentially resistance.
McCarthy, Paglen, Perry, and countless other contemporary artists demonstrate that even without the manipulable signal that characterized early video art, artists can still claim agency by interrogating the very nature of technological mediation itself. As Richard Serra presciently argued in Television Delivers People (1973), media consumers themselves become the commodity—a dynamic that has intensified in our era of surveillance capitalism and algorithmic governance. Building from historical precedents set in the 1970s, artists today focus on revealing the mechanisms through which our attention is captured, packaged, and monetized by technological systems deliberately designed to operate beyond scrutiny. These artists create moments of recognition by making visible the invisible structures of technological control, from biased software architectures to surveillance infrastructures to the emotional manipulation embedded in AI interfaces. Their work suggests that in an age of black boxes and closed circuits, the most radical artistic act may be to illuminate what we’ve been conditioned to ignore: the very systems of technological enclosure that shape our perceptions, behavior, and social relations.
This essay was published with support from the Terra Foundation for American Art as a part of Video After Television: Open Circuits Revisited.
Notes
[incomplete citation] cite WC3
Crawford, Kate, and Jason Schultz. “AI Systems as State Actors,” Columbia Law Review 119, no. 7 (2019): 1941–72. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26810855.
Gregory Sholette, Dark matter: Art and politics in the age of enterprise culture (Pluto Books, 2010), 34.
[incomplete citation] https://www.cooperhewitt.org/2022/02/16/a-love-letter-to-planetary/
See Bhumikorn Kongtaveelert, “Full interview with Lauren Lee McCarthy, visiting artist at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence,” April 18, 2023. https://arts.stanford.edu/full-interview-with-lauren-lee-mccarthy-visiting-artist-at-stanfords-institute-for-human-centered-artificial-intelligence/