GLOBAL CONTROL AND CENSORSHIP

The exhibition »Global Control and Censorship« travels the world: From late 2015 to July 2016 it was on show at the ZKM as part of the GLOBALE and then made stops in Talinn, Žilina, Bialystok and Vilnius. In November 2018, it will be on display in Debrecen, Hungary. 

Knowledge is power. But those who control the flow of information have the greatest power of all. The digitalization of all areas of life and its networking in the infosphere have connected all people from all over the world. Each day, all kinds of content and data are created billion-fold and sent all over the world. Even during its creation, before it reaches its recipients, our data is picked up by private service providers and government services and used for their purposes.

Through mass data acquisition, global businesses benefit from the individual and social dependencies of their users. And with the convincing argument of security, government services strive unashamedly for the perfection and major expansion of their data collections.

Has subjection to all-powerful instances of monitoring and censorship already become part of the human condition, to the fundamental basis of our culture? In an emergent culture of suspicion, ubiquitous monitoring of citizens could cause resignation, self-censorship and assimilation through to silent complicity.