Surveillance, Aggregation, & Entropy in the 21st Century
Curator’s Essay
In D/ata/Generation, photographer Bob Hemauer presents a series of images that invites the viewer to connect to the modern day a central theme explored by Thomas Pynchon in The Crying of Lot 49— the threat of cultural entropy to American society and the impact that this ever-encroaching sameness has on individual identity. The connection to this theme begins with the title-- Hemauer challenges the viewer with wordplay and forces the viewer to question whether the images presented are data generation or entropy— degeneration. Hemauer argues that Pynchon’s vision of entropy in 1960s America, demonstrated at the time by the rhizomatic proliferation of suburbs and the ever-expanding influence of the military-industrial complex, finds a new expression in the twenty-first century-- through large-scale data collection and omnipresent surveillance.
The photographs in the collection were taken exclusively with a vintage Polaroid OneShot Camera using Polaroid 600 color film; this choice of medium was central to the artist’s conception of the project. Polaroid was founded in the 1930s and made early profits selling polarized lenses to the United States Armed Forces, placing the company firmly within the military-industrial complex that Pynchon identified as a stultifying influence on American culture. When commenting on the choice of medium, Hemauer said: “I found the juxtaposition of predominantly digital imagery in an analog medium to be an important link between the 1960s and the modern day. This, combined with the fact that Polaroid instant cameras were an icon of consumer culture made possible by research funded by defense industry profits made the choice natural to explore these themes.” By choosing this medium, Hemauer makes meta-level commentary by using a product of the military industrial complex, and a symbol of suburban consumer culture, to illustrate the modern-day manifestation of the entropy identified by Pynchon.
The subject matter presented in D/ata/Generation illustrates the numerous ways, voluntary and involuntary, that the individual in modern American society forfeits data about one's life and invites the viewer to contemplate how the process of surveillance and data collection in the public sphere reduces the individual to a data point. Hemauer presents images of the mundane-- credit card readers, identification cards and scanners, surveillance cameras, DNA tests, large technology companies—and demonstrates the ubiquity and diversity of large-scale data collection in twenty-first century America. In doing so, he questions the role of the individual in a society that reduces daily interactions to data points assimilated into the aggregate. Hemauer argues, through these images, that the individual increasingly exists to generate data to provide a more accurate data set and this reduction of the role of the individual is the modern manifestation of the corporate and suburban sameness identified by Pynchon in the novel.
Hemauer consciously uses the composition of the images in D/ata/Generation to further connect the reader to both a sense of cultural entropy and Pynchon’s novel. He links the modern day with The Crying of Lot 49 through a repeated motif of rectangles and squares, both as visual elements of the photos and in the uniform squares in which the images are presented—each reminiscent of the houses that crowd the winding streets of Pynchon’s San Narciso. This visual connection to entropy extends further to the technical approach Hemauer used for the project. Commenting on his technique, Hemauer remarked: “The instant camera offers limited options for manipulation of aperture and shutter speed, but I pushed both of those things as far as possible. This approach, along with the inherent properties of instant film, caused the colors to be washed out and muted, and the subjects to feel like they were decaying.” Indeed, the images oftentimes are out of focus, and the subject not immediately discernible, lending the series an air of abstraction. The indeterminate, blurry lines and dull color palette in the photos extend the sense of entropy to the subject matter itself, underscoring the pervasiveness of this modern expression of entropy and, perhaps, its inevitability. The ambiguity and inaccessibility of these photos also places the viewer in an analogous position to the protagonist of The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa. Hemauer forces the viewer, like Oedipa, to interpret vague and unclear imagery to discern meaning, draw connections and reach conclusions that may be of the photographer’s design or merely coincidental.
The viewer is thus placed at an intersection of medium, subject matter, and technique and left with a sense of unease. This tension stems from both the obscure presentation of imagery and the consequences that the images, and the entropy they represent, have on the individual and American society. D/ata/Generation leaves the viewer wondering whether a modern American is more than the sum of the information they create. If the answer is yes, then how does an individual escape the role of data generator? If the answer is no, then what does it mean to be human? Hemauer does not present an optimistic, or even tidy, solution; no matter which question the viewer chooses to answer, the implications are deeply disturbing— and ultimately existential.