POST-SURVEILLANCE POSTCARD

Visual Poetry / Code. Bad Quarto, 2022. Postcard. 5.25" × 4". Limited edition of 60. 

From the press: Each Post-Surveillance Postcard is one of a set of 60, with text and images generated using the processes of Juan Manuel Escalante’s Post-Surveillance Alternative Atlas project. These can be sent through the US mail as postcards, if appropriate postage is affixed.

Juan Manuel Escalante is a designer and an artist working with computer code, modular synthesizers, and analog drawings. His work is exhibited internationally. He is a member of the National System of Art Creators (National Endowment for the Arts, Mexico) and received the Corwin Award for Electronic-Acoustic Composition in 2016. He has taught creative coding at several universities in the US and Mexico, and is currently an assistant professor at California State University, Fullerton.

From the artist: PSAA is an AI-generated cartography. During the last few years, we have witnessed an increasing adoption rate of artificial intelligence techniques in multiple law enforcement agencies worldwide. In the age of rising mass surveillance architectures, this browser-based program turns the system back to the observers. PSAA generates a new type of poetic pseudo archive of alternative machine readings. Over time, the program unfolds by extracting humans from several images and generating new layers of reconstructed data.