University of Birmingham Secrecy, surveillance and poetic “Data bodies”

This article explores themes of secrecy and monitoring in three works of experimental poetry published since the millennium: Redell Olsen’s Secure Portable Space (2004), “Who Not to Speak To” by Marianne Morris, and Zoe Skoulding’s The Museum of Disappearing Sounds (2013). My analysis draws on Zygmunt Bauman and David Lyon’s discussion of secrecy in Liquid Surveillance, along with theories of “data doubles” and “everyday” ubiquity of surveillance technologies, to show how these poets use innovative lyric forms to negotiate contemporary expectations of “public” and “private” communicative spaces.

The intersection of secrecy, privacy and digital media in the twenty-first century presents a challenging topic for critical and creative thought. In Liquid Surveillance, David Lyon argues that new technologies present "renewed challenges in terms of the 'secrets' that exist," since "questions of 'privacy'" in post-millennial societies are "in flux and much more complex than was once imagined." 1 Musing on these themes in discussion of her collection Secure Portable Space, Redell Olsen anticipates Lyon's expression of privacy in flux with the observation that poets must "grapple with" the perceived boundaries of different spaces: In the book the lyric "I" exists as a series of subjectivities produced by and in relation to mediatised technologies of representation and capitalism […] It seems important to try and grapple with what I think of as the messiness and difficulties of the lyric in relation to different spaces. Spaces in which clearly there is a constant overlap between the boundaries of what might be termed "public" and "private" or "inner" and "outer". How that might show up in language seems exciting. 2 Olsen's comments provide a conceptual starting-point for this article, prompting me to consider how the kind of "constant overlap" identified by Olsen may indeed "show up" in poetic efforts to consider the new conceptual spaces of digital media. Olsen's reference to "boundaries" invokes a potent set of imagery often used in discussions of secrecy, while her account captures an impression of shifting expectations about these boundaries in terms of public and private space.
In the poems I discuss here, spatial metaphors of boundaries and containment provide a framework for unravelling perceptions of secrecy and privacy in the context of "mediatised" technological environments. This approach chimes with a theoretical tendency to discuss questions of "secrecy" using language of borders and sovereignty. Responding to Lyon's statement about secrecy "in flux" in Liquid Surveillance, Zygmunt Bauman outlines traditional perceptions of "secrets" in terms of spatial boundaries: A secret, like other categories of personal possessions, is by definition that part of knowledge whose sharing with others is refused or prohibited and/or closely controlled. Secrecy draws and marks, as it were, the boundary of privacy -privacy being the realm that is meant to be one's own domain, the territory of one's undivided sovereignty, inside which one has the comprehensive and indivisible power to decide 'what and who I am' and from which one can launch and relaunch the campaign to have and keep one's decisions recognized and respected. 3 By defining secrecy as unshared knowledge that marks a "boundary of privacy," Bauman draws a direct link between secrecy and a personal "inner space," exemplified by the suggestion that to maintain secrecy is to mark out "one's own domain". Such metaphors of "territory" and "domain" are a common feature in discussions of secrecy and privacy; Bennett and Raab use similar terms when they define "the modern claim to privacy" as "based on a notion of a boundary between the individual and other individuals, and between the individual and the state." 4 For Bauman in Liquid Surveillance, the preservation of secrecy as a "boundary of privacy" appears to be unravelling in post-millennial societies. In place of valuing "the realm that is meant to be one's own domain," Bauman finds evidence of a fundamental shift toward "public display of the 'inner self'." 5 This, he suggests, marks a "startling U-turn from the habits of our ancestors." 6 Bauman speculates that the appeal of a shift to "electronic life" is rooted in craving for attention and recognition, where "the area of privacy turns into a site of incarceration, the owner of private space being condemned and doomed to stew in his or her own juice." 7 These issues surrounding voluntary exposure of private information emerge throughout Marianne Morris's poem "Who Not to Speak To," where Morris depicts performative elements of "public display" emerging in the multidirectional debate of forums in a so-called "cybersphere". "Who Not to Speak To" captures the intersection of personal opinion and public voice in lines that ironically exaggerate an apparent frenzy of online communication (Figure 1).
"SUCH PASSIONS ABOUND/in the CYBERSPHERE!" the poem proclaims, with its combination of capitalisation and exclamation mark deliberately echoing the declarative formal properties of a traditional newsprint headline. 9 Morris's poem plays with the capacity of typography and formatting to capture an impression of chaotic expression. The website title is underlined, invoking the html convention for distinguishing a hyperlink, while words in bold and italic, of different sizes and alternative fonts, jostle for attention on the page. The deliberately disordered typography used to describe the "Have Your Say" site is matched by use of vocabulary and syntax to convey an impression of contrasting discourse. The description mixes up an array of linguistic forms, disordering proper names, verbs and terms in a verbal enactment of the poem's earlier reference to "directions subjective and laughable." 10 Names of politicians are spliced with commercial terms and contemporary themes in the context of this "cybersphere," where "Pitt-Palin Pacified Rice Thatcher" appears as a monstrous conglomeration of (in)famous political figures. Similarly, issues around the manipulation of personal appearance and issues of national and international politics congeal in the mirroring phrases of "embroiled in a botox debate" and "embroiled in a patriotic debate." Even the name of the site itself is prey to intrusive displacements: the second reference to the "Have Your Say website" has the word "stick insect" stuck into it, still grouped by the hyperlink underline.
Morris's poem exists in more than one published form, and comparison between editions reveals variations in the poem's approach to the online interface between public and private discourse. The version quoted above emphasises "debate" on a website apparently designed to invite diverse views, with the official-sounding observation that it represents "a good cross-section of social strata". Terms like "cross-section" and "social strata" deliberately echo the kind of formal language used to discuss inclusivity on public platforms, as when a BBC diversity consultation cites praise for "programmes covering all the social strata" and efforts "to portray a good cross section of society." 11 However, a 2009 chapbook version of Morris's poem has "talentless, jealous, single women and haters" in place of the "good cross-section" (Figure 2).
Inflected by the language of trolling and "haters," this line re-emphasises the web as a public space dominated by amplified emotions. The difference is subtle, but significant. In particular, the 2009 version's reference to "talentless, jealous, single women" captures the problematics of navigating online space in specifically gendered terms, by invoking the language of stereotyping and harassment to emphasise a "widespread culture of misogyny that exists online." 12 Both versions of "Who Not to Speak To" draw attention to the ways in which digital platforms can "occupy a double function as sites of empowerment and identity formation, on the one hand, and of surveillance and self-monitoring, on the other, particularly for women," by characterising the online forum as a context where personal views can quickly cross the "boundary of privacy" to become exclamatory attack. 13 This is borne out by the confluence of anxieties and passions on the "Have Your Say" site, where botox, patriotism, celebrities, and politicians jostle for space amidst the "haters." Returning to Bauman's reference to "public display of the 'inner self'," it is evident that the "Have Your Say website" encourages people to escape the "incarceration" of private space, allowing contributors to reveal their abundant "passions" by giving voice to personal opinions on a public platform, including views that may be offensive to others. 15 In principle, we might assume that each contributor to the "Have Your Say" site does so in anticipation of their words' reception and interpretation.
However, it is notable that the "one hundred and sixty four people" engaging on the site are "embroiled in a patriotic debate/about themselves" (my emphasis), and Morris's depiction questions how far this engagement with a public space for selfexpression actually reaches an attentive audience. The reference to debate "about themselves" suggests that participants on the "Have Your Say Website" may be entirely focused on having their own say at the expense of really listening to others. This implication is clarified when Morris introduces the image of a "digital mirror" to suggest that these efforts at communication are essentially "aimless" and solipsistic: a digital mirror sputters, the lines rage aimless, the passion is aimless 16 The figure of a "digital mirror" captures an inward turn inherent to this public display of interaction. The sputtering of the purported mirror implies multiple flaws in this situation, suggesting both the "splutter" of apoplectic speech and the sound of a failing engine. Despite the promise that "passions abound" in the so-called "cybersphere," communication in this section of "Who Not to Speak To" turns out to be both repetitive and circuitous, as participants in the broiling mass of opinion on the "Have Your Say Website" continue to effectively "stew" in their own juice.
Morris effectively depicts an electronic hall of mirrors, where figures talking "about themselves" continually fold in on their own digital space. The image of a "digital mirror" neatly suggests a narcissistic and self-monitoring impetus in online communications, as participants observe themselves rather than others.
While Bauman identifies public sharing of personal information as rooted in a perception of "the area of privacy" as "a site of incarceration," Alfred Hermida argues that "sending a message from a keyboard over the air to an undetermined audience provides a sense of freedom that can lead one to make comments that should remain private thoughts." 17 Morris's poem interprets communication on the internet forum as an expressive form that fails to bring either freedom or productive response. In Morris's account, the private thoughts sent "to an undetermined audience" become directionless in the face of an audience similarly focused on sharing their own thoughts. The digital mirror only reflects back "aimless" passion, and while the forum may be public, efforts at external communication are illusory and essentially solipsistic. This is a neat twist on discussions of an "echo chamber" effect in uses of social media. Eli Pariser uses the term "filter bubble" to describe the results of a transition from the internet as "anonymous medium" to the use of social media as "a tool for soliciting and analyzing our personal data." 18 For Pariser and others, the use of algorithms and self-defining networks leads to an "echo chamber" effect, where the individual's own view is constantly reaffirmed by viewing similar content.
In Morris's image of the "digital mirror" and reference to individuals "embroiled in a patriotic debate/about themselves," the walls of the echo chamber have constricted to the individual's own "inner space". The repetition of "aimless" as "lines rage aimless" and "the passion is aimless" all suggest that the level of engagement with others' views has shrunk to the extent of a one-person filter effect. Amidst a proliferation of words, communication between individuals breaks down in favour of solipsistic and "aimless" self-expression, in a "public" space that may as well be private.
The kind of extravagant solipsism evident in "Who Not to Speak To" is also central to Redell Olsen's collection Secure Portable Space, which engages with questions of privacy and "inner space" by reconfiguring imagery from pre-digital works to examine tensions and overlaps between "public and private" spaces in a contemporary environment. Secure Portable Space is divided into four discrete sections, the last of The "Songs of Minimaus" consistently subvert latent categorisations in the "Songs of Maximus". For example, "Song 1" dedicates a full page to parsing Charles Olson's direct address to "you islands/of men and girls." Redell Olsen's version initially substitutes "plants" for "girls", addressing "you islands, of men & plants," where the repetition of "plants" anticipates the "outraged/mind of vegetable" that will appear in the next "song." Subsequent configurations re-emphasise the self, replacing "men" with "you islands, of me and plants," while the originary line's "and girls" shapeshifts into the half-rhyme of "& gulls." By the end of the sequence each facet has been rewritten, or relegated to parenthesis: "you is island of (men) gull (& plants)," where the poem concludes with a question, asking "if you is land of gull, what then?" (Figure 3). In a poem that consistently returns to experiences and emotions that have been sidelined or neglected, Olsen's vehement rejection of the collective female diminutive "girls" chimes with her invocation of Minnie Mouse, rather than Mickey, as a means of critiquing patriarchal language and drawing attention to gendered experiences of public space. Megarry argues that "the presence of women in public spaces inherently transgresses the stability of the public/private divide in patriarchal societies," and Olsen's lyrical interventions represent this transgression on the page, switching fluidly between voices and characters of multiple genders. 22 In a twenty-first century circumstance where "gender inequality still characterizes the fields in which our technologies are conceived, built, and legislated," 23 Olsen's use of shifting language sets out to reconfigure patriarchal dominance in the digital context. [brackets] 26 Olsen's repetition of the onomatopoeic term "crunch" playfully emphasises themes of consumption in both poems' reference to "all things to eat". It also evokes the compressive qualities of digital storage; in the parlance of early millennium new media, to "crunch" a file is to reduce its size. Both interpretations reveal the "minimising" impetus of "The Songs of Minimaus", depicting a solipsistic turn inwards whose impulse is reduction and compression. Hence "all over everything" becomes Olsen's are not overwhelmed by external forces, but rather exhorted to "make" their own reality as they are "wired/into the network".
The shift inward to become "all in everything" described in Charles Olsen's "Song 2" echoes the solipsistic turn identified in Morris's imagery of a "digital mirror", and also introduces a wider network of imagery that considers the implication of bodies "wired" into a network. The implications of engaging with a networked environment are also explored in Olsen's "Song 3," which re-works a hint of monitoring Olsen's version invokes elements of Olson's imagery and form, but reconfigures the thinly concealed bodies in their shallow graves as tracking "data bodies": How can we go anywhere, even across-town without our data bodies knowing, (flesh, no object) cards in shallow casings 28 As in "The Songs of Maximus," Olsen's "data bodies" are figured as unseen, and both poems invigorate seemingly inert entities -the bodies, the data bodies -to imbue them with a lively capacity to trace movement and actions. In both cases, the imagined "bodies" appear to affect or impede free movement through public spaces, though this is stated more explicitly in Olsen's version. However, Olsen's substitution of the "shallow casings" of cards instead of the "shallow graves" found in Olson's poem anticipates a new mode of intrusion, different from the kind envisaged in the earlier poem. This is a specifically "mediatised" environment, one in which the wish to traverse "across-town" is inevitably subject to tracking and monitoring.
Redell Olsen's conflation of "data" and "bodies" in "Song 3" of "The Songs of Minimaus" resonates with Donna Haraway's influential and much-cited invocation of the cyborg as "cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism." 29 Olsen's verse disrupts boundaries between machine and organism, while also introducing the hybridity of organisms -as in the substitution and mixing of "girls" with "plants" and "gulls" analysed above. The "data bodies" of "Song 3" can be read in the context of early cyberfeminist hopes that conventional gender boundaries might be productively broken down in a virtual space, where "tools mutate into complex machines which begin to learn and act for themselves." 30 This would represent a progressive state, exemplified by Sadie Plant's hopeful account of "a dispersed, distributed emergence composed of links between women, women and computers, computers and communication links, connections and connectionist nets." 31 However, the optimism of Plant's vision of "distributed emergence" is countered by recognition of an online reality where, as Lisa Nakamura notes, "supposedly 'fluid' selves are no less subject to cultural hegemonies, rules of conduct, and regulating cultural norms than are 'solid'." 32 Olsen's repeated use of imagery of constraint -"cards/in shallow casings" -undermines the possibility of reading these "data bodies" as an uncomplicated emblem of emergence from stipulated "rules of conduct." Instead, Olsen melds attention to the digital with reference to embodied activities that have historically been problematically coded as "feminine," whether shopping ("personal shopping is an art form of trust"), makeup ("gained second-place for/a black lipstick"), or domestic labour ("our souls are in the wash"). 33 Such moments insist on the reinterpretation of embodied experience in conjunction with, rather than in opposition to, digital spaces.
Olsen's project in "The Songs of Minimaus" uses the example of digital con- Our choices and curiosities that make us what we are, are now in databases somewhere, to be retrieved at will by people with access to the database.
Data converges upon matter, the body, even as the body is disseminated as zeroes and ones into the database.
[…] Our identity is increasingly found in bits and bytes across multiple spaces. 38 Nayar's account emphasises the spread of intimate information across "bits and bytes" and "multiple spaces," drawing attention to the unwitting creation of entities beyond the control of the individual, stored in fragmentary forms in the records of companies and governments. The focus here is on the body's dissociation from its diversely multiplied traces, since it is disseminated across multiple databases and therefore no longer subject to the "boundaries of privacy" outlined by Bauman. Olsen's knowing "data bodies" are suggestive of the state of the "data double" as outlined by Poster and Nayar. However, they also maintain an impression of continued connection between the surveilled body and its data version. Instead of an individual's geospatial information becoming disparate data disseminated as "zeroes and ones", Olsen personifies these "data bodies" in terms of possession and connection to the Just as Olsen's verse sustains a connection between our movements and the "knowing" of "our data bodies", the artist-activists involved in Critical Art Ensemble insist on "always connecting data-bodies to real-bodies." 50 Ricardo Dominguez, a key figure within the group, heralds the development of "trans_bodies", whose hybrid between "real" embodiment and "data" version will become "multi-node citizens." 51 For Dominguez, the development of a "multi-node" citizen relies upon a continuing acknowledgement of the relation between the "data-bodies" and "real-bodies" -a factor he relates explicitly to questions of privacy and secrecy. Contrasting CAE with Wikileaks, Dominguez claims that "everyone knows who we are, where we are, why we are doing the gesture, whereas the Wikileak hactivists are hidden and do their work in secret, making no attempts to connect data-bodies and real-bodies." 52 Thus, a refusal to detach "real-bodies" from their data-based actions engages with one of the longest-running tropes of digital communications: the tension between potential for anonymity -secrecy -and a need to acknowledge the embodied human sources for digital "data".
Olsen's exhortation to "sing modemly!" anticipates more sustained imagery Disappearing Sounds," is filled with the sonic effects of electronic devices as "electricity sings in D." 53 The collection's conceit of a "museum" for sounds is referenced by numbered subsections of the sequence labelled "exhibit", and each exhibit introduces the presence of human flesh and actions merged with the machinery of various forms of communicative media, both digital and analogue. "exhibit 1" opens with "breath a crackle of static" and "a detuned radio in one lung," while a voice in "exhibit 4" emerges from a phone's "thin vibrations" and "shimmers on the end of a line." 54 Skoulding's verse uses similar terms to Olsen's "Songs of Minimaus" to contemplate the place of the individual within an environment dominated by electrified devices. Both deploy imagery of immersion and containment; Olsen's "Song 2" envisages "eyes, ears wired/into the network," while Skoulding narrates a firstperson perspective slipping into an evocative morass of digital sounds, where "I vanish in lossy compression" amidst whirring mechanisms and singing electricity. 55 The reference to "compression" echoes the themes of "minimising" found in Olsen's "Songs of Minimaus". Skoulding uses the context of sound technologies to create an impression of the first-person subject simultaneously subsumed into, and emerging through, the distorting effects of digital media.
In The Museum of Disappearing Sounds, Skoulding uses spatial imagery to explore a tension between "inner" and "outer" spaces via imagery of containment and over- In this account, the glittering "cascade" of information is rendered incomprehensible to our narrator, for whom figures are merely glimpsed as "rapid unreadable/patterns." Discussing visibility and data, David Murakami Wood argues that the expansion of data will lead to "a vast ocean of largely unknown, uninterpreted and perhaps unknowable data," prompting a circumstance where "we are haunted by fragmentary and contingent meanings." 57 Skoulding's "Room 4036" envisages precisely this kind of fragmentation, which extends to difficulties with perception and visibility: "You enter the room in pixels," the poetic voice observes, "now you're breaking up." The technologised fragmentation of breaking apart into scattered pixels is echoed in the next poem in the sequence, where "I'm just playback/all pauses and stutters" and the room is "faithfully/erasing every note it remembers." 58  These lines suggest the permeability of an individual's innermost thoughts to an external monitoring force, announcing the possibility of purposeful observation by an entity constantly "waiting" for an opportunity to intrude on the private interiority of "your head". Again, spatial imagery prevails as a means of conceptualising secrecy; in this poem, the mind is conceived as a series of self-containing spaces, picturing memories as a series of rooms "diminishing/another inside that one/smaller still" until the final reduction of "the smallest imaginable/cell in the skull/which can't be contained in/this passage." 61 Meaning is evasive here, as "the/beginning of the sentence slips away/before you reach the end." It is important to note, however, that the waiting entity in the lines quoted above has not yet succeeded; "your head" remains un-entered and therefore retains its as-yet unnamed secrets, at least during the temporal moment of the poem.
The poems in Skoulding's collection alternate between tracing an urgent wish to archive and catalogue and an inclination to remain outside the usual purview of "data" or digitised information. Thus "Wingprint" concludes with "a restless wish for what can't be googled," while "The Museum for Disappearing Sounds" implies a capacity to maintain secrecy of "inner" spaces, in direct contrast to the susceptibility to all-knowing "data bodies" in Olsen's "Songs of Minimaus." 62 Whereas individuals in Olsen's sequence seem unable to escape the purview of their "data bodies," Skoulding's "exhibit 3" imagines a retreat from intrusive discovery and observation, an effective refusal to be sought and found: These lines offer the possibility of interiority as a secret retreat, figured via imagery of a natural environment. The poem conjures a rural landscape where the narrator is in fragmented motion, "dripping into forests," while the kind of mechanical and digital sounds described in other "exhibits" in this sequence are replaced with the "rustle of larch." "exhibit 3" also associates freedom from monitoring with the physical state of drifting "into sleep," suggesting that privacy can come in the abdication of wakeful consciousness.
Despite the assertion that "you can't find me," Skoulding's verse lingers on means and effects of observation. As with the "data bodies" in Redell Olsen's "Song 3", "exhibit 3" anticipates an external force determined to track, monitor and record, accusing the entity (or entities) addressed as "you" of wishing to "catalogue" sounds and to "unpick" the spatial surroundings. In Skoulding's verse, the evasion of observation is described using imagery of a natural landscape, as in the alignment of falling asleep and "dripping into forests", or the "rustle of larch" that cannot be catalogued. However, the conflation of natural and technological imagery in "exhibit 3" refuses to comply with binary oppositions of urban versus rural, or embodied versus digital. Although it is used to imagine an escape from an unnamed monitoring force, the "natural" landscape in Skoulding's "exhibit 3" is nevertheless vulnerable to potential intervention, in the as-yet-unrealised possibility of unpicking stones "pixel by pixel". In this case, the possibility of invisibility -of an "unreadability" similar to that of the glittering data flows described above -offers comfort and a temporary reprieve from surveillant entities. The lack of punctuation and repetition of "trust" conveys a faux-naïvety in this determination to seek comfort in an official announcement. In contrast to the chaotic forms used to describe the "Have Your Say website", the formal "announcement" is conveyed in an unpunctuated sentence whose simplicity echoes the standardised, supplanted by the narrator's entry to a "retail space". Here she finds a mutual absence of threat in the brightly idealised environment of commerce. "NO ONE WILL COME," our narrator announces confidently, "BECAUSE I don't want to destroy anything." The assumptions behind this statement imply the presence of an observing entity, monitoring intentions or actions to "destroy", implying that someone certainly would "come" if such destruction were entertained. The account of the retail space chimes with Gabriel and Lang's observation that the purpose-built retail space is actively designed to reassure, since "an invisible hand has planned everything for your delectation." 66 For Gabriel and Lang, such environments offer "a synthetic oasis […] a clean, genial, graffiti-free space," defined in terms of an orderly absence of threat or challenge. "There are no worries here," they observe, "no pushy salesmen, no invisible pickpockets, goods have fixed price-tags and are covered by the Trades Description Act." 67 Entering the retail space, the poetic persona of "Who Not to Speak To" defines her own discourse in terms appropriate to the "synthetic oasis", arriving "hopeful with anecdotes, charm, and energy". Like the wish for "some language I can trust", the cheerful banality of this entry to the retail space reiterates themes of containment and control within the poem, the consumer's continuing reassurance is predicated on compliance with the possibility of external monitoring.
Morris's depiction of the retail space in "Who Not to Speak To" chimes in significant ways with the references to bodies "enmeshed" with networks and mechanisms in the verse of Olsen and Skoulding. In this case, however, the "mediatised environment" is one which involves a different kind of "enmeshing," as the narrator sets out to "envelope" an unnamed and unvoiced addressee in the offerings of everyday retail: Morris's approach is characteristically playful in its childlike demand to "look!", and there is a sardonically humorous effect in the seemingly random items produced as a kind of faux-resolution at the end of the poem. However, though they may appear harmlessly eclectic, these gifts quietly embody imagery of monitoring and compliance. Gabriel and Lang describe gifts as emblematic of "reciprocal exchange relations," and in this case, the expected reciprocation for these gifted items is the other's willingness to be "enveloped," captured within the offerings of the retail environment. 68 This is a sardonic paeon to the power of purchases, and the eclectic combination of items simultaneously mocks and emphasises efforts to deploy the materialist trappings of domestic purchase-power. The longing for "my items to envelope you" suggests that contemplating the "overlap" of "inner" and "outer" lives is not only about considering the kind of "public" expression evident in the "Have Your Say Website", but also involves tracing the various impetuses for monitoring and containment in contemporary iterations of "private" domestic space.
The account of official and commercial language in "Who Not to Speak To" aptly demonstrates how contemporary depictions of "public" and "private" spaces demand a move away from traditional conceptions of monitoring by dominant external forces. Instead, contemporary surveillance practices are embedded in the practical infrastructure of society. A level of complicity with such forms, and their capacity to be both reassuring and trustworthy, is captured in the apparent eagerness of Morris's anxious narrator to "trust" official discourse and redeploy retail items for the purpose of personal control. Similarly, it is present in Olsen and Skoulding's imagery of monitoring and the blending of individuals into the networks that dominate public and private spaces. While there may be opportunities for self-expression in the newly mediatised environments envisaged by these poets -for example, in the invitation to "sing modemly" -imagery such as Morris's "digital mirror" or the all-knowing "data bodies" in Olsen's "Song 3" set out to explore the ways in which traversal of "mediatised" spaces involves complicity with, and production of, reflected versions of the