This essay addresses the aesthetics of surveillance in the context of the coronavirus (coronasurveillance), focusing on heat maps and their biopolitics. Below are excerpts published in the series by Lavits (the Latin American Network of Surveillance, Technology and Society Studies):
Used in military operations and border control, thermal cameras saw a dizzying increase in use during the coronavirus pandemic. Attached to drones, they monitored Wuhan from above, and a prototype fitted with loudspeakers was tested in Recife. Recently, Amazon installed this type of camera in its warehouses to monitor infection among employees. The camera acts as an electronic doorkeeper. If someone has a fever, they cannot enter. The body thus becomes the new password for the new normal.
The need to contain the spread of the virus by taking measures that interfere with social life is not in question. We know these are, nevertheless, the only way to control the pandemic. The question here is different: to understand the aesthetics of coronavirus surveillance within a new biopolitics. A porous biopolitics that enters physiology, monitoring bodies without touching them, without coercion and without pain.
The biopolitics of the painless
This does not mean it is a less violent biopolitics than that of industrial capitalism. On the contrary, it is as perverse as, or more perverse than, the coercive forms we all know. Its efficiency depends on the convergence of traceability and identity, which in extreme situations such as the coronavirus lead toward a different social hierarchy. This hierarchy pits immobile bodies against mobile ones, those who are visible against those who are invisible to the state and corporate algorithms.
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It is too early to anticipate what will happen in the post-pandemic context and to know whether this social division between the mobile and the immobile will persist in the new normal. It is not premature, however, to say that the pandemic has already established certain rules of neoliberal grammar as social foundations. The normalization of surveillance is its supporting pillar, and the heat map is the visual translation of a paranoid everyday life.
Heat maps
A heat map is a data visualization technique that shows the magnitude of a phenomenon through color in two dimensions. Variations in hue or intensity reveal how the phenomenon clusters or changes. Widely used in molecular biology to identify how genes behave under different conditions, heat maps also visually translate information about body temperature, a feature popularized by the coronavirus pandemic and one that I appropriated in the project Coronário.
A net art work of mine commissioned for the Instituto Moreira Salles program IMS Convida, Coronário brings together the most striking words from the cultural experience of the coronavirus in Brazil (such as hand sanitizer and “communavirus”), measured through Google’s search trends index between March and April, a period coinciding with the first days of social isolation. The words most frequently accessed by visitors to the site respond dynamically, changing color according to a heat map that reflects the attention they receive.
It is important to emphasize that this use of heat maps to monitor public attention is grounded in digital marketing and lives up to the principles of the economy of the gaze that drives the Internet. To retain users’ attention, it is essential to understand not only how their gaze moves through content, but also where it settles and how it wanders. Software designed specifically for this purpose tracks mouse movements on the screen, identifying the most frequently clicked points and the areas that receive the most and least attention from users. This gives rise to a complex of techniques combining cognitive psychology, semiotics and marketing expertise, aimed at capturing what once stood for the very site of freedom: the gaze.
This is precisely the type of tracking we use in Coronário. The most frequently accessed words in the coronavirus lexicon (the Coronário) react to visitors’ clicks, reflecting collective interest. I followed the logic of dataveillance (data surveillance), whose focus is not the individual but their integration into a pattern. For this reason, the heat patches on the Coronário website do not result from interactions based on action and reaction. They operate relationally, indicating the distribution of attention across the entire audience and incorporating individual interactions into the formation of collective patterns and trends.