The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the many ways our systems are complicated and complex, making them susceptible to failure as it tests the limits of their capabilities. At the same time, these failures and the pandemic itself have provided the perfect opportunity to increase surveillance through already ubiquitous platforms and technologies.
The sudden shift from in-person to online classes made educational technology the perfect setting for corporate entities to capitalize on the real need for rapid technological solutions to deal with remote learning and teaching. They did so by increasing invasive surveillance in the name of supporting educational institutions and maintaining academic integrity through problematic online proctoring software.
#tresdancing speculates the effects of escalating surveillance and control through educational technology. In this near future fiction narrative, a young person has little choice but to use invasive augmented reality glasses as they are forced to ramp up their engagement with a new, experimental technology in order to make up for a failing grade.
The film highlights different issues around privacy, algorithmic bias, AI-enabled decision making, and surveillance. Tech adoption, especially in education, is often presented as a choice that people make. But, as shown in this film, administrators, teachers, and especially students, rarely have much choice and find themselves having to interact with increasingly invasive technology as a condition for “success”. The protagonist’s use of the technology escalates out of her control, and she finds herself being manipulated into making decisions she might not otherwise make. The film also highlights the moral and carceral logics that often underpin surveillance technologies. Our protagonist finds herself at the mercy of this technology that is recording, analyzing, and judging everything she sees and does in her life, bring her to the point of having to choose between her friends and social life, and academic success. A difficult choice indeed.
This film points to the sometimes impossible position we find ourselves in with regards to technology use, and the hope is that we can have conversations about how to mitigate harms from the technology that we already use, and work towards ensuring equity and safety, especially for young students, by creating space to question the use of technology and hold companies accountable for the harms they enact.
Fourth instalment of the Screening Surveillance series, the short film was created by sava saheli singh and directed by Hingman Leung. Co-produced by the AI + Society Initiative, the eQuality Project and the Queen’s Surveillance Studies Centre, the creators were advised by professors Valerie Steeves, Jane Bailey, David Lyon, David Murakami Wood, and Florian Martin-Bariteau.
