Obfuscation, Hacking and Disruption: art practices to sabotage techno-imperialism

A common thread throughout my art practice has been to visualise the mechanisms of control and surveillance that big tech companies have developed. Different authors have described these processes of extraction, prediction and behaviour modification under different names, such as platform capitalism (Srnicek), surveillance capitalism (Zuboff) and playful capitalism (Galloway).

My art practice relies on finding and creating artistic tactics that inform users about the manipulation hidden behind technology, especially in monitoring and collecting data, identifying infrastructures of control, and visualising their cultural, social, political and economic effects. My projects compile a set of countertactics, including mapping, sabotage and camouflage, as well as tactics to avoid digital identifiers such as MAC addresses, cookies and other data-collection mechanisms.

My early projects explored the role of interfaces in surveillance. In 2010, I developed the artistic project Keyboard of Things, a series of hybrid devices that connect computer keyboards to objects such as tennis rackets, pillows and boxing bags. Using these dysfunctional interfaces across social networks, email or web browsing allows users to type random text sequences, generating incorrect information that interferes with pattern recognition. Keyboard of Things uses strategies such as obfuscation, confusion, hacking, disruption and gamification to open up discourse about interface functionality and surveillance.

In 2014, I developed the first prototype of an interface capable of interacting with touch surfaces as part of Martin Kaltenbrunner’s lecture “Multimodal Interfaces”. The lecture offered an in-depth technical exploration of the latest developments in HCI. A year later, influenced by the seminal work of new media theorists Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Christian Andersen, Søren Pold and Alexander Galloway, and by their critical analyses of the effects of interfaces, as well as the revelations about global surveillance disclosed by Edward Snowden in 2013, I submitted my project proposal, entitled Inter_fight, to the “Membrana” Open Call art in residence launched by the Pipes research group and the Hangar.org art centre in Barcelona.

Inter_fight was conceived in this context as a series of DIY physical bots designed to complicate the relationship between systems, and as a paradoxical method to emphasise the presence of interfaces in our lives.

Built with basic components such as photocells, a PCB, vibrators, a microcontroller and conductive plastic that emulates human skin, these devices can tap, click, scroll randomly, open and close applications, make decisions and provide incorrect information across all kinds of operating systems, web platforms and social networks. Inter_fight becomes an untraceable tool for disrupting data tracking and website analysis without detection, since the robot is detached from any corporate software and the internet.

Martin Zeillinger (2022), in his article “Critique-It-Yourself”, described Inter_fight as small robotic bugs from a cyberpunk near future, designed to sabotage the monetisation efforts of platforms such as Facebook […] In this way, they produce chaotic informational noise that “pollutes” the user data commonly scraped when we scroll social media feeds. In a media art context, we can appreciate these bugs as robotic artworks. Additionally, the artist provides instructions and DIY kits, so we can easily build these bots ourselves. This is both fun and a good way to learn how to counter our exposure to surveillance capitalism.

One of the main objectives in developing Inter_fight was to reflect in an artwork what Wendy Chun has termed the “unknown” side of computer software, highlighting its two main neoliberal functions: controlling the masses and processing individualisation and personalisation of users (Chun, 2011, p. 3). For this reason, although Inter_fight was conceived for exhibition spaces, it was logical to present the research through educational practices. In 2016, I introduced the “Data Polluter” workshop as a tactic to inform participants how to obfuscate and provide noise to the analysis-trackers and data-brokers. The introductory theoretical part draws on my research on surveillance capitalism and platform capitalism. The workshop was organised and delivered at festivals such as AMRO and Ars Electronica, at art institutes such as Aksioma and at universities such as Aarhus, ALUO and KunstuniLinz, among others, followed by a practical session in which each participant could assemble their own Inter_fight to obfuscate data.

One of my latest works is the infography, The fall of the fiber optic control, power and paranoia, which employs cartography as a tactic to show all the documented cuts made in the internet’s undersea cables from 1988 to 2025, linking visible actions to invisible systems of power. Many of these cuts are caused by human interference, including trawlers dragging nets across the ocean floor and local infrastructure projects that damage cables on land (Starosielski, 2015). Others result from accidents or environmental disasters such as earthquakes or tsunamis, but all highlight geopolitical, economic and social tensions between countries (Vonderau, Tawil-Souri, Sterne, Starosielski, Sandvig & Miller, 2015).

I created this diagram to illustrate a previous project, an autonomous cutting device powered by marine currents that can cut underwater internet cables. Named Free Universal Cut Kit for Internet Dissidence [F.U.C.K.-ID], this art project’s main objective is to visualise the socio-political effects of physical internet infrastructure, thereby returning to users the ability to decide about their data and privacy. F.U.C.K.-ID encompasses design thinking, reverse engineering and critical speculation as tactics to create questions around the topic, a practice closely related to Wendy Chun’s concept of “creative destruction”, which refers to the use of interfaces to dismantle existing systems and empower individuals to critique and creatively reimagine social structures (Chun, 2011, p. 83).

In essence, F.U.C.K.-ID is an internet stop button. The device attaches to the cable with two screws, a process that takes several minutes. Once connected, the spring on the back presses the saw through the cutting surface. The vane in the upper part provides the resistance needed to drive the pendulum that supports the saw. Over an estimated week, the saw’s gentle movement will cut a 60 mm-thick cable.

My ongoing project, FUCK-SD, continues the previous project F.U.C.K.-ID in space, and its research framework examines how the expansion of big tech companies is transforming space into a militarised, privatised territory. An example is the Starlink project, a network of 10,000 satellites launched by SpaceX. By analysing Starlink, we can draw critical conclusions about how a weaponised platform operates and how Starlink’s orbit colonialism is creating a new layer of dependency and centralised control. The question is no longer just who controls the internet, but who controls the sky, and how we can reclaim both.

In this sense, my projects use speculative and critical thinking to confront scenarios and create narratives that prompt audiences to consider how Big Tech is colonising every aspect of our lives.

References

CHUN, Wendy H. K. (2011). Programmed visions: Software and memory. The MIT Press.

ESCUDERO, César (2025). “The fall of the fiber optic control, power and paranoia”. Escuderoandaluz.com [online]. Available at: https://escuderoandaluz.com/2025/08/10/the-fall-of-the-fiber-optic-control-power-and-paranoia/

ZEILLENGER, Martin (2022). “Critique-it-yourself”, Outland Magazine.

Recommended citation: ESCUDERO ANDALUZ, César. Obfuscation, Hacking and Disruption: art practices to sabotage techno-imperialism. Mosaic [online], October 2026, no. 209. ISSN: 1696-3296. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7238/m.n209.2609