With the development of the new technologies and their adaptation to daily use, the amount of informational traces left by an individual in everyday life is considerably expanded (starting from completion of registration forms for access to free accounts, online or phone payments, personal electronic correspondence, video recordings in closed circuits, etc.). Simultaneously, the ways and means of control, monitoring and storage of the information carried out by the state and commercial corporations have been multiplied and enhanced. The state justifies these practices in the name of self-protection, in attempt to defend the established order, its interests, ideology, and its structures of power to protect itself from the threats of hostile factors. The large corporations practice these methods with similar objectives of protection and expansion of their markets of influence, in the informational war against competition.

At first, the netopticon report, was to concentrate only on works built in the surroundings of the Internet, but throughout the process of its compilation, we saw that we could not help referring to the local urban context of Israel, the country of our residence. The policy of the "state of war" has served the basis for the Israeli politics from the very establishment of the state and quickly acquired the theoretical and modern redefinition of "war against the terror" developing and justifying the all-embracing practices of control and monitoring in name of the "national security". The "war against terror" policy, which was mainly a local policy in different countries, gained a global context since the 11.9 attacks and the war against terror policy directed by the US. This global policy redefines the control practices and gives it the new dimensions.

Netopticon report attempts to display works and actions that reveal, subvert and demystify systems of control in the network and the urban spaces. Works that vary from those taking the aesthetic and poetic approach, treating the systems of control and monitoring as intimate, personal and narrative subject to politically oriented projects inverting the use of technologies and the control means for countersurveillance.

Notes

^[1] Netopticon makes referes to the Jeremy Bentham's panopticon and analized later by Michael Foucault in his book "Discipline and punishment" – 1975 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon and to Gilles Deleuze's society of control http://www.n5m.org/n5m2/media/texts/deleuze.htm