Clarity can be care. Clarity can be capture. The pixel decides.
Hito Steyerl
How Not to Be Seen (2013)
The episode opens at full Gaussian blur over the civic network. As you scroll, resolution sharpens. Names come into focus. Dollar amounts stabilise. At full resolution, you can trace specific donation-to-contract chains.
The question at each scroll depth: who benefits from being seen at this resolution, and who is endangered by it? Small orgs become legible to funders. Individual donors become legible to the public. Storytellers become legible to extraction.
A counter at the bottom of the page shows, anonymously, how many readers today chose to scroll all the way to full resolution. Most do not. The ones who do are building a different kind of visibility.
- ·CivicGraph · dual donor-contractors (140 entities, $80M donated, $4.7B received)
- ·AEC political donations register
- ·AusTender contracts cross-joined on ABN
- ·ATO tax transparency for entities above $100M revenue
Three.js with a custom GLSL fragment shader for scroll-linked Gaussian blur on a data texture. WebGL particle points for entity nodes.
The right to be seen is not the same as the right to be tracked. Legibility is a technology of power.
Artefact 002 — The 140 (one named dual donor-contractor)
Every episode ships alongside a printed, news-pegged ledger. The artefact proves the episode's point at the scale of one specific recent event. See the full artefact series at aesthetics.act.place/artefact.