This week’s DLI Seminar at Cornell Tech will be dedicated to a creative reflection, an exploration of how contemporary art can operate as a form of research, and as a sharp mode of critique, in an era shaped by pervasive surveillance, data extraction, and biometric inference. Bringing artistic practice into dialogue with critical scholarship, the session will consider what art can reveal about privacy and power that is harder to see through policy, engineering, or social-science methods alone: the felt experience of being monitored, the assumptions baked into “objective” technologies, and the ethical stakes of turning bodies, traces, and behaviors into data.

The seminar will begin with a short talk by Lior Zalmanson on the role of art and artists in critical research on privacy and surveillance, followed by a screening of films by Heather Dewey-Hagborg. It will conclude with a conversation between Lior and Heather on art as method, how speculative and material interventions can generate new questions, publics, and forms of evidence, and what responsibility looks like when critique itself engages sensitive technologies and intimate data.