Performing Surveillance: Designing identity prostheses as tools for algorithmic resistance
2025
PREMI DELTA CULTURA OR 2026 // GOLDEN DELTA CULTURE AWARD 2026
Keywords: Identity, Surveillance, Resistance, Subterfuge, Performance, Trans Technologies, Biometrics, Artificial Intelligence, Studio Practice
My PhD thesis has been developed and conducted at Eindhoven University of Technology and Elisava School of Design & Engineering in Barcelona, promoted by Ron Wakkary, Oscar Tomico and Kristina Andersen. The context of my work can be understood within a research through studio community, where my research is indivisible from my professional design practice, a meeting place for people with shared synergies and concerns around the infinite conceptions of identity. The results are clustered as a series of strategies to confront new challenges, paradigms, interactions, values, solutions and expressions of digital individuals and virtual communities.
Participatory surveillance is a model of discipline through involvement that presents varying degrees of risk, influenced by factors such as economic standing, health conditions, citizenship status, gender positioning or race. Surveillance technologies are continuously debated in their relations to strategic military use, civil rights, commercial exploitation, through mainstream news, entertainment media and the emerging academic discipline of surveillance studies. However, opportunities to imagine and rehearse alternatives and resistance to surveillance capitalism and algorithmic profiling remains limited.
The present work centers on the resistance strategies, motivations and rationale I have explored over ten years of critical design practise.This thesis focuses on the possibilities of tactically employing different kinds of identity prostheses as tools to create new and different ways of interacting, understanding and confronting contemporary surveillance technologies as alternatives to mainstream and dominant applications of surveillance technologies and systems.
The thesis presents my portfolio alongside three papers and a workshop. The portfolio enables me to introduce prostheses as design tools, following embodied ideation dynamics, working with relationships between body, material and context to enliven design and research potential. One paper is presented for each subverting strategy, proposed for a reconsidered approach to identity: Subterfuge, multiplication and amplification.
Following a subterfuge strategy I disassociate beauty and its biological origin as an unbreakable unit, proposing expressions where identity is imagined and designed along and in opposition to what might be naturally possible. Following a multiplication strategy I confront biometric artificial intelligences discriminatory, excluding and misgendering normative parameters of gender, race and class by making myself owner of multiple diffracted identities recognized by surveillance and tracking systems. Following an Amplification strategy I flip the rationale and rearrange the agency powers by making myself a large producer of personal biometric data.
Finally, I present the results of a workshop with the participation of designers and artists with an interest in identity surveillance and designerly activism. I share my subversive strategies, reflecting on their applicability within and outside my own design and research practice. Participants designed identity prostheses to reimagine the social and political landscape of contemporary surveillance, suggesting that our roles as users, consumers and subjects of surveillance technologies can become radically ambivalent and open to revision.
Overall, this thesis explores my motivations and implications for subverting biometric technologies. I address matters such as agency, resistance, (dis)empowerment, identity, participation, discipline or desire, tailoring algorithms to suit my own demands, enabling me to assert control over the "outcome" of the algorithms, repurposing them for uses beyond their original intentions. By doing so, I may be able to present myself to others as I like to be perceived, or more specifically, surveilled.
DOWNLOAD THE THESIS:
www.surl.li/mzwuvy
Baeza Argüello, S. (2025). Performing Surveillance: designing identity prostheses as tools for algorithmic resistance. [Phd Thesis 1 (Research TU/e / Graduation TU/e), Industrial Design]. Eindhoven University of Technology.