sava saheli singh
Screening Surveillance (2019)
Blaxites, 2019, Canada, Short Film. Writer: Nehal El-Hadi, Director: Josh Lyon, Producers: Josh Lyon and sava saheli singh. Turn on auto generated closed captions on Youtube.
Frames, 2019, Canada, Short Film.Writer: Madeline Ashby, Director: Farhad Pakdel, Producers: Farhad Pakdel and sava saheli singh. Turn on auto generated closed captions on Youtube.
A Model Employee, 2019, Canada, Short Film. Writer: Tim Maughan, Director: Leila Khalilzadeh, Producers: Leila Khalilzadeh and sava saheli singh Turn on auto generated closed captions on Youtube.
The invasive surveillance apparatus we find embedded in almost all aspects of our technologically mediated lives collects and analyzes personal information which is then used to manipulate and produce various outcomes that we do not control.
Screening Surveillance is a short film series created by sava saheli singh that speculates surveillance futures and aims to raise awareness about how large organizations use data by highlighting how these practices might affect everyday life. Intended as a public education resource to spark discussion and extend understandings of surveillance, trust, and privacy, each film focuses on a different aspect of surveillance and the tensions that manifest when the human is interpreted by the machine. The films encourage us to consider the implications of surveillance and critically examine the logics and practices within big data systems that underpin, enable, and accelerate the harm that can come from such surveillance.
sava saheli singh
Dr. sava saheli singh (she/her) is an interdisciplinary scholar and filmmaker working at the nexus of education, technology, surveillance, speculative futures, and intersectional marginality, with a strong commitment to community-based public scholarship. As as a postdoctoral fellow (first with the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen’s University and then with the eQuality Project and the AI+Society Initiative at uOttawa), sava created the SSHRC and OPC funded award winning Screening Surveillance – a film series for which she co-produced four speculative fiction short films, co-writing one of them. The films have been screened at film festivals, international conferences, workshops, global public events and in classrooms across the world. sava earned her PhD from New York University’s Educational Communication and Technology program. Her research interests include critical digital literacy; educational technology; surveillance; digital labour and surveillance capitalism; restorative justice and abolition; speculative fiction; and critically examining the effects of technology and techno-utopianism on society.
Blaxites, A Model Employee, and Frames were funded by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC), under the Contributions Program (2018-2019); the views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the OPC. The films were also supported by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
#tresdancing was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Scotiabank Fund for AI and Society at the University of Ottawa.
