On this year’s theme, Terms of Privacy:

Current discussions around privacy are shaped by the role new technologies play in enabling modern forms of individual, corporate, and state surveillance. In 2013, Edward Snowden revealed that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) operates numerous global surveillance programs targeting governments, corporations, and civilians in the United States and abroad, and thus what everyone suspected became official: that we—tech consumers—are watched, listened to, traced, and monitored in real time via our gadgets and personal computers.

As we speak or type, programs of mass surveillance gather our personal data and mega-data. Further, Snowden’s leaked classified information revealed that the problem goes beyond the NSA, linking Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United States and the United Kingdom in an intelligence alliance known as the “five-eyes”.

Snowden’s revelations opened the lid on a broad range of concerns regarding privacy in the 21st century, at the state level certainly, but also within the more intimate spheres of everyday life. In this 12th edition The HTMlles invites artists, scholars, and technologists to creatively engage with the concept of privacy and to image and imagine the “terms” of individual and collective privacy necessary to resist old and new forms of marginalization and oppression.