#visages

En Europe, les migrants premières victimes de l’intelligence artificielle

Alors que se tient à Paris cette semaine le Sommet pour l’action sur l’intelligence artificielle (IA), chefs d’État, chefs d’entreprise, chercheurs et société civile sont appelés à se prononcer sur les #risques et les #limites de ses usages. Des #biais_discriminatoires et des #pratiques_abusives ont déjà été observés, en particulier dans la gestion européenne de l’immigration.

Un #détecteur_d’émotions pour identifier les #mensonges dans un #récit, un #détecteur_d’accent pour trouver la provenance d’un ressortissant étranger, une analyse des #messages, des #photos, des #géolocalisations d’un #smartphone pour vérifier une #identité… voici quelques exemples de systèmes intelligents expérimentés dans l’Union européenne pour contrôler les corps et les mouvements.

« Ici, les migrations sont un #laboratoire_humain d’#expérimentation_technologique grandeur nature », résume Chloé Berthélémy, conseillère politique à l’EDRi (European Digital Rights), un réseau d’une cinquantaine d’ONG et d’experts sur les droits et libertés numériques. « Les gouvernements et les entreprises utilisent les environnements migratoires comme une phase de #test pour leurs produits, pour leurs nouveaux systèmes de contrôle. »

Des détecteurs de mensonges à la frontière

L’un des plus marquants a été le projet #iBorderCtrl. Financé partiellement par des fonds européens, le dispositif prévoyait le déploiement de détecteurs de mensonges, basés sur l’analyse des #émotions d’un individu qui entrerait sur le sol européen. « Les #visages des personnes, en particulier des demandeurs d’asile, étaient analysés pour détecter si, oui ou non, ils mentaient. Si le système considérait que la personne était un peu suspecte, les questions devenaient de plus en plus compliquées. Puis, éventuellement, on arrivait à un contrôle plus approfondi par un agent humain », explique-t-elle.

Expérimenté dans les #aéroports de Grèce, de Hongrie et de Lettonie, il ne serait officiellement plus utilisé, mais l’EDRi émet quelques doutes. « Dans ce milieu-là, on est souvent face à une #opacité complète et il est très dur d’obtenir des informations. Difficile de dire à l’heure actuelle si cette technologie est encore utilisée, mais dans tous les cas, c’est une volonté européenne que d’avoir ce genre de systèmes aux frontières. »

Drones de surveillance, caméras thermiques, capteurs divers, les technologies de surveillance sont la partie émergée de l’iceberg, la face visible de l’intelligence artificielle. Pour que ces systèmes puissent fonctionner, il leur faut un carburant : les #données.

Les bases de données se multiplient

L’Europe en a plusieurs en matière d’immigration. La plus connue, #Eurodac – le fichier des #empreintes_digitales – vise à ficher les demandeurs et demandeuses d’asile appréhendés lors d’un passage de frontière de manière irrégulière. Créée en 2002, la nouvelle réforme européenne sur l’asile étend considérablement son pouvoir. En plus des empreintes, on y trouve aujourd’hui des photos pour alimenter les systèmes de #reconnaissance_faciale. Les conditions d’accès à Eurodac pour les autorités policières ont également été assouplies. « Elles pourront le consulter pour des objectifs d’enquêtes criminelles, on retrouve donc cette idée que de facto, on traite les demandeurs d’asile, les réfugiés, avec une présomption d’illégalité », conclut Chloé Berthélémy.

Or, ces collectes d’informations mettent de côté un principe clef : celui du #consentement, condition sine qua non dans l’UE du traitement des données personnelles, et clairement encadré par le Règlement général de protection des données (#RGPD). Les politiques migratoires et de contrôles aux frontières semblent donc faire figures d’#exception. Lorsqu’une personne pose le pied sur le sol européen, ses empreintes seront collectées, qu’il soit d’accord ou non. Selon l’EDRi, « l’Union européenne est en train de construire deux standards différents. Un pour ceux qui ont les bons papiers, le bon statut migratoire, et un autre pour ceux qui ne les ont pas ».

Un nouveau cadre juridique qui a d’ailleurs été attaqué en justice. En 2021, en Allemagne, la GFF, la Société des droits civils (qui fait partie du réseau de l’EDRi) triomphe de l’Office allemand de l’immigration, condamné pour pratiques disproportionnées. Textos, données de géolocalisation, contacts, historique des appels et autres #fichiers_personnels étaient extraits des #smartphones des demandeurs d’asile à la recherche de preuve d’identité.

Automatisation des décisions

Une fois les frontières passées, l’intelligence artificielle continue à prendre pour cible des étrangers, à travers sa manifestation la plus concrète : les #algorithmes. Examiner les demandes de #visa ou de #naturalisation, attribuer un #hébergement, faciliter l’organisation des #expulsions, prédire les flux migratoires… la multiplication des usages fait craindre aux chercheurs une administration sans guichet, sans visage humain, entièrement automatisée. Problème : ces systèmes intelligents commettent encore beaucoup trop d’#erreurs, et leur prise de décisions est loin d’être objective.

En 2023, l’association La Quadrature du Net révèle que le code source de la Caisse nationale d’allocations familiales (Cnaf) attribue un « score de risque » à chaque allocataire. La valeur de ce score est ensuite utilisée pour sélectionner ceux qui feront l’objet d’un contrôle. Parmi les critères de calcul : avoir de faibles revenus, être au chômage, ou encore être né en dehors de l’Union européenne. « En assimilant la précarité et le soupçon de fraude, l’algorithme participe à une politique de #stigmatisation et de #maltraitance institutionnelle des plus défavorisés », estime Anna Sibley, chargée d’étude au Gisti. Quinze ONG ont d’ailleurs attaqué cet algorithme devant le Conseil d’État en octobre 2024 au nom du droit à la protection des données personnelles et du principe de non-discrimination.

Autre exemple : l’IA a déjà été utilisée par le passé pour soutenir une prise de décision administrative. En 2023, le ministère de l’Intérieur a « appelé à la rescousse » le logiciel #Google_Bard, un outil d’aide à la prise de décision, pour traiter la demande d’asile d’une jeune Afghane. « Ce n’est pas tant le fait que l’intelligence artificielle ait donné une réponse négative qui est choquant. C’est plutôt le fait qu’un employé du ministère de l’Intérieur appuie sa réponse sur celle de l’IA, comme si cette dernière était un argument valable dans le cadre d’une décision de justice », analyse la chercheuse.

#Dématérialisation à marche forcée

En 2024, un rapport du Défenseur des droits pointait du doigt les atteintes massives aux droits des usagers de l’ANEF, l’administration numérique des étrangers en France. Conçue pour simplifier les démarches, l’interface permet le dépôt des demandes de titres de séjour en ligne.

Pourtant, les #dysfonctionnements sont criants et rendent la vie impossible à des milliers de ressortissants étrangers. Leurs réclamations auprès du Défenseur des droits ont augmenté de 400% en quatre ans. Des #plaintes allant du simple problème de connexion aux erreurs de décisions de la plateforme. Un casse-tête numérique contre lequel il est difficile de se prémunir. « Les services d’accompagnement déployés sont trop limités », constate Gabrielle de Boucher, chargée de mission numérique droits et libertés auprès du Défenseur des droits. Selon elle, il est important que la France reconnaisse aux étrangers le droit de réaliser toute démarche par un canal humain, non dématérialisé, un accueil physique.

Le biais discriminatoire

Autre écueil de la dématérialisation croissante des administrations : le biais discriminatoire. Puisque les systèmes intelligents sont entraînés par des êtres humains, ces derniers reproduisent leurs biais et les transmettent involontairement à l’IA. Illustration la plus concrète : les erreurs d’#identification.

En 2023, un homme a été arrêté aux États-Unis après que les logiciels de reconnaissance faciale l’ont désigné par erreur comme l’auteur de vols. « On peut légitimement avoir des craintes sur le respect des droits, puisqu’on sait, par exemple, que le taux d’erreur est plus élevé pour les personnes non blanches », s’inquiète Gabrielle du Boucher. Comme elles sont sous représentées dans les #bases_de_données qui nourrissent l’apprentissage de l’IA, celle-ci sera moins fiable que lorsqu’elle devra, par exemple, se concentrer sur les personnes blanches.

►https://www.infomigrants.net/fr/post/62762/en-europe-les-migrants-premieres-victimes-de-lintelligence-artificiell
#IA #AI #intelligence_artificielle #migrations #réfugiés #victimes #frontières #technologie #contrôle #surveillance #accent #langue #discrimination

Cardinal Canvas : Green Library hides art in plain sight
▻https://stanforddaily.com/2024/05/09/cardinal-canvas-green-library-hides-art-in-plain-sight

https://stanforddaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/J7B-2.jpg

By Adam Golomb
Published May 9, 2024, 12:25 a.m., last updated May 10, 2024, 9:18 p.m.

Editor’s Note: This article is a review and includes subjective opinions, thoughts and critiques.

On my way to study in Green Library’s Lane Reading Room, I was suddenly struck by a portrait of a woman in an industrial kitchen, staring at me. An object label next to it reads: “Teresa.” As a regular at Green, I questioned how I had never seen this artwork — or noticed that the library even had art — before.

After a little sleuthing, I discovered “Teresa” is a part of an exhibit entitled “Seeing Silicon Valley,” on display at Hohbach Hall, the East Wing of Green Library. The exhibit is a selection from the photography book of the same name, created by photographer Mary Beth Meehan in tandem with Stanford Professor of Communication Fred Turner.

The original photography book captured the lives of those who struggle financially in Silicon Valley, an area known for its economic prosperity and technological innovation. Teresa is one of many essential workers in Silicon Valley, operating a food truck that serves the entire Bay Area, including Stanford itself. We see her in a full-body portrait, with the tubs of empty guacamole and salsa containers towering in the back.

Teresa’s expression is complex. I initially saw it as hardened but, the more I stare, I see pride, tiredness, inquisitiveness. The object label explains, after a long shift, she returns to an apartment that she shares with her four daughters. I found myself contemplating the times I’ve walked past this picture without acknowledging Teresa’s story, oblivious of the work that drives Silicon Valley.

While I appreciate the integration of an art exhibit into a library, the placements of some of the other photographs accidently contribute to this motif of ignoring these workers. Venturing toward the presentation room, a series of “Seeing Silicon Valley” portraits adorn the wall, but they are partially covered by the library’s collection of desktop monitors.

One of these slightly obscured photos, “Abraham & Brenda,” caught my eye. A close-up of a couple embracing each other, but both focused toward the viewer. Abraham and Brenda pose in front of their trailer that they park outside of Stanford’s campus.

Their expression of love toward each other is raw, a tight clasp between them that shines as both protective and reassuring. “Abraham & Brenda” spotlights the ways love beams through, even through hardship. With their entwined figures casting shadows against their trailer, Meehan’s photography masterfully catches the couple’s financial reality.

While most of the portraits center their subjects, “Cristobal” pushes its titular character toward the back, nested in a small shed painted with bright pinks and greens. Cristobal, a full-time security officer at Meta, is only able to afford this shed located in someone’s backyard in Mountain View, reads the object label.

The viewer can see the entirety of the shed in the frame, with Cristobal posing inside with his hands in front of his body, making him look as small as the shed. A wave of deep sadness flowed over me; there is almost no way to reconcile this deep socioeconomic inequality that pervades the region we all currently inhabit and benefit from.

“Cristobal” is another portrait that is slightly covered by computer monitors. Poignantly, the person working right in front of “Cristobal” had a product from the same company that Cristobal works for, Instagram, open on the screen. In a way, “Seeing Silicon Valley” expresses its theme too well, as students ignore the lives of these workers even as their portraits tower over them.

This exhibit is long-term, set to stay up until 2025. Next time you’re at Green, take the time to look and read their stories — they are complicated and thought-provoking, a true reflection of our positionality on campus.

#Mary_Beth_Meehan #Fred_Turner #Visages_Silicon_Valley

Le #règlement européen sur l’IA n’interdira pas la #surveillance_biométrique de masse

Le 8 décembre 2023, les législateurs de l’#Union_européenne se sont félicités d’être parvenus à un accord sur la proposition de #règlement tant attendue relative l’intelligence artificielle (« #règlement_IA »). Les principaux parlementaires avaient alors assuré à leurs collègues qu’ils avaient réussi à inscrire de solides protections aux #droits_humains dans le texte, notamment en excluant la #surveillance_biométrique_de_masse (#SBM).

Pourtant, malgré les annonces des décideurs européens faites alors, le règlement IA n’interdira pas la grande majorité des pratiques dangereuses liées à la surveillance biométrique de masse. Au contraire, elle définit, pour la première fois dans l’#UE, des conditions d’utilisation licites de ces systèmes. Les eurodéputés et les ministres des États membres de l’UE se prononceront sur l’acceptation de l’accord final au printemps 2024.

L’UE entre dans l’histoire – pour de mauvaises raisons

La coalition #Reclaim_Your_Face soutient depuis longtemps que les pratiques des SBM sont sujettes aux erreurs et risquées de par leur conception, et qu’elles n’ont pas leur place dans une société démocratique. La police et les autorités publiques disposent déjà d’un grand nombre de données sur chacun d’entre nous ; elles n’ont pas besoin de pouvoir nous identifier et nous profiler en permanence, en objectifiant nos #visages et nos #corps sur simple pression d’un bouton.

Pourtant, malgré une position de négociation forte de la part du Parlement européen qui demandait l’interdiction de la plupart des pratiques de SBM, très peu de choses avaient survécu aux négociations du règlement relatif à l’IA. Sous la pression des représentants des #forces_de_l’ordre, le Parlement a été contraint d’accepter des limitations particulièrement faibles autour des pratiques intrusives en matière de SBM.

L’une des rares garanties en la matière ayant apparemment survécu aux négociations – une restriction sur l’utilisation de la #reconnaissance_faciale a posteriori [par opposition à l’utilisation en temps réel] – a depuis été vidée de sa substance lors de discussions ultérieures dites « techniques » qui se sont tenues ces dernière semaines.

Malgré les promesses des représentants espagnols en charge des négociations, qui juraient que rien de substantiel ne changerait après le 8 décembre, cette édulcoration des protections contre la reconnaissance faciale a posteriori est une nouvelle déception dans notre lutte contre la #société_de_surveillance.

Quel est le contenu de l’accord ?

D’après ce que nous avons pu voir du texte final, le règlement IA est une occasion manquée de protéger les #libertés_publiques. Nos droits de participer à une #manifestation, d’accéder à des soins de #santé_reproductive ou même de nous asseoir sur un #banc pourraient ainsi être menacés par une surveillance biométrique omniprésente de l’#espace_public. Les restrictions à l’utilisation de la reconnaissance faciale en temps réel et a posteriori prévues par la loi sur l’IA apparaissent minimes et ne s’appliqueront ni aux entreprises privées ni aux autorités administratives.

Nous sommes également déçus de voir qu’en matière de « #reconnaissance_des_émotions » et les pratiques de #catégorisation_biométrique, seuls des cas d’utilisation très limités sont interdits dans le texte final, avec d’énormes lacunes.

Cela signifie que le règlement IA autorisera de nombreuses formes de reconnaissance des émotions – telles que l’utilisation par la police de systèmes d’IA pour évaluer qui dit ou ne dit pas la #vérité – bien que ces systèmes ne reposent sur aucune base scientifique crédible. Si elle est adoptée sous cette forme, le règlement IA légitimera une pratique qui, tout au long de l’histoire, a partie liée à l’#eugénisme.

Le texte final prévoit également d’autoriser la police à classer les personnes filmées par les caméras de #vidéosurveillance en fonction de leur #couleur_de_peau. Il est difficile de comprendre comment cela peut être autorisé étant donné que la législation européenne interdit normalement toute #discrimination. Il semble cependant que, lorsqu’elle est pratiquée par une machine, les législateurs considèrent de telles #discriminations comme acceptables.

Une seule chose positive était ressorti des travaux techniques menés à la suite des négociations finales du mois de décembre : l’accord entendait limiter la reconnaissance faciale publique a posteriori aux cas ayant trait à la poursuite de crimes transfrontaliers graves. Bien que la campagne « Reclaim Your Face » ait réclamé des règles encore plus strictes en la matière, cela constituait un progrès significatif par rapport à la situation actuelle, caractérisée par un recours massif à ces pratiques par les États membres de l’UE.

Il s’agissait d’une victoire pour le Parlement européen, dans un contexte où tant de largesses sont concédées à la surveillance biométrique. Or, les négociations menées ces derniers jours, sous la pression des gouvernements des États membres, ont conduit le Parlement à accepter de supprimer cette limitation aux #crimes_transfrontaliers graves tout en affaiblissant les garanties qui subsistent. Désormais, un vague lien avec la « #menace » d’un crime pourrait suffire à justifier l’utilisation de la #reconnaissance_faciale_rétrospective dans les espaces publics.

Il semblerait que ce soit la #France qui ait mené l’offensive visant à faire passer au rouleau compresseur notre droit à être protégés contre les abus de nos données biométriques. À l’approche des #Jeux_olympiques et paralympiques qui se tiendront à Paris cet été, la France s’est battue pour préserver ou étendre les pouvoirs de l’État afin d’éradiquer notre anonymat dans les espaces publics et pour utiliser des systèmes d’intelligence artificielle opaques et peu fiables afin de tenter de savoir ce que nous pensons. Les gouvernements des autres États membres et les principaux négociateurs du Parlement n’ont pas réussi à la contrer dans cette démarche.

En vertu du règlement IA, nous serons donc tous coupables par défaut et mis sous #surveillance_algorithmique, l’UE ayant accordé un blanc-seing à la surveillance biométrique de masse. Les pays de l’UE auront ainsi carte blanche pour renforcer la surveillance de nos visages et de nos corps, ce qui créera un précédent mondial à faire froid dans le dos.

►https://www.laquadrature.net/2024/01/19/le-reglement-europeen-sur-lia-ninterdira-pas-la-surveillance-biometriq
#surveillance_de_masse #surveillance #intelligence_artificielle #AI #IA #algorithme

voir aussi :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/1037288

Les #VasesCommunicants :

L’obstination des vagues, de Caroline Diaz (sur des images de Pierre Ménard) : ▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqXk-gMq8DY&feature=youtu.be

Surface sensible, de Pierre Ménard (sur des images de Caroline Diaz) ▻https://youtu.be/m6vmMTBoLno

▻http://liminaire.fr/vases-communicants/article/surface-sensible-l-obstination-des-vagues

Tous les mois, faire échange de vidéo. S’emparer des images et de la bande son, entrer en dialogue avec, sans nécessairement modifier le montage de la vidéo mais en ajoutant selon ses préférences (voix off, texte lu, improvisé, écrit sur l’image, ajout de sons, de musique), puis envoyer sa propre vidéo à son correspondant pour qu’il s’en empare à son tour.
Le premier vendredi du mois, chacun diffuse le mixage/montage qu’il a réalisé sur la vidéo de l’autre et découvre à son tour son montage mixé sur la chaîne YouTube de son invité. (...) #Journal / #Vidéo, #Architecture, #Écriture, #Sons, #Mer, #Plage, #Normandie, #Paysage, #Ville, #Visages, #Regard, #Dérive, #Ciel, #Voyage, #Vidéo, #Littératube, #vidéoécriture (...)

Les #VasesCommunicants :

Naître, conte étiologique de Milène Tournier (sur des images de Pierre Ménard) : ▻https://youtu.be/bQbYnP6TlIY

Une voix qui vient des rêves de Pierre Ménard (sur des images de Milène Tournier) ▻https://youtu.be/EMcIJccwC0k

▻http://liminaire.fr/vases-communicants/article/naitre-une-voix-qui-vient-des-reves

Tous les mois, faire échange de vidéo. S’emparer des images et de la bande son, entrer en dialogue avec, sans nécessairement modifier le montage de la vidéo mais en ajoutant selon ses préférences (voix off, texte lu, improvisé, écrit sur l’image, ajout de sons, de musique), puis envoyer sa propre vidéo à son correspondant pour qu’il s’en empare à son tour.
Le premier vendredi du mois, chacun diffuse le mixage/montage qu’il a réalisé sur la vidéo de l’autre et découvre à son tour son montage mixé sur la chaîne YouTube de son invité. (...) #Journal / #Vidéo, #Architecture, #Écriture, #Sons, #Paris, #Paysage, #Ville, #Visages, #Regard, #Dérive, #Ciel, #Voyage, #Vidéo, #Littératube, #vidéoécriture (...)

Les #VasesCommunicants : Le chemin de nos regards, vidéo de Anh Mat (texte et voix de Pierre Ménard) et Dans la ville de l’autre, vidéo de Pierre Ménard (texte et voix de Anh Mat)

▻https://youtu.be/BLEqaqB1pXI

▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-CZQDpZOWU

▻http://liminaire.fr/vases-communicants/article/le-chemin-de-nos-regards-dans-la-ville-de-l-autre

Tous les mois, faire échange de vidéo. S’emparer des images et de la bande son, entrer en dialogue avec, sans nécessairement modifier le montage de la vidéo mais en ajoutant selon ses préférences (voix off, texte lu, improvisé, écrit sur l’image, ajout de sons, de musique), puis envoyer sa propre vidéo à son correspondant pour qu’il s’en empare à son tour.
Le premier vendredi du mois, chacun diffuse le mixage/montage qu’il a réalisé sur la vidéo de l’autre et découvre à son tour son montage mixé sur la chaîne YouTube de son invité. (...) #Journal / #Vidéo, #Architecture, #Écriture, #Sons, #Paris, #Saigon, #Paysage, #Ville, #Visages, #Regard, #Dérive, #Ciel, #Voyage, #Vidéo, #Littératube, #vidéoécriture (...)

Fascination Shibuya : Portraits arrachés à la ville flux
▻http://liminaire.fr/derives/article/fascination-shibuya

▻https://youtu.be/iU7TEzhqDYI

J’avance. Je ne vois rien. La musique des immeubles avec leurs publicités aux images obsédantes et répétitives, lumières clignotantes, signes enchevêtrant, et ce bruit inouï qui se mêle aux sons de la circulation, des métros aériens, de la gare toute proche, et des avions dans le ciel. Une jeune femme dans un long manteau vert kaki qui porte une besace de couleur bleu, la lanière en cuir au creux de son bras replié, dans le pli du coude, la main serrée sur son téléphone portable tout contre son cœur. J’avance. Je ne peux pas regarder les immeubles qui entourent le carrefour et traverser sans risquer de me heurter à l’un des passants qui vient en sens inverse. Une femme brune, lunettes aux fines montures, vêtue d’une robe en jean, d’une veste en laine côtelée bleu marine, elle porte son sac à dos noir sur sa poitrine, elle fouille à l’intérieur pour en sortir un titre de transport sans y jeter le moindre regard, la force de l’habitude. J’avance. Les regards sont fuyants. Le pas pressé. (...) #Journal / #Vidéo, #Architecture, #Écriture, #Sons, #Tokyo, #Japon, #Shibuya, #Paysage, #Ville, #Visages, #Regard, #Dérive, #Ciel, #Voyage, (...)

[C&F] Samedi 23 avril - Un cadeau pour la Sant Jordi
▻http://0w0pm.mjt.lu/nl2/0w0pm/1glu.html?m=AVgAACH9OOwAAABES1gAAAhharoAAAAAtBIAAK4dABjAHgBiYrJDcqvTue_HSq

https://0w0pm.mjt.lu/img/0w0pm/b/1glu/sh368.jpeg

[C&F] Samedi 23 avril - Un cadeau pour la Sant Jordi

Bonjour,

Le 23 avril 1616 mourrait Miguel de Cervantes, l’auteur de L’ingénieux Hidalgo Don Quichotte de la Manche. Depuis 1926, le 23 avril est devenu en Catalogne la fête du livre. Ce jour là, qui est également la Saint Georges (Sant Jordi en catalan), Barcelone se transforme en immense librairie en plein air.

Il est de coutume d’offrir un livre et une rose pour la Sant Jordi.

Barcelone devient une gigantesque librairie en plein air pour la Sant Jordi

Cette relation du 23 avril au livre a encouragé l’Unesco à en faire la Journée mondiale du livre et du droit d’auteur.
C&F éditions ne pouvait rester en dehors de cette fête du livre.

Notre cadeau de Sant Jordi se fera à partir de notre librairie en ligne (►https://cfeditions.com)

Notre offre décrite ci-dessous commence dès maintenant. Elle est valable jusqu’au 23 avril 2022 à minuit.

Accéder à la librairie en ligne de C&F éditions : ►https://cfeditions.com

Cette année, nous vous proposons un cadeau à double détente :

– Si vous achetez un livre, nous vous offrons le même titre au format epub s’il existe... et s’il n’existe pas encore, nous vous offrons « En communs : une introduction aux communs de la connaissance » de votre serviteur.

– Si vous achetez deux livres, nous ajoutons au colis Visages de la Silicon Valley, le merveilleux livre de photos de Mary Beth Meehan avec un essai introductif de Fred Turner. Ça, c’est du cadeau !

https://cfeditions.com/visages/ressources/visages_couve_800.jpg

Accéder à la librairie en ligne de C&F éditions
►https://cfeditions.com

Bonne lecture,

Hervé Le Crosnier

PS : Vos libraires favoris auront également des cadeaux pour vous si vous franchissez leurs portes ce samedi 23 avril. Malheureusement, il vous faudra commander nos livres, car nous ne sommes présents dans les rayonnages que d’une minorité de librairies... et ce n’est pas de notre fait : la plupart des librairies contactées estiment que leur public n’est pas intéressé par les sujets que nous traitons. C’est dommage, mais nous devons vivre avec cette situation pour rester indépendants des méga-diffuseurs. Mais n’hésitez pas à indiquer à votre libraire favori·te qu’il ou elle peut nous contacter pour présenter nos ouvrages en rayon, voire sur table (contact@cfeditions.com). Nos conditions libraires sont les mêmes que celles de tous les éditeurs (remise, droit de retour, envoi gratuit via prisme ou coursier).
Des roses de Barcelone pour la Sant Jordi

#C&F_éditions #Sant_jordi #Visages_Silicon_Valley

Mary Beth Meehan’s photos dissolve distances between people - CSMonitor.com
►https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2021/1006/Mary-Beth-Meehan-s-photos-dissolve-distances-between-people
►https://images.csmonitor.com/csm/2021/09/1011+BOOKS%20meehan%20pool.jpg?alias=standard_900x600

Silicon Valley exerts a magnetism like a tractor beam on people from around the world. They come to the San Francisco Bay Area seeking riches, or at least the trickle down from the booming high-tech economy led by Apple, Alphabet (owner of Google), and Facebook.

The reality, as photographer Mary Beth Meehan depicts in the book “Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America,” is strikingly different. Yes, tech companies have created thousands of jobs, she says in an interview, “but the dominant narrative about a ‘utopia’ obscures how life is actually lived, and what it means to be a human being there.” The gap between the ultra-wealthy and ordinary workers – who cannot afford housing and basic necessities even with decent-paying jobs – is widening.

Silicon Valley is a microcosm of the broader inequality that divides the nation, according to Meehan. The effects are felt not just economically but socially. “People are living right next to each other and they don’t interact,” she says. To counter this sense of separation, the photographer created portraits that encourage readers to go beyond stereotypes to see the people who make up this amorphous place known as Silicon Valley. The result is a book of images that speaks to the human toll exacted by the relentless economy.

When she makes portraits, Meehan collaborates with individuals to decide where and how they will be photographed, and what they’ll be wearing. Her skill is seen in the deliberateness with which she frames and edits the picture.

By highlighting the humanity of each person, Meehan hopes to bring out the viewer’s humanity. This is especially important in a place like Silicon Valley, she says, where the wealthy may not really see the people who clean, cook, and care for them and their families. It’s a place where immigrants arrive seeking the American dream, only to end up struggling to find a foothold.

“Each project is pushing against a big system,” she says. “In Silicon Valley, it’s the myth that the economy there is floating all boats.” Why, she argues, can’t some of that enormous wealth go into creating healthy lives for the people there? “That’s the question we’re really asking, and what does that say about the American economy?”

#Mary_Beth_Meehan #Visages

A conversation with Fred Turner and photographer Mary Beth Meehan | USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism
▻https://annenberg.usc.edu/events/annenberg-research-seminar/conversation-silicon-valley-culture-expert-fred-turner-and

https://annenberg.usc.edu/sites/default/files/camera-in-hand.jpg

Annenberg Research Seminar
A conversation with Silicon Valley culture expert Fred Turner and photographer Mary Beth Meehan
Monday, November 8, 2021 12 p.m. – 1 p.m. PT Online

Acclaimed photographer Mary Beth Meehan and Silicon Valley culture expert Fred Turner join forces to give us an unseen view of the heart of the tech world.

Photo of Mary Beth Meehan Mary Beth Meehan
It’s hard to imagine a place more central to American mythology today than Silicon Valley. To outsiders, the region glitters with the promise of extraordinary wealth and innovation. But behind this image lies another Silicon Valley, one segregated by race, class and nationality in complex and contradictory ways.

Photo of Fred Turner Fred Turner
With arresting photographs and intimate stories, Seeing Silicon Valley makes this hidden world visible. Join Fred Turner and Mary Beth Meehan as they discuss the making of the book, the role of photography in scholarship, activism and public life, and what it might mean for the technology industry to help us make a truly humane society.

Speakers:

Mary Beth Meehan is a photographer known for her large-scale, community-based portraiture centered around questions of representation, visibility, and social equity in the United States
Fred Turner is Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University

#Mary_Beth_Meehan #Fred_Turner #Visages_Silicon_Valley

’Seeing Silicon Valley’ creators on the tech hub’s growing inequalities
▻https://money.yahoo.com/video/seeing-silicon-valley-creators-tech-214456317.html?guccounter=1&guce_re
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Tue, September 7, 2021, 11:44 PM

Photographer Mary Beth Meehan and Stanford University Professor Fred Turner sat down with Yahoo Finance’s Akiko Fujita to discuss their book, “Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America”

#Fred_Turner #Mary_Beth_Meehan #Visages_Silicon_Valley

In Silicon Valley, many find it impossible to make ends meet | The Big Issue
▻https://www.bigissue.com/culture/books/in-silicon-valley-many-find-it-impossible-to-make-ends-meet

https://images.bigissue.com/2021/05/Konstance_MBM-Hero.jpg

Facebook, Google and hundreds of other companies that drive our digital lives call Silicon Valley home, but so do people who find it almost impossible to make ends meet, even if they are key to keeping billion-dollar industries running.

In a new book, photographer Mary Beth Meehan presents a series of portraits that show another side of the people who power the world’s tech capital.

#Mary_Beth_Meehan #Visages_Silicon_Valley

Mary Beth Meehan: Seeing Silicon Valley - LENSCRATCH
▻http://lenscratch.com/2021/05/mary-beth-meehan-seeing-silicon-valley

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“For more than seven decades, business leaders, politicians, and would-be entrepreneurs have tried to unravel the secrets of Silicon Valley. In just over one hundred powerful, haunting pages, Meehan and Turner have captured a side of the valley rarely seen: the deeply inequitable landscape of contingent and disproportionately foreign-born labor that makes its high-tech magic possible. Humane, insightful, and deeply compelling, this book tells the story of Silicon Valley in a completely new and utterly magnetic way.” – Margaret O’Mara, author of The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America

Photographer Mary Beth Meehan has a legacy of considering the complexity of communities and reminding us of our humanity through her portraits and interviews. For her newest project and book published by the University of Chicago Press, Seeing Silicon Valley, she joined forces with Silicon Valley culture expert Fred Turner to give us an unseen view of the heart of the tech world.

When considering the population central to this American mythology, we might consider the characters of the television show Silicon Valley–rag tag techies that carry dark under eye circles from long days in front of a screen without sunshine and a small cluster of visionaries who have gotten very rich from technology. But the reality of place is very different. Behind this image lies another Silicon Valley, one segregated by race, class, and nationality in complex and contradictory ways. Its beautiful landscape lies atop underground streams of pollutants left behind by decades of technological innovation, and while its billionaires live in compounds, surrounded by redwood trees and security fences, its service workers live in their cars.

With arresting photography and intimate stories, Seeing Silicon Valley makes this hidden world visible. Instead of young entrepreneurs striving for efficiency in minimalist corporate campuses, we see portraits of struggle—families displaced by an impossible real estate market, workers striving for a living wage, and communities harmed by environmental degradation. If the fate of Silicon Valley is the fate of America—as so many of its boosters claim—then this book gives us an unvarnished look into the future.

Mary Beth Meehan uses photography to transform public spaces, works collaboratively to reflect communities back to themselves, and aims to jolt people into considering one another anew. Combining image, text, and large-scale public installation, Meehan’s work challenges notions of representation, visibility, and equity, and prompts people to talk with one another about what they see.

Meehan’s first book, Seeing Silicon Valley: Life inside a Fraying America, with Fred Turner, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press in Spring of 2021.

“Seeing Newnan,” Meehan’s most recent public installation, was featured on the Sunday front page of The New York Times on Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, in January of 2020, and has shifted the dialogue about representation, identity, and race in that small Georgia city.

Meehan has held residencies at Stanford University, the University of Missouri School of Journalism, and at Brown University upcoming in 2021. She has lectured and led workshops at the School of Visual Arts, New York, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

A native of Brockton, Massachusetts, Mary Beth holds degrees from Amherst College and the University of Missouri, Columbia. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
Book spread 2

Spread from “Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America” University of Chicago Press, 2021

Seeing Silicon Valley

Seeing Silicon Valley is a collaboration between myself and Silicon Valley culture scholar Fred Turner. During the Fall of 2017 I was invited by Turner to hold an artist’s residency at Stanford University, in order to try to see, ­through my own eyes, what life was like for the thousands of workers in that mythic place. Since then Turner and I have worked together to present what we found – a place, within one of the richest economies in the world, where life is tenuous and where people struggle to find stability, connection, and community. These portraits and narratives are meant to draw viewers in to considering Silicon Valley on an intimate, human scale, and reflecting on what it means for our future.
From “Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America” University of Chicago Press, 2021

©Mary Beth Meehan, RAVI and GOUTHAMI Between them, Ravi and Gouthami have multiple degrees — in biotechnology, computer science, chemistry, and statistics. After studying in India and working in Wisconsin and Texas, they have landed here, in the international center of technology, where they work in the pharmaceutical-technology industry. They rent an apartment in Foster City and attend a Hindu temple in Sunnyvale, where immigrants from India have been building a community since the early 1990s. Although the couple have worked hard to get here, and they make good money, they feel that a future in Silicon Valley eludes them — their one-bed-room apartment, for example, costs almost $3,000 a month. They could move somewhere less expensive, but, with the traffic, they’d spend hours each day commuting. They would like to stay, but they don’t feel confident that they can save, invest, start a family. They’re not sure what to do next. From “Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America” University of Chicago Press, 2021
From “Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America”

©Mary Beth Meehan, RICHARD Richard has spent his entire adult life in the auto industry, loving his work and making good money. In 2010, the year that GM went bankrupt and the plant he worked at in Fremont closed, he was earning $120,000 a year. After Tesla took over the plant, Richard got a job on the manufacturing floor. He was paid $18 an hour, or less than $40,000 a year. Richard started noticing things that didn’t seem right. As a line worker assembling car doors, he was required to work twelve-hour shifts, five or six days a week. Richard had a home, but he noticed young guys “who came in broke, with a bag of clothes” being hired, working the long shifts, sleeping in their cars, showering in the break room, and doing it again the next day. When a friend invited Richard to meet with the United Automobile Workers union, he agreed. Soon after that, when people complained to him about the low pay or long hours, he’d tell them that with the union, they could stand up for themselves. He handed out buttons and T-shirts, told people they had a choice. “We don’t want to break ’em,” he said of the company. “We just want a little larger piece of the pie — so we can have a cooler of beer every now and then, go camping once in a while.” Though he’d never received a negative review, Richard was fired last October, along with more than four hundred other workers. The UAW has filed a complaint, alleging that Tesla fired workers who were trying to unionize. The worst part for Richard, he says, is that he hears the employees are now too scared to talk about the union. He believes that all his hard work has been in vain. From “Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America” University of Chicago Press, 2021
From “Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America” University of Chicago Press, 2021

©Mary Beth Meehan,WARREN In junior high, in Illinois, before he knew anyone else who had a personal computer, Warren got to play Lemonade Stand on his uncle Bob’s Commodore PET. At thirteen, he attended a computer trade show in Chicago: “I didn’t even know what I was looking at,” he says. “But it was cool. It piqued my curiosity profoundly.” In high school, Warren sought out a friend who could teach him all the workings of computers. After he graduated as his school’s valedictorian, Warren went to Stanford to study engineering and business. Then he became a venture capitalist, backing such fledgling firms as Skype, Hotmail, and Tesla (and turning down the founders of Theranos, one of Silicon Valley’s legendary frauds). Ten years ago, he says, “I did a very Silicon Valley thing”: he called a few of his industry pals to launch Thuuz, a service that creates highlights of sporting events in real time. He runs the company out of a bungalow in Palo Alto, adjacent to his house—just a block away from the garage where Hewlett-Packard began. Warren’s company is small, and while he wants it to be successful, he doesn’t strive to make it one of Silicon Valley’s giants. “Many of those companies are huge because they are willing to cross some lines,” he says—ethical, moral lines. “Steve Jobs was irascible,” he says, “Jobs was tough, Jobs was rude.” But, says Warren, thanks to the iPhone, billions of people in India and China now have access to information. “I put Steve Jobs above that line and say, ‘Yeah, he could have been a jerk, but he’s above that line.’” Warren feels differently about Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. “He has broken some massive, massive rules,” he says. “He is completely abusing his users.” Facebook has “corrupted our election. They corrupted Brexit, over in Europe. They’ve destroyed minorities in Asia. . . . They are below the line, below the line. Absolutely, below the line.” From “Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America” University of Chicago Press, 2021

#Mary_Beth_Meehan #Visages_Silicon_Valley

Great Reads in Photography: May 16, 2021 | PetaPixel
▻https://petapixel.com/2021/05/16/great-reads-in-photography-may-16-2021

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Every Sunday, we bring together a collection of easy-reading articles from analytical to how-to to photo-features in no particular order that did not make our regular daily coverage. Enjoy!

Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America — Lenscratch
From “Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America” University of Chicago Press, 2021
Elisa and Family © Mary Beth Meehan, courtesy University of Chicago Press. 2021
Mary Beth Meehan © Molly Heller

Acclaimed photographer Mary Beth Meehan and Silicon Valley culture expert Fred Turner join forces to give us an unseen view of the heart of the tech world.

“With arresting photography and intimate stories, Seeing Silicon Valley makes this hidden world visible,” says Aline Smithson in Lenscratch. “Instead of young entrepreneurs striving for efficiency in minimalist corporate campuses, we see portraits of struggle—families displaced by an impossible real estate market, workers striving for a living wage, and communities harmed by environmental degradation.

“If the fate of Silicon Valley is the fate of America—as so many of its boosters claim—then this book gives us an unvarnished look into the future.”
From “Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America” University of Chicago Press, 2021
Ravi and Gouthami © Mary Beth Meehan, courtesy University of Chicago Press, 2021

Silicon Valley glitters with the promise of extraordinary wealth and innovation. But behind the façade lies a world segregated by race, class, and nationality in complex and contradictory ways.
Cristobal was born in Bakersfield, out in the desert. After high school, he served eight years in the Army, including one tour in the Iraq war. He now works full time as a security guard at Facebook. He starts at dawn, guiding cars on and off the campus, and making sure walkers looking down at their phones cross safely. Despite this job, he has no health benefits, and he can’t afford to have a home in Silicon Valley. He’d like to go back to Bakersfield, to be near his mother, but there’s no work there. So he keeps doing his best. Cristobal feels he works hard, and has given back to his country, but his pay forces him to live in a rented repurposed shed, in a back yard in Mountain View. He’s starting to get angry. “Silicon Valley is a shithole,” he says.
Cristobal © Mary Beth Meehan, courtesy University of Chicago Press, 2021

“For those who have not been fortunate enough to make billionaire lists, for midlevel engineers and food truck workers and longtime residents, the valley has become increasingly inhospitable, testing their resilience and resolve,” say photographer Meehan and Turner in The New York Times.

#Visages_Silicon_Valley #Fred_Turner #Mary_Beth_Meehan

12 则真实硅谷故事：不一样的硅谷，残酷的人生百态_详细解读_最新资讯_热点事件_36氪
▻https://www.36kr.com/p/1220133179347336
▻https://img.36krcdn.com/20210512/v2_d8cd77d36e0b4b2783b64ed25a14d3be_img_jpg

Les journaux chinois en parlent... l’édition originale est en français
►https://cfeditions.com/visages

则真实硅谷故事：不一样的硅谷，残酷的人生百态
神译局
昨天
关注
在硅谷看不到未来。

编者按：作为全球科技精英的圣地，硅谷似乎永远与创新、财富、机会、奇迹、梦想和成功这些令人心潮澎湃的词汇紧密相连。但在创造巨额财富、改变世界进程的同时，硅谷也是美国贫富分化最严重的地区之一，生活成本极其高昂，从赤贫的流浪汉到年入百万的白领精英，硅谷各个阶层的居民们都背负着巨大的生活压力。一起来看硅谷最真实的另一面吧！本文编译自《纽约时报》，作者Mary Beth Meehan和Fred Turner，原标题Seeing the Real Faces of Silicon Valley，希望给您带来启发。

La véritable histoire de la Silicon Valley : une Silicon Valley différente, une vie brutale
Le Bureau de la traduction
Hier
Suivez
L’avenir n’est pas en vue dans la Silicon Valley.

Note de l’éditeur : en tant que Mecque de l’élite mondiale de la technologie, la Silicon Valley semble être associée pour toujours aux mots enivrants d’innovation, de richesse, d’opportunités, de miracles, de rêves et de succès. Mais si la Silicon Valley a créé d’énormes richesses et changé le cours du monde, c’est aussi l’une des régions les plus polarisées des États-Unis. Le coût de la vie y est extrêmement élevé, des sans-abri démunis à l’élite millionnaire en col blanc, les habitants de la Silicon Valley de tous horizons subissent une pression énorme pour vivre. Découvrez le vrai visage de la Silicon Valley ! Cet article a été compilé à partir du New York Times par Mary Beth Meehan et Fred Turner, sous le titre initial Seeing the Real Faces of Silicon Valley, et j’espère qu’il vous inspirera.

#Fred_Turner #Mary_Beth_Meehan #Visages_Silicon_Valley

Providence photographer captures overlooked truths about Silicon Valley - The Boston Globe
▻https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/05/11/metro/providence-photographer-captures-overlooked-truths-about-silicon-valley
▻https://bostonglobe-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/mqqHgBHUEptHJkF7FfCDhgzWBfI=/506x0/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/bostonglobe/67J7OLM57BGGVAUNUEHMVARROA.jpg

From Brockton to Providence, from small-town Georgia to Silicon Valley, photographer Mary Beth Meehan is challenging communities to see themselves in new ways, spurring discussions about race and inequality, the economy and the environment.

“We want people to see beyond the myths of Silicon Valley’s wealth and innovation to the ways in which real people struggle in that environment,” Meehan said. “They struggle in terms of financial security but also to find connection and community.”

In “Seeing Silicon Valley,” Meehan introduces us to Cristobal, a US Army veteran who makes $21 an hour working as a full-time security officer at Facebook but lives in a shed because he can’t afford a house in the area’s high-priced housing market.

Meehan said a former colleague connected her to Turner, a Stanford communications professor who was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, lived in Boston for 10 years, and graduated from Brown University. The book was designed by a Providence resident, Lucinda Hitchcock.

Turner, who now lives two miles from Google headquarters, said Silicon Valley excels at marketing itself. “But the actual community that is here on the ground is much more diverse and much more unequal than the mythology tells us,” he said. “Very few people look or make money like Mark Zuckerberg.”

Turner said Meehan’s large-scale portraits demonstrated her ability to capture images that tell you something about both the person and their community, and as a Brockton native, she brought to bear a working-class background.

“I hope people can see that the seemingly magical world of technology depends on the really hard work of a whole lot of different people,” he said. “In the same way that the Industrial Revolution in Boston didn’t just depend on the people who went to Harvard, Silicon Valley is not just the Zuckerbergs and Jobs.”

Turner said the nation’s industries need to sustain the people that build them – not just a few people at the top. “The lesson is that if you just pursue profit and innovation, you can injure your workers, pollute your landscape, and build a society you wouldn’t want to be a member of,” he said. “We can do a lot better than that.”

As an artist-in-residence at Stanford, Meehan spent six weeks introducing herself to strangers, sitting in kitchens and living rooms, listening to their stories.

She said she found tremendous unease among the people there, not only among the cashiers and waiters, but among the tech professionals and other high-income earners. And she found the anxieties of Silicon Valley reflect a nationwide gulf between the rich and the poor – the hollowing out of the middle class.

“Even though the stock market is doing well, people are struggling,” Meehan said. “If people are not doing well in Silicon Valley, then what does that say about where the country is headed?”

#Fred_Turner #Mary_Beth_Meehan #Visages_Silicon_Valley

Seeing the Real Faces of Silicon Valley - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/08/business/economy/seeing-the-real-faces-of-silicon-valley.html

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The workers of Silicon Valley rarely look like the men idealized in its lore. They are sometimes heavier, sometimes older, often female, often darker skinned. Many migrated from elsewhere. And most earn far less than Mark Zuckerberg or Tim Cook.

This is a place of divides.

As the valley’s tech companies have driven the American economy since the Great Recession, the region has remained one of the most unequal in the United States.

During the depths of the pandemic, four in 10 families in the area with children could not be sure that they would have enough to eat on any given day, according to an analysis by the Silicon Valley Institute for Regional Studies. Just months later, Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, who recently added “Technoking” to his title, briefly became the world’s richest man. The median home price in Santa Clara County — home to Apple and Alphabet — is now $1.4 million, according to the California Association of Realtors.

For those who have not been fortunate enough to make billionaire lists, for midlevel engineers and food truck workers and longtime residents, the valley has become increasingly inhospitable, testing their resilience and resolve.

Here are 12 of them, who originally appeared in our book, “Seeing Silicon Valley,” from which this photo essay is excerpted.

#Fred_Turner #Mary_Beth_Meehan #Visages_Silicon_Valley

Stanford scholar’s new collaboration reveals the complexities of life in Silicon Valley
▻https://news.stanford.edu/press-releases/2021/05/04/revealing-complee-silicon-valley

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To capture what it’s like to live and work in Silicon Valley – for the affluent, those who are barely getting by and the many people in between – Stanford communication professor and Silicon Valley scholar Fred Turner teamed up with renowned photographer Mary Beth Meehan.

Turner hopes his new project, a collaboration with renowned photographer Mary Beth Meehan, can shine a spotlight on some of the complexities of the region known as the center of tech innovation.

“I knew that there were things that photographers could see that I couldn’t quite put into words,” said Turner, the Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication in the School of Humanities and Sciences, “I thought that if I worked with a photographer like Mary Beth Meehan I would find a new way to express some of the kinds of things that I wanted to express in academic work but hadn’t really found an idiom for.”

The result of their academic-artistic collaboration is a new book, Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America, (University of Chicago Press, 2021), an intimate look into the everyday experiences of people who live and work in Silicon Valley, from some of its more wealthy residents to its poorest – and the many people in between. In a collection of over 30 portraits photographed in 2017 and 2019, readers see Silicon Valley workers inside their homes and at their workplaces – images that convey the realities of what life is like in one of America’s wealthiest regions.

Meehan, who lives in Providence, Rhode Island, had never spent much time in Silicon Valley. What she knew of the region came mostly from stories she read in newspapers and magazines that had for a long time portrayed the region as a place of the future, where tech geniuses were transforming society.

“Silicon Valley was a mythic idea for me,” Meehan said. “I had this idea of it as a place where everything sparkled, where everything was possible, where people were young and healthy – that it was a place in which all of the best of human ingenuity was put into play.”

What Meehan encountered was far different from what she imagined.

“Nothing could have prepared me for the uneasiness and human stress and suffering that went along with being a part of that economy,” Meehan said.

Over several extended trips, Meehan immersed herself in Silicon Valley culture. She approached strangers she encountered on neighborhood streets and had long conversations with the cashiers she met at the taquerias she frequented. She attended a United Auto Workers meeting and went to a party with tech entrepreneurs – and through these interactions, Meehan began to see themes emerge from the valley’s hustle and bustle.

Some of Meehan’s observations surprised Turner, particularly the feelings of economic insecurity workers reported experiencing on a daily basis.

“One of the things that really surprised me was how Mary Beth heard a persistent humming of anxiety in the workers that she was talking with – at every level: from folks at the taqueria up to the executive, C-suite,” he said. “Across the board, you find folks worried about whether they can make it, whether they can survive, whether they can get ahead.”

The project was supported by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, the Stanford Arts Initiative and the Departments of Communication and Art & Art History. An earlier version of the book was published in 2018 by C&F Editions in Paris, France.

#Fred_Turner #Mary_Beth_Meehan #Visages_Silicon_Valley

Silicon Valley photograph book by Mary Beth Meehan and Fred Turner focuses on the unseen in the uber-rich area - The Washington Post
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/silicon-valley-photography-book-mary-beth-meehan/2021/04/30/4867019e-a46f-11eb-85fc-06664ff4489d_story.html

Four years ago, New England portrait photographer Mary Beth Meehan received a query out of the blue. A professor in California named Fred Turner wanted to collaborate on a project about the people who live and work in Silicon Valley.

“It was just so bizarre,” Meehan recalls thinking. “It never occurred to me to think of Silicon Valley as an actual place where people lived.”

This was precisely Turner’s point. A Stanford University historian and professor of communication who has studied Silicon Valley culture for 20 years, Turner has long been troubled by what he calls the “persistent mythology” of the region, a digital ecosystem in Northern California known mainly as the home of Apple, Google and Facebook, and as the hub of billionaire innovators.

“We tell ourselves that Silicon Valley is a place where heroic geniuses invent products that somehow harness the invisible powers of electricity and information and magically change the world,” Turner said in an interview. “And the heroes in our stories are almost always White men.”

Everybody else might as well be invisible. “You can literally be here and see the young tech bros not seeing the people cleaning the stores or their houses or the streets,” he said. “It’s a kind of low-key oblivious arrogance that comes from being genuinely brilliant, spending a lot of time with machines, working with code, which is highly abstract and rational, and being rewarded with lots of money.”
Image without a caption
Photographer Mary Beth Meehan. (Molly Heller)

Turner, a photography aficionado, was familiar with Meehan’s work and knew that invisibility is one of her key themes. Her process is to immerse herself in communities and create large-scale portraits of ordinary, uncelebrated people and install them as huge banners on the sides of buildings in downtown areas. Invariably, her installations prompt townwide dialogue about race, inclusiveness and the meaning of community. Meehan’s work also is evocative of JR, the French photographer and street artist, though she has been influenced by many artists who activate public spaces.
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“A common thread is moving past preconceptions to understand one another,” said Meehan, who has created installations in Brockton, Mass., where she grew up, Providence, R.I., where she lives now, and, most recently, in Newnan, Ga., a small town striving to embrace and celebrate change in the wake of a white nationalist rally there in 2018.

Meehan was eager to take on a Silicon Valley project, though she and Turner were fuzzy about the end product. Banners were — and continue to be — a consideration, but, Meehan said, “I haven’t been able to get my head around what banners would look like. There’s no central Silicon Valley space. There’s no there there. It’s a conglomeration of towns.”

They ultimately landed on a book, featuring text and Meehan’s images. “Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America” will be released May 3 by the University of Chicago Press.
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“Silicon Valley has long been a shining example of those who dream of a society built around individual initiative and enabling technologies,” Turner writes in the introduction. “But what does it feel like to live in such a world? What kind of society does the relentless pursuit of technological innovation and wealth produce?”

Meehan went to Stanford in the fall of 2018 as an artist in residence and set to work finding the answer. She introduced herself to strangers, sat in their kitchens and living rooms, met them in businesses and shops.

“I chased them on the street,” she said. “I met people through workers’ rights groups and at a gathering of young tech engineers. I met a couple in a Hindu temple. And then there was the magic of connecting with someone in that moment, photographically.”
Justyna, one of Meehan’s subjects: “If we want to achieve excellence in technology, why can’t we achieve excellence in being good to each other?”
Justyna, one of Meehan’s subjects: “If we want to achieve excellence in technology, why can’t we achieve excellence in being good to each other?” (© Mary Beth Meehan)
Mary came to the United States from Uganda more than a year ago: “I’ve discovered one thing. There are people here who are poorer than we are in Africa . . . because our community cares for each other. . . . This place is lonely.”
Mary came to the United States from Uganda more than a year ago: “I’ve discovered one thing. There are people here who are poorer than we are in Africa . . . because our community cares for each other. . . . This place is lonely.” (© Mary Beth Meehan)

She got to know affluent professionals, people behind cash registers and in homeless encampments, rising tech stars, a recent immigrant from Uganda, a food truck worker from Mexico who serves burritos to Tesla employees, a man in his 80s who can’t afford an apartment so he lives in a small trailer a couple of miles from the Google campus; he has no electricity or running water. She met the parents of a 19-year-old girl who had killed herself. They allowed her to photograph the suicide note, in which she apologized and wrote: “i am not super smart or talented.”
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As Meehan pieced together a narrative about the unseen heart of the tech world, what emerged was a startling view of Silicon Valley.

“What surprised me, and what stays with me still, was the unease that was palpable in Silicon Valley,” Meehan writes in the book’s afterword. “From those at the lowest end of the economic spectrum to those with higher incomes whose unease was more existential, people conveyed how hard it was to find balance, connection, and community. The sense of distress was so pervasive that I wondered if I was seeing things correctly.”

Among the people she photographed was the blond-haired Justyna with a piercing gaze, originally from Poland. (No last names are used in the book.) She has a PhD, works on self-driving cars and shares a mansion with other scientists in Cupertino. She told Meehan she used to be idealistic but thinks people have lost track of the core values of integrity, respect for others and being good to each other. “We seem to be losing ourselves,” she said.

Meehan met Mark, 39, born with severe brain damage. When his mother was pregnant, she worked in the electronics industry making the lasers that scan groceries. She later learned that the greenish substance she was inhaling was toxic — and the cause of her son’s birth defects.
Image without a caption
Mark is 39 and needs constant care. His mother worked in a Mountain View electronics plant making laser scanners with a mixture that contained high levels of lead known to cause birth defects. (© Mary Beth Meehan)

Brenda and Abraham lost their home after the 2008 crash. They lived for a while in improvised shacks that are common in the region, though illegal. They now live in a trailer in a long row of other trailers in Palo Alto, parked in front of the Stanford campus.
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Mary, from Uganda, told Meehan: “There are people here who are poorer than we are in Africa.”

She spent a lot of time with Cristobal, an Army veteran who works full time as a contract security officer at Facebook, earning $21 an hour. Meehan agreed to meet him at his home, which turned out to be a shed.

“I was shocked,” she said. “[Cristobal and I] shared so much anger in the making of that picture. I mean, for God’s sakes. You have a full-time job, you served in the U.S. military. Should a home be so far outside your reach?”

It was at times like this that the story she and Turner were telling became personal.

“I was raised by working-class people, and there was a level of security that could be attained by hard work,” she said. “And when I think of the equivalent of that worker toiling away in Silicon Valley, I don’t see the same level of comfort or security or the ability to build a life or build wealth. It’s not a livable economy.

“I don’t think the difference is in the character and ambitions of these people. I think the difference is in the system they entered. And that’s the part we’re not talking about.”

#Mary_Beth_Meehan #Fred_Turner #Visages_Silicon_Valley

Visual Arts Review: “Seeing Silicon Valley” - Our Future Dystopia? - The Arts Fuse
▻https://artsfuse.org/227474/visual-arts-review-seeing-silicon-valley-our-future-dystopia

https://artsfuse.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Seeing-Silicon-Valley-hi-res-cover_9780226786483-1.jpg

Meanwhile, Turner, now Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communications at Stanford, had embarked on similarly disillusioning project. Turner, who lives in Mountain View, in the heart of Silicon Valley, had studied the region’s culture for some two decades. In 2017, he invited Mary Beth Meehan, known for her “large-scale, community-based portraiture,” to spend six weeks in the Valley, photographing its inhabitants and listening to their stories.

“He told me that he was troubled by the power of the region’s mythology,” Meehan recalls, “and wanted people to see the place as it is. He asked if I’d be willing to come and try to see it through my own eyes.” After her work got underway, Turner asked Meehan to his house once a week for a home-cooked dinner and would “pepper me with questions: ‘What are you seeing? What are you finding out there?’”

But brevity, succinctness, and personal focus are among the key strengths of this powerful and important book, an account that fans out into other developing narratives about the decline of California as America’s paradise, social media’s mendacity and lack of civic responsibility, and the super-charged rise of economic injustice and insecurity. It is likely to attract a lot of attention, discussion, and controversy.

Nowadays, the economy of Silicon Valley is based mostly on software, biotech, product development, and gigantic, Internet-based companies like Facebook and Google. Silicon and its industrial byproducts are no longer the raw materials of the region’s wealth, which is mostly generated via brand names and intellectual property. Meehan’s photographs and stories portray a different kind of environmental damage: economic and social disruption, especially the upheavals caused by a catastrophic rise in housing costs.

Meehan’s photographs are unsentimental. Nobody smiles. The images are saturated in California sunlight and color and classically composed, suggesting the long heritage of Western portraiture. The various poverties they encompass do not immediately strike the eye, as Evans’ images do. The pain lurks below, like Turner’s underground toxic plumes.

#Visages_Silicon_Valley #Fred_Turner #Mary_Beth_Meehan

Short Fuse Podcast #39 : « Seeing Silicon Valley » : The Fraying of Life in America - The Arts Fuse
▻https://artsfuse.org/227588/short-fuse-podcast-39-seeing-silicon-valley-the-fraying-of-life-in-america

https://artsfuse.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Cristobal_web.jpg

N’oubliez pas que la version orginale de ce livre est celle en français de C&F éditions, il y a deux ans. Le livre est toujours d’actualité, c’est pourquoi les Presses de l’Université de Chicago le publient aujourd’hui.
►https://cfeditions.com/visages

Perception vs. Reality. For many, the words “Silicon Valley” signify the egalitarian opportunities offered by America’s cutting-edge tech industry. Stark reality reveals a much more complicated picture. Growing inequality and an ever rising cost of living are putting pressure on all of the area’s workers: at least seven percent of families live in poverty without access to quality education, health care or housing. Fred Turner and Mary Beth Meehan spotlight these realities in their new book, Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America. In a recent conversation with Elizabeth Howard, they talk about the situation they found there, and what it reveals about our country as a whole.

#Visages_Silicon_Valley #Fred_Turner #Mary_Beth_Meehan

Silicon Valley’s Hidden Voices
▻https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/silicon-valleys-hidden-voices

https://dev.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/seeingsiliconvalley.jpeg

Très belle critique de la version anglaise « Seeing Silicon Valley » qui va paraître en avril aux Presses de l’université de Chicago.
Rappel : la première édition de ce livre est parue en France :
Visages de la Silicon Valley
25 € - ISBN 978-2-915825-86-2 - nov. 2018
►https://cfeditions.com/visages

Two new books — Seeing Silicon Valley and Voices from the Valley — reveal, if not the future I thought I would find, a critical part of Silicon Valley that most people never look for or think about, let alone see. These two books’ goal is the same: to reveal the Valley’s forgotten but essential communities — obscured more often than not by hyperbolic press releases, lawyers waving non-disclosure agreements, and journalists’ myopic view of what “working in tech” means. In some cases, these are the “people behind the platforms” — the unheralded engineers and programmers who, despite being paid far above the median salary still find themselves living precariously in houses they can’t afford to furnish. In other cases, they are the nannies, cooks, and gardeners whose hidden labor keeps the Valley’s financial, familial, and social circuits humming. That newly minted billionaire you read about might drive a McLaren but someone has to wash and wax it.

After a brief essay from Fred Turner, a communications scholar at Stanford, Seeing Silicon Valley deploys an array of pictures captured in 2017 by Mary Beth Meehan, a photographer known for her “community-based portraiture.” For six weeks, Meehan rented an Airbnb in Menlo Park, introduced herself to strangers, and took photographs. She kept the statement “Invisible Community, Invisible Relationships, Invisible Human Beings” written on a sticky note above her desk.

Meehan’s color photographs are accompanied by short but powerful life histories of her subjects. Along the way we meet, for example, Justnya, a Polish-born engineer who shares a mansion in Cupertino with other technologists, and Victor, an elderly man originally from El Salvador who lives in a small trailer a few miles from Google’s campus. Each photograph tells a story, and it’s rarely the one you might imagine. There’s a photo, for example, of “Mark,” a young white man. On closer inspection, you sense something wrong with his body position and facial expression. You learn that Mark’s mother worked for years in an electronics plant making lasers for supermarket checkout scanners. Every night she came home with “green gunk” on her face and hands. Only years later, after Mark was born with extreme developmental issues, mental and physical, did she learn this gunk was a mixture of chemicals, primarily lead. What was once billed as “the Valley of Heart’s Delight” became the eventual home of nearly two dozen Superfund sites created by now-defunct electronics companies. The non-defunct ones have taken their manufacturing, their jobs, and their gunk overseas.

Meehan’s photos and captions sometimes reveal human warmth transcending the tragedy and unfairness. In another photograph, Abraham and Brenda are captured hugging each other in that special golden glow one sees near sunset in coastal California. But that glow can only do so much. They are in front of their dilapidated RV, which they have lived in since they lost their house in 2008. Normally, they parked on the edge of Stanford University’s land holdings along El Camino Real. But not on game days when the university forces them to move. On those days, like Steinbeck’s Okies, they drive their aged vehicle over the Santa Cruz Mountains to Half Moon Bay and look at the ocean together.

The aforementioned essay by Stanford professor Fred Turner, which heads the Meehan collection of photographs, is titled “The Valley on the Hill.” It compares Silicon Valley’s present to the worldview of 17th-century Pilgrims recently arrived in the New World and seeking to build a “City Upon a Hill.” Technologists, many from outside the United States, flock to the Bay Area with “their sense of mission and their search for profits,” and — like their Puritan ancestors — they are motivated by deep, almost compulsive work ethics, argues Turner. He doesn’t say quite enough to give the analogy the depth it deserves — in part because his essay is a mere six pages, a disappointment given his oft-cited expertise on the topic. Still, in his erudite yet truncated telling, the idea of a “New Jerusalem,” a.k.a. Silicon Valley, goes back some 50 years to when Santa Clara County became a hotbed of innovation, albeit one eventually strewn with oozing Superfund sites.

Turner’s comparison to the Puritans perfunctorily cuts in a couple of other ways. As a religious sect, the Puritans were notoriously dogmatic, and eager to sacrifice heretics. Some programmers share their belief in eschatology and denial of the body, he suggests. It thus makes a kind of sense that Soylent — a start-up company based on marketing a meal-replacement product named after a creepy post-apocalyptic movie — was developed there. But Turner sees present-day “denials of the body” primarily in people’s eager atomization into digital data to be “aggregated and repurposed.” He could go further. Believers in a coming technological Singularity imagine dispensing with the body altogether by uploading their minds. A hundred years ago, the mirage factory of Los Angeles produced the evangelist-huckster Aimee Semple McPherson. Today we have engineer and self-confessed felon Anthony Levandowski and his scheme for a religion based around worship of artificial intelligence. Long live the new flesh. Or, if another variant of Silicon Valley’s fixations is to be believed, long live the old flesh, rejuvenated by steroids and blood transfusions from the young.

Eventually fruit and vegetable production in the Valley became the dominant crop. The number of workers needed — then and now — exceeded the local population. And so the labor-intensive work of picking and preserving the fruit fell largely to invisible Japanese, Chinese, Italian, Filipino, and Mexican workers. Much of it was performed by women employed as seasonal contractors and segregated by race and ethnicity, and they were the first to be let go when hard times came. The xenophobia, discrimination, and misogyny that runs throughout both books thus goes back a lot farther than when William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor and committed racist, arrived in the Valley in 1956 and started an electronics company.

Shockley Semiconductor begat Fairchild Semiconductor begat Intel and scores of other companies, large and small. Engineers accordingly multiplied. They flocked to the region and in general came to represent the second largest segment of American professionals — behind school teachers. Engineering was the most common occupation pursued by white-collar men.

Along with their readers, the people who cover “tech” — whatever that term even means these days — too often portray Silicon Valley as a place apart from America. But, as Seeing Silicon Valley and Voices from the Valley reveal, with its racism, casual misogyny, economic inequality, and environmental devastation concentrated among poor communities, Silicon Valley is America. Given its innumerable sins, venal and moral alike, punching at Silicon Valley is as easy as ordering an Uber. Critiques of it take many forms, and the best of these are informed by an understanding of the region’s long and fraught history. These two books don’t fully take that history into account but they do point to the heart of what makes the region run: people, many of them hidden or invisible. Making them visible is a start to creating a more praiseworthy place. Silicon Valley may never be the Puritan’s “City Upon a Hill.” But in its pursuit of the future, it can and must do better.

#Fred_Turner #Mary-Beth_meehan #Visages_silicon_valley

Designed to Deceive: Do These People Look Real to You? - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/21/science/artificial-intelligence-fake-people-faces.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2020/11/19/us/artificial-intelligence-fake-people-faces-promo-1605818328743/artificial-intelligence-fake-people-faces-promo-1605818328743-facebookJumbo-v3.jpg

Visages de la Silicon Valley, Fred Turner et Mary Beth Meehan -
►http://danactu-resistance.over-blog.com/2019/04/visages-de-la-silicon-valley-fred-turner-et-mary-beth-

https://img.over-blog-kiwi.com/0/53/44/39/20190424/ob_dc568e_visages.jpg

A l’automne dernier les éditions C&F, basées à Caen, ont publié un ouvrage d’une grande originalité, intitulé Visages de la Silicon Valley, un essai signé Fred Turner avec des photographies et récits de Mary Beth Meehan.

Quand on lit ou entend ces deux mots , Silicon Valley, formant un lieu géographique célèbre en Californie, aussitôt l’on pense, technologies de pointe, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Facebook, et autres Apple, Tesla. Les gros bataillons de la super start-up nation nord-américaine que Macron voudrait bien installer en France. Certes sont bien là, le soleil, les innovations qui nous changent, parfois, la vie et les symboles de la réussite économique, concentrés sur quelques kilomètres carrés.

Pourtant comme le savent les cinéphiles, depuis Quai des brumes (Carné, Prévert) il est utile de voir les choses cachées derrière les choses. Voilà pourquoi ce livre, Visages de la Silicon Valley, à la fois un superbe livre de photographies et un ensemble de textes, nous a particulièrement surpris. Que se cache-t-il derrière les mythes de la Silicon Valley où semblerait se construire le futur de notre monde, ou du moins de leur monde ? Quels sont les visages cachées derrière ceux des grands dirigeants des multinationales, diffusés en boucle dans tous les médias du monde ?

S’il nous semble difficile de qualifier d’essai, l’introduction en une demi-douzaine de pages de Fred Turner, le livre nous offre, dans un beau format, un superbe reportage photos de Mary Beth Meehan. Chaque cliché est accompagné d’un petit récit le contextualisant. Photographe indépendante, son travail a été publié et exposé dans le monde entier. Nominée deux fois pour le prestigieux prix Pulitzer, elle anime aussi des conférences et ateliers à l’Université de Brown ou à l’école de Design de Rhode Island. Cela débute par Cristobal,vétéran de l’armée américaine durant sept ans, dont trois dans l’Irak en guerre, aujourd’hui agent de sécurité chez Facebook, il gagne une vingtaine de dollars de l’heure, et vu le prix de l’immobilier dans la Silicon Valley, il vit dans un abri au fond d’une cour à Mountain View ! Il constate que les immenses richesses des grandes entreprises ne ruissellent pas vraiment.

Victor, 80 ans, qui survit dans une petite caravane, au milieu d’autres, non loin du magnifique campus de Google. Ni électricité, ni eau. Et aussi Mary, venue d’un village en Ouganda où elle enseignait l’anglais dans toute l’Afrique, venue rejoindre sa fille, et qui voudrait bien repartir : « C’est la solitude ici, tellement de solitude. »

Ainsi se succèdent les portraits, magnifiques photographies et textes édifiants, matérialisme partout, spiritualité nulle part, argent coulant à flots mais pas pour tous. Précarité, pauvreté, invisibilité, et parfois peur, l’envers terrible de ce que l’on appelait jadis, le rêve américain !

Dan29000

Visages de la Silicon Valley
Mary Beth Meehan, Fred Turner
Éditions C&F
2018 / 112 p / 25 euros

#Mary_Beth_Meehan #Fred_Turner #Visages_Silicon_Valley #Silicon_Valley

Visages de la Silicon Valley, Fred Turner et Mary Beth Meehan -
►http://danactu-resistance.over-blog.com/2019/04/visages-de-la-silicon-valley-fred-turner-et-mary-beth-

https://img.over-blog-kiwi.com/0/53/44/39/20190424/ob_dc568e_visages.jpg

A l’automne dernier les éditions C&F, basées à Caen, ont publié un ouvrage d’une grande originalité, intitulé Visages de la Silicon Valley, un essai signé Fred Turner avec des photographies et récits de Mary Beth Meehan.

Cela débute par Cristobal,vétéran de l’armée américaine durant sept ans, dont trois dans l’Irak en guerre, aujourd’hui agent de sécurité chez Facebook, il gagne une vingtaine de dollars de l’heure, et vu le prix de l’immobilier dans la Silicon Valley, il vit dans un abri au fond d’une cour à Mountain View ! Il constate que les immenses richesses des grandes entreprises ne ruissellent pas vraiment.

Victor, 80 ans, qui survit dans une petite caravane, au milieu d’autres, non loin du magnifique campus de Google. Ni électricité, ni eau. Et aussi Mary, venue d’un village en Ouganda où elle enseignait l’anglais dans toute l’Afrique, venue rejoindre sa fille, et qui voudrait bien repartir : « C’est la solitude ici, tellement de solitude. »

Ainsi se succèdent les portraits, magnifiques photographies et textes édifiants, matérialisme partout, spiritualité nulle part, argent coulant à flots mais pas pour tous. Précarité, pauvreté, invisibilité, et parfois peur, l’envers terrible de ce que l’on appelait jadis, le rêve américain !

#Visages_Silicon_Valley #Mary_Beth_Meehan #C&F_éditions #Silicon_Valley