Rare Effect 2026: Countersurveillance

We’re being watched. By our friends, our family, our employer, our gym, our feed, our chatbot, and ourselves. We self-regulate in fear, or perhaps hope, of being seen in the panopticon of everyday life.

​But what does it mean to look back? Not through nostalgic rose-tinted Meta glasses, but locked in direct eye contact with the surveyor. Is it even possible? The mega-corporations that dictate this watching leave us with more questions that answers when we look closer at how, when, and why our data is being collected.

​Are our phones listening to us? Are fitness apps selling our geo-located run club data? Does it matter in a future where content is not only algorithmically tailored to, but generated for, our tastes and moods?

​Still, the looking feels important. If images are becoming less reliable, or perhaps obsolete, does their fallibility predicate a return to first-hand experience? Art has, at its best, always been good at showing us how unreliable reality can be, and how feeling can come from out of nowhere.

​This year’s Rare Effect theme is Countersurveillance, asking participating artists, thinkers, and audiences to set their critical gaze on the hyperstructures that watch, govern and shape our realities, and to speculate on where we go from (now)here.

​Rare Effect returns, 11-15th November, at Arroz Estúdios, and venues across the city. This year’s lineup features artists, musicians, theorists, technologists and filmmakers thinking through what it means to be alive and online right now.

Early bird tickets on-sale now.

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​Estamos a ser observados. Pelos nossos amigos, pela nossa família, pelo nosso empregador, pelo nosso ginásio, pelo nosso feed, pelo nosso chatbot e por nós próprios. Autorregulamo-nos com medo, ou talvez com esperança, de sermos vistos no panóptico da vida quotidiana.

​Mas o que significa olhar para trás? Não através de óculos Meta nostálgicos e cor-de-rosa, mas mantendo contacto visual direto com quem nos observa. Será sequer possível? As megacorporações que ditam esta vigilância deixam-nos com mais perguntas do que respostas quando analisamos mais de perto como, quando e por que razão os nossos dados estão a ser recolhidos.

​Será que os nossos telemóveis estão a ouvir-nos? Será que as aplicações de fitness estão a vender os dados geolocalizados do nosso clube de corrida? Será que isso importa num futuro em que o conteúdo não só é adaptado algoritmicamente aos nossos gostos e estados de espírito, como também é gerado para eles?