Data that Should Not Have Been Given: Noise and Immunity in James Newitt’s HAVEN

Abstract

This article performs a close reading of HAVEN, a 2023 digital video installation by James Newitt. It analyses the way in which the work discusses issues around privacy, surveillance, and the management of digital data. Newitt’s work tells the story of how an abandoned anti-aircraft defence tower off the Suffolk coast in the North Sea was turned first into a pirate radio station and then into a data haven; a collection of servers meant to avoid early Internet regulation. Investigating the many ways in which HAVEN can be understood as noisy, a concept borrowed from Michel Serres, this article proposes that Newitt’s work is at its most generative in its suggestion of a theory of (auto-)immunity that complicates contemporary discussions of privacy centred on visibility (Derrida, Foucault). Moving away from a model of surveillance, and drawing on the work of Philip E. Agre, this text seeks to understand the dynamics of power made visible in HAVEN with reference to the notion of capture. The article proposes that HAVEN’s poetics are of interest both aesthetically and in terms of content as they examine a contemporary territorial logic of the Internet and its connections to empire.