In an exclusive conversation, surveillance scholar Simone Browne and artist Zach Blas critique various forms of “control diagrams” and imagine a new commons in the space between the Internet’s network nodes.

Simone Browne: The soundtrack for artist Zach Blas’s “Contra-Internet Inversion Practice #3: Modeling Paranodal Space” comes from the corresponding title track to Joe Meek and The Blue Men’s 1960 concept album “I Hear a New World.” The album, Meek wrote, is a deliberately “strange record” meant to conjure up rockets, science fiction, moon landings before the first moon landing, as well as “whatever could be up there in outer space.”