Cloaking: Édouard Glissant’s Theory of Opacity

Cloaking, beyond its technical application in AI contexts, can be understood as a broader artistic strategy of resistance—a refusal to be fully legible, extractable, or defined on dominant terms. Within contemporary art, cloaking manifests as a way to challenge systems that demand visibility, clarity, and constant disclosure. Whether through abstraction, coded language, concealment, or fragmentation, cloaking becomes a mode of withholding, an insistence on the right to complexity.

This aligns closely with Édouard Glissant’s theory of opacity, which defends the right not to be reduced to what is easily understood. Glissant wrote against the colonial imperative to make the Other transparent—to name, classify, and consume. In contrast, opacity preserves the richness of identity, expression, and relation without surrendering them to dominant frameworks. For artists, embracing opacity is a way to resist cultural legibility, particularly in systems that treat difference as something to be flattened or monetised.

Cloaking, then, is not about disappearing—it is about reclaiming the terms of engagement. It offers artists a language of refusal, a way to critique hyper-visibility, algorithmic capture, and the extractive gaze of institutions, markets, and machines. It allows artists to protect the parts of themselves and their communities that cannot or should not be made transparent. In this context, cloaking is a poetics of protection and protest. To cloak is not to hide, but to assert: you do not have the right to consume all of me.

Cloaking: Toward a Critical Theory

Elaine Hoey

In the coming months, I will be undertaking further research into the emergent concept of CLOAKING as a critical theory and strategy of resistance within digital art practice. This work will develop both a theoretical and artistic framework that situates cloaking at the intersection of tactical media, artistic activism, political philosophy, and technological intervention.

This inquiry builds upon this existing body of research and proposes cloaking as a method for resisting systems of visibility, extraction, and control. It will serve as both a practical research tool and a discursive platform—mapping the aesthetic, political, and ethical dimensions of cloaking across visual culture, theory, and technology.

At its core, cloaking resists visibility. Philosophically, it draws from Édouard Glissant’s concept of opacity—the right to remain unknowable and irreducible within systems of surveillance and categorisation. This is expanded through Judith Butler’s work on legibility and performativity, and Michel Foucault’s analyses of power, biopolitics, and disciplinary regimes.

Artistically, cloaking is informed by traditions of refusal, camouflage, visual interference, and the politics of concealment, found in tactical media, cyberfeminist practices, queer aesthetics, and anti-surveillance art. These strategies engage visibility not as a default but as a site of contestation—often used to disrupt or redirect systems of recognition and capture.

Technologically, cloaking has gained renewed urgency through developments in AI ethics and adversarial machine learning. Tools such as Glaze and Nightshade (Ben Zhao et al.) employ data poisoning to prevent  AI unauthorised image scraping and model training.

Cloaking, then, is not simply about concealment. It is an active refusal to comply with regimes that demand legibility— instead it is a disruptive gesture that moves between opacity and interference, sabotage and strategic visibility. This research aims to articulate cloaking as a hybrid critical theory: a political strategy, a visual tactic, and a technological intervention in the age of AI and algorithmic governance.