There is something so dry and difficult about the mainstream narrative of Snowden-era mass surveillance. The discussion is often heavy and demands that we think about the internet’s puzzling plumbing. Such an important issue wants highlighting with multiple palettes.

We already have a grand history of literature and art posing the problem. George Orwell’s tale of voyeuristic tyranny, 1984, may be one of the most referenced books in politics.

Snowden: spy for the people, here in the trailer for CitizenFour.

Television and film give regular snapshots of spy culture, and Citizen Four, the inside story of Snowden blowing the whistle, casts the man in a decidedly romantic light.

Beyond that, we need other aesthetic approaches to help us grasp the severity and strangeness of today’s omniscient state. Here’s a peek at some inventive applications of the theme across art, design and in between.

Dress to misdirect

Cameras are everywhere. In our streets and stores, our phones, our laptops and soon on our spectacles and drones that hover through our towns. Many are equipped to recognise your face for data.

CVdazzle technology incorporates cutting-edge, anti-recognition design with striking, sartorial ensembles.

It pioneers the anti-face, where asymmetries and oblique patterns work to confuse machines which non-consensually register your presence.

In future fashion, being seen needn’t mean being tracked.

Snooping design as standard

What relationship do we have to the devices that come with us everywhere, ready to spy as we go?

The iPatch, DIY design against spying products, seen at the covercam blog.

Why does the default hardware setup of a MacBook Pro, for example, thrust its camera unquestioningly in your face, when we know it can be hacked, by criminals, trolls and other rogues?

It’s the stuff of nightmares.

This problem of product design finds focus at covercam, a Tumblr set up to list DIY efforts to block laptop webcams and the bemused sentiments of their owners.

Anti-drone burqa at the Privacy Gift Shop.

The Nope webcam shield is a target-beating Kickstarter spot which answers the same itch with a neat pair of magnets.

People are being driven to bodge their consumer goods to counter the threat.

Digital intrusion is such a personal thing, affecting home life and psychology, and it needs to be seen and described as such.

Elsewhere, the Privacy Gift Shop, offering drone-defying hoodies, Burqas and more, adds to the armoury against tracking.

These projects catalogue ad hoc solutions to the sinister reality rapidly engulfing us.

Mystical landscapes

The murky world of spy craft has produced a huge, alien terrain. Surveillance sleuth Trevor Paglen is dedicated to uncovering this sprawling network of special spy units, secret operation sites, phoney identities, uncharted satellites and other phenomena.

His documentation gives a rare view on the bizarre aesthetic built up by these lavishly-funded, black-ops brigades. Tasked with making the most intricate, intelligence-gathering system possible, all out of the public eye, they have constructed an epic, cloaked chimera. No other human formation spans so many sites so stealthily, with such grandeur.