Screens and Bodies: Surveillance Art
“A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation […] He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribed in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.”
― Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
Judith Butler argues that it is bodies asserting themselves in public space, people assembling, that performs the utterance of “we the people,” asserting the power of the commons. Visibility and embodiment are central to the performance of assembly, and she notes that gathering in public spaces “presupposes access to some media that relays the events outside of that space and time; the public square is now partially established as a media effect, but also as part of the enunciatory apparatus by which a group of people claims to be the people”(167). This media is represented not only by the news and social outlets recording the action, but also by the surveillance apparatus that monitors and records bodies in space.
The works of the Surveillance Camera Players, a Situationist inspired, New York based guerrilla performance group, are expressly concerned with the gathering of bodies in spaces subjected to video surveillance. In an early document describing their principles and practices, the SCP critiqued the camera as “primarily a tool of social control,” used to advertise and educate the populace not h proper commodities to purchase, and the right way to acquire them. The SCP then turns to the surveillance apparatus:
“Then, in turn, the camera as used in surveillance systems monitors the actions of this populace to ensure that, if they react to the commodity in any subversive way (shoplifting, stealing from work, sabotage, vandalism), the “criminal” can be detected and that s/he will take his or her place as product for the crime control industry. Moreover, the detectable presence of the camera in the workplace, in stores, schools, city parks, street corners, even coffee shops serves to remind the individual that s/he is a citizen of a surveilled society. It is important to remind oneself of the relationship between the eye of the media and that of the corporate police state — for they are both the guardian of the commodity, however nebulous and ephemeral that commodity may become. As a tactic designed to point out the paradox of a system that turns the lens on a public that has been taught to place more importance on images recorded by cameras than images seen by their own eyes, we propose Guerrilla Programming of Video Surveillance Equipment.”X
SCP goes on to describe the staging of public plays and happenings in surveilled areas as a way to draw attention to the constant monitoring of public space, as well as alert the unseen watchers to the fact that their subjects are indeed self aware. As assemblies in themselves and as events that encourage the participation and gathering of passers by, these performances make bodies speak in physical space. They oppose the interests of “we the people” — we the watched — with those of the watchers.
Artist Paola Barreto plays with similar ideas of performance and use of the surveillance apparatus in her live cinema performances. In this project
“which discusses the possibilities of artistic appropriation of surveillance circuits, we discuss not only issues on civil liberties and the right to privacy (always in discussion when the theme of the control society is raised) but also and overall, how the symbolic construction of common space, social imaginary and political functions of images come into being in a world more and more media oriented. […] We refuse to delegate the responsibility of observing others — and ourselves, to mechanisms based on suspicion. One of our intentions with this work is to redefine relations between people, gaze and image, overcoming fear and insecurity. By the same measure we propose the re-thinking of the experience of cinema, video and television starting from this presence of cctv cameras.”
In these live showings, “performers and the public collaborate in the narrative construction, which forcibly creates itself by fusing the collective audio-visual imaginary and the real time occurences [sic.] captured by the cameras. Playing with codes of cinema, sounds and stereotyped characters, memory and history, we place in check the actual functionality of the images — which, in video circuits that are incessantly recording, most of the time have no function whatsoever — creating a game of construction and deconstruction where nothing is what it appears to be.”
The coordinated live performances on live feeds are often shown in a grid at once, and expanded selectively like investigating details in a live updating database. This series of projects, rather than assembling onlookers as a part of the performance, allows spectators to view the performance from the position of the surveiller, and invites them on as collaborative directors.
Of course, the nature of surveillance has developed considerably since the SCP was active in the 90s, and advances in artificial intelligence and data science have fundamentally altered the nature of “watching.” Casetti describes the implications of the term “monitor” as a new metaphor for the screen. As a monitor, “the screen increasingly serves to inspect the world around us, to analyze and verify it — in essence, to keep it under control. The window that once restored our contact with the world has become a peephole through which to scrutinize reality, on the likely chance that it may be hiding something dangerous” (6). Invoking the Foucault’s Panopticon, Casetti points out the shift that has taken place from a society of discipline to one of control: “in the case of security cameras everything is observed, but there are no longer any observer”(7). The purpose is simply to gather useful data that can be used to modulate the means of control.
Exhausting a Crowd is a video piece that allows viewers to annotate footage of a public location, adding their own data and interpretations to the overlay of the video. The work is collaborative, displaying prior users annotations. This work implicates new technology of data collection and identification.
Zach Blas’ Facial Weaponization Suite is a protest “against biometric facial recognition–and the inequalities these technologies propagate–by making “collective masks” in workshops that are modeled from the aggregated facial data of participants, resulting in amorphous masks that cannot be detected as human faces by biometric facial recognition technologies. The masks are used for public interventions and performances.”
Directly confronting the biases of these algorithms and the rise of phrenology and eugenics, the project creates masks from the aggregate data of targeted and marginalized people in order to comment on the specific conditions of a given groups visibility. These masks confront the criminalization of racialized bodies, the relationship of feminism to forms of visibility, and homophobic pseudo-science.
This is just a small sampling of new media projects over the last 20 years that have confronted surveillance technologies. A central and common feature of these artworks is the element of participation, inviting the public to interact with the work and participate in its process and critique in order to empower and educate. In that spirit, below you will find some more projects and tools that you might use to create your own guerrilla surveillance art or protect yourself from detection.
And remember: keep your web cam covered up ‘cause even Zuckerberg’s paranoid.
