A sense of ambient entrapment
In this post, Karen Louise Grova Søilen reflects on her piece ‘A Sense of Ambient Entrapment in Hito Steyerl’s Factory of the Sun’, which appeared in the 21(4) issue of Surveillance & Society.
Why was I climbing up the hill to an old cold war NSA listening station in the forest at the outskirts of Berlin on a ridiculously hot June afternoon to write about a sense of ambient entrapment in Hito Steyerl’s Factory of the Sun, recently published in in Surveillance & Society?
Something had a hold on me as I was moving deeper into the Grunewald Forest, catching a glimpse of the shattered white radomes ahead. Teufelsberg, “devils mountain”, an artificial hill consisting of rubble and debris from the ruins of wartime Berlin which covers an incomplete Nazi military academy designed by Albert Speer. During the cold war, it was employed by the NSA as a site of espionage and communication interceptions. Today the large, decaying radar domes are plastered by graffiti and street art and the site’s concrete material layers of history generate a haunting atmosphere.
I was there to think about the temporalities of surveillance, its historical situatedness and particular aims, scopes, and methods. First and foremost, I was there to make sense of how feelings of surveillance can form social experiences specific to particular places and times.
In my article, I try to identify what surveillance feels like in the age of the digital data economy and the Internet of Things, a time when our physical environment is increasingly embedded with barely noticeable sensors and connected technologies of tracking and monitoring. How can we understand the affective experience of living in environments pervaded by smart devices that are always on, constantly monitoring and reporting on our behavior?
My suggestion is that the experience of contemporary surveillance can be described as a sense of ambient entrapment: a vague, yet pervasive feeling of a controlled environment saturated by surveillance and exploitation, where machine perception and algorithmic processes are hard at work, extracting and exploiting our personal data and online behavior and interactions. Simultaneously, a sense of ambient entrapment encompasses desire and the lure of these technologies and devices. It is a sense of being enmeshed, and deliberately so.
The article forms a part in my ongoing work of mapping and identifying the feelings and embodied experiences of surveillance in the early decades of the 21th century. In this way, my research contributes to what has been known as the cultural turn within surveillance studies, a growing body of work focusing on cultural and aesthetic perspectives on surveillance.
But still, why Teufelsberg? In the article, I analyze German artist Hito Steyerl’s immersive video installation environment Factory of the Sun (2015). In the artwork, the digital data economy and its relationship to participatory surveillance culture is pushed to its extreme and turned into a motion-capture studio gulag, where workers are forced to dance in tight golden suits to produce light: the source of money and information travelling through fiber optic cables. Steyerl’s motion capture gulag is situated at the old NSA listening station in the forest of what was once West Berlin. Here, past and present dreams of control, surveillance, and destruction come together.
