Surveillance is “in the air”
In this blog piece, Karen Louise Grova Søilen reflects on her recent publication in Surveillance & Society: “Safe is a Wonderful Feeling: Atmospheres of Surveillance and Contemporary Art.”
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Have you ever felt an “atmosphere of surveillance?” Have you entered a certain space, perhaps an airport security check, lined with body scanners and security personnel ready to perform a search? Maybe it was while attending a political demonstration in a major city, feeling a slight shudder while wondering if the CCTV system featured facial recognition technology? Perhaps the idea of atmospheres of surveillance better resonates with an aesthetic experience from watching a film (Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation? Andrea Arnold’s Red Road?), a TV- series (Black Mirror?) or reading a book (George Orwell’s 1984, Dave Egger’s The Circle?)? Inspired by this line of thought, my current research sets out to explore how surveillance practices and technologies contain and co-produce atmospheres. How do atmospheres of surveillance come into being, how do we experience them, feel them, express them, become influenced by them?
How do atmospheres of surveillance come into being, how do we experience them, feel them, express them, become influenced by them?
In my article featured in Surveillance & Society, I suggest that contemporary surveillance culture is perceived bodily –as “atmospheres of surveillance.” To explore this further, I turn to contemporary art. What interests me is how surveillance is staged and experienced in artworks. The article analyzes how the video installation Safe Conduct (2016) by the British artist Ed Atkins opens up new perspectives on experiences of surveillance, and how it suggestively penetrates everyday life. Safe Conduct recreates the well-known situation of going through an airport security check, but instead of feelings of safety, Safe Conduct’s de-familiarized airport security routine evokes paranoia. The combination of a visual narrative, the sounds of the conveyor belt and X-ray machines, a heavy breathing, and Ravel’s Boléro (1928) builds up an anticipation of something awful. Death and violence linger at its edges, and a disquieting atmosphere fills the exhibition space…
Throughout the article, I experiment with how the sinister atmosphere of the installation can be absorbed and performed methodologically. This exploration forms a central part of the article’s contribution. My suggestion is that thinking about the embodied experience of surveillance through the lens of contemporary art can make certain atmospheres more explicit to us. We can experience them in the artworks. The article concludes that being more sensitive to the atmospheres of surveillance in our environment can give us a space to think critically about how these atmospheres affect us, how they are absorbed bodily, and how they attune our being: how surveillance is “in the air.
