Derived from the French word ‘surveiller’, meaning ‘to keep watch’ or ‘to watch over’, the surveillance camera has been used to regulate borders, to assist war-time scouting, to gain advantage over political opponents or simply to gather information. Each and every one of us is entitled to the right to privacy, yet our own government are constantly proposing advancements in surveillance technology in order to closely monitor our every movements for an array of uses. Within this study I will be exploring the ways in which surveillance, as a modern-day affair, has influenced contemporary art work and how that art explores the different controversies surrounding surveillance. An artist I have investigated is American multimedia and installation artist, Tony Oursler; whose writings and work have been very influential in both my production and my own interpretation of contemporary and conceptual art work that encapsulates the issues with new technological developments in surveillance. Moreover, Parisian artist, Sophie Calle creates works of art that challenge the boundaries of documentary and artistic photography. She photographs people and their possessions without their knowledge. She reveals intimate details about her personal life, her relationships, and those of her subjects. As a result, she has been labelled a voyeur and an exhibitionist by her critics and by her supporters.
Critical surveillance artwork has blossomed in recent years, pushing inquiry of this sort through a multitude of approaches and stances. One of the bearings Belgian artist, Dries Depoorter takes is by disturbingly and effectively probing the ethics of surveillance made possible through the combination of public data sources. For instance, his 2016 conceptual artwork, “Jaywalking” takes advantage of unprotected, open video feeds from close circuit camera at big road junctions in different countries to ‘catch’ pedestrians in the act of jaywalking across streets. If a pedestrian cross without the proper signal, Depoorter’s algorithm will automatically flag that violation and take a screen capture, thus producing legal evidence; next, it will ask gallery-goers whether they would like to report the violation to the local police department with lawful authority. If viewers choose to interact with the piece and press the button when prompted, the images will be emailed to the police department closest to the offender, who could then allegedly name the person guilty of the offence. Although it is unlikely that images sent to police from this installation will result in fines for the identified offenders, this immersive art project reveals the immoral logics of data systems and introduces subjects as potential complicit actors in those systems. The innocuous-looking camera on the street corner can easily be integrated within larger systems of control, perhaps – as shown here – completely unknown to the people being watched or the very owner of the camera in question. I’ve taken heavy influence from the immoral logics of Dries Depoorter’s work and the ignorant rationalities that modern surveillance technology has over our feelings and desires that this artist’s work represents. The feeling of helplessness on the part of the unknowing participant is something that has transpired in my piece, ‘Subjects’. My piece captures public suspiciousness in a raw, unmodified outlook – and reflects a sense of power and guilt on the person viewing the images, and again, that identical sense of
vulnerability on the unaware partaker. In addition, my later piece, ‘Echoes’, a moving-image video installation piece, shows the manipulation of figure, form and individuality into digits, data and evidence. The work sees heavy inspiration from ‘Jaywalking’, in the sense that the piece sees silhouettes of people in a rush-hour stricken city walking left to right across the screen. The silhouettes are layered on top of each other, and frequently we can see a positive image of a person through a silhouette. Again, the transcending feeling of helplessness on the part of the unknowing participant is represented in my piece, ‘Echoes’.
Whereas repeated exposure to dedicated surveillance devices, such as public video (CCTV) cameras, can cause them to fade from active attention or recognition, uncanny and unexpected configurations of such devise can snap awareness back into place. This is the conceit of Czech artist, Jakub Geltner’s public art series titled, ‘Nests’. For these installations, Geltner places a surfeit of video cameras and satellite dishes in unusual positions and sites, densely clustered along the walls of buildings, on rooftops, along walking paths or even on rocky outcrops along seashores. The tactic if definitely one of defamiliarisation, or making strange, which follows from a mode of literary theory that finds the value of art in its ability to shift perception and understanding of everything things. Because Geltner’s works appear in public places, their success at defamiliarising is readily observed in the behaviour of passers-by who look up, point at and take photographs of the arranged surveillance devices.
The term ‘Nest’ cleverly symbolises the tensions produced by these works. Nests are typically places of safety, shelter and propagation. By placing surveillance devices in nest arrangements or suggesting that they possess attributes similar to (other) nesting creatures, Geltner naturalises the potentially predatory behaviour of surveillance as an expected, instinctual response to threats, such as humans who may seek to challenge the need for, or appropriateness, of surveillance. The hint of natural configurations for surveillance technologies defamiliarises them for viewers; opening them up to renewed attention and inquiry.
To conclude, critical artworks about surveillance introduce compelling possibilities for rethinking the relationship of people to larger systems of control. They call into question the hidden logics of surveillance systems, which reduce people to decontextualised pieces of data to facilitate manipulation. By revealing some of these logics and pushing people to question their places within the systems, these art projects create a space for ideological critique. If the goals are to challenge viewers and generate critical insights about surveillance, then the projects that nurture ambiguity seem best equipped to achieve these goals. For instance, the works by Jakub Geltner and Dries Depoorter each boast ambiguous situations that provoke discomfort, reflection and participation on the part of viewers. With Geltner’s Nests installations, viewers must make sense of unusal arrangements and placements of video cameras that do not fit within standard explanatory models. Viewers appear to find the pieces oddly unrealistic and are kept ignorant about whether the cameras are real, if the footage is being watched, what the messages of the works might be, or perhaps even if the camera configurations are an artwork. With Depoorter’s Jaywalking piece, viewers are forced to make a decision that might affect someone else’s life, someone whom they see but who is completely unaware of them. The ambiguity rests in whether the action of pushing the red button will or will not generate a chain reaction for which the participant would be responsible. By fostering ambiguity and decentring the viewing subject, critical surveillance art can capitalise on the anxiety of viewers to motivate questions that might lead to greater awareness of surveillance systems and protocols. Works that use participation and interaction to make viewers uncomfortable can guide moments of personal reflection about one’s relationship.
American multimedia artist, Tony Oursler produces work revolving around the nature of exploring the human identity – he is most definitely recognised as a pioneer of video art and installation; within his 2015 composition, “template/variant/friend/stranger”, Oursler intertwines sculptural objects with video art to reflect the complicated nature of contemporary identity. Residing in London’s “Lisson Gallery” is a sculptural collection of seven faces, nearly nine feet tall. The seven portraits recall the captures intended for photo identification cards, and other disturbing trends in security technology. Oursler reminds the viewer – having just left the bustle of Bell Street in north west London to enter the quiet of Lisson’s space, only punctuated by the artist’s talking heads – that they are living in one of the world’s largest systems of surveillance. In this instance the gallery is no longer a white cube space, as the cameras become glaringly obvious in juxtaposition to the nature of the works. Overlaying the giant, emotionless faces are markings reflecting the networks of nodes on specific features that facial recognition systems use in order to recognise and differentiate between individuals, transforming these standard portraits into electronic profiles. The surface of each face is punctuated by video screens of eyes or mouths, animating the cut-outs and forming a dialogue between them – and a relationship the the viewer – as the artist creates a collection of faces that end up watching you, introducing their blinking eyes, and the unsettling feeling of being spied upon. The works highlight the utterly inhuman nature of biometric analysis, the artist draws on the ways in which we have distorted and subverted our own identities through contemporary technology; sifting us and categorising us in terms of visual recognition, physical body traits, storing our genetic fingerprints, and following us with GPS via our mobiles, the world has never been more invasive and yet utterly impersonal. In terms of the piece as an installation, we see the images (the faces), staggered in a maze-like layout throughout the space in the manner of theatrical props. As if giant police mug shots or closed-circuit camera stills, the original identity of the individuals is distorted and impersonalised by their mediation through technology. All the while, London’s Lisson Gallery is filled with whispers and murmurs, as Oursler’s giant talking heads advocate the power of technology in terms of both its potential and its dangers, conveyed in their fears in whispers, creating an effect of people talking to themselves, or attempting to break through the technology that their true identity is locked behind – in an attempt to talk to each other. The faces at once signify an attempt to break with their technological subversion. Oursler’s body of work serves creates a dialogue where traditional social structures and definitions of identity are mediated by technology, the effect of which is dangerously dehumanising, and impersonal. The smearing of paint on Oursler’s video mouths and eyes is at once a reference to the theatricality of the works, and individual’s attempts to render themselves unreadable to the system. The artist’s own systems are, as always highly engaging works as powerful in presence as they are disturbing in subject matter. The artist’s works present individuals stripped of personality and subjective identity, they are in fact reduced portraits, homogenised, the ultimate objectification – they are reflections of our own disturbing invention.
contemporary Japanese artist, Shizuka Yokomizo, has taken surveillance technology as her subject, turning the camera back on itself – her work makes use of both photography and video to examine the relationship between the self and the other. Looking beyond the strictly representational possibilities of the photographic image to what remains unseen. Both Oursler’s and Yokomizo’s work has been extremely significant and influential in the development of my own work; studying surveillance as a topic myself and producing an array of pieces under this title has opened my eyes to a lot of facts and statistics surrounding the issues of surveillance and much of this has been discovered through conceptual, contemporary art work.
Calle
In addition, I wish to study the works and writings of the array of contemporary artists who conceptualise this modern, pressing issue within their artworks.
Methods of surveillance are closely linked to developments in photographic technology – from the earliest aerial photographs to satellite imagery. In the twenty-first century, cameras on street corners, in shops and public buildings discretely record our every move, while web-based tools such as Google Earth adapt satellite technology to ensure that there is no escape from the camera’s all-seeing eye. The increasing capabilities of technology systems has bred a new multitude of concerns in privacy issues and ethics, with the average Briton passing under the monitoring of roughly 300 closed circuit television cameras every single day, modern-day surveillance has presented numerous challenges to the right to privacy.