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Home |Changes [Jul 19, 2007]
ScheduleWith regard to the projects the easiest way forward will be if folks pick those they feel are particularly worthy of discussion in the relation to the books aim: to creatively, critically and constructively address the "merits, limits, and uses of surveillance" in working toward an "urgently needed surveillance literacy."
The cluster of installations and pieces relating to surveillance cameras did provide an interesting insight. It struck me that that these artists were working orthogonally to the what I have experienced and documented in game-based performance. They perform in public space (such as on the sidewalk outside a building) for what is essentially a single viewer, a single screen. The public becomes private, in a sense. (Leaving aside all the issues of public discourse and surveillance as control confronted by the performances.) I'm just looking at the form of the performance.
This interested me, because game-based performances such as replays and machinima start as private gameplay, a player facing a single screen, but are created for a public (online) viewership. The private becomes public performance. (Even live performances such as Ill Clan can be seen this way, as the performers spend most of their time staring at a screen.)
I think the distinction might be significant, not so much in terms of content, but certainly in terms of impact. This was especially evident (for me, anyway) in the interview with with SCP esp. on p. 618. I can't see how this sort of performance would have an impact on public discourse and community expression as widely noticed as, say, Koulamata's "The French Democracy," for example. Despite SCP's claim, it seems to me that Koulamata better demonstrates how "mere individuals or small groups can be very effective."
I realize that this is an infinitesimal point, but I don't think it would have been possible without the tremendous diversity of projects presented in this volume. It encourages thinking comparatively, rather than focusing on a dominant argument.
Henry
The Message
The contemporary world is populated by societies under surveillance. Delegation. Not only are things coming to fill the roles once filled by (unreliable) snitches, spies, and informants under, for example, the Roman Empire, by an entire infrastructure of surveillance, monitoring and eavesdropping has been proliferated over the last few centuries.
The last few decades have witnessed the proliferation of tracking technologies. The so-called ‘war on terror’ has lead to “a largely unchecked and often uncritically embraced curtailment of civil liberties in the name of “security” (10).
But these issues provide occasion for the editors to creatively address the “merits, limits, and uses of surveillance” (10). There is an “urgently needed surveillance literacy” (10).
Ultimate aim is a book that “contributes to the global discussion over society’s new task to defend its civil rights against the tyranny of control as much as against the threat of militant violence” (11).
There are a range of topics and themes from the panopticon (also called the inspection house) of Bentham (p114) to Big Brother, a kind of “reality soap.” (But also Big Brother as in the government.) The book is rich, insightful, and at times fascinating. But the papers are of varying qualities and are in some ways hit or miss.
Key Themes
The book continually makes reference to the panopticon. A circular prison lined with divided cells where light only passed through from outside and which had a window on the inside. All the cells could be seen from a central tower in the dark center where a guard was always potentially watching.
Society becomes one under the gaze. But the gaze is of a peculiar kind.
In step with the panopticon is the proliferation of linear perspective. For both Ivins and Latour, the scientific revolution was not marked by the birth of a more rational mind, but it was a revolution of the sight. It was a mark a change in how people Circulated places at a distance.
Power takes the form of a map in a soldier’s hand. Military surveillance through text, always knowing what’s over the next hill. Vector power…
The phenomenologies of surveillance… Sensation and surveillance…
For Fred, the transforming character and configuration of power. How does power work on the ground. Two chapters deal with this in detail: Deleuze and Baudrillard.
But also the path forward to empowerment. Steve Mann reverses the gaze of surveillance by enrolling the Webcam. The singular becomes a crowd in their engagements with other crowds.
Another subtext is the desensitization and complicity of people to surveillance. This brings us into the realm of psychoanalysis, with Zizek and others.
For me the most important lesson of the book: surveillance is a translation and there is always a disjuncture between was is, and what is surveyed. Our complicity in the surveyed takes us away from the truth and reality.
(The artists deal with this theme time and time again: Sopie Calle in The Shadow Detective deals with this quite well.)
Structure
The book is divided into 8 sections which are subdivided into Essays and Projects.
Way forward
Suggest we deal with the key themes of select essays and bring in Art pieces which folks find of interest.
1) Phenomenologies of surveillance
History
The importance of the senses in surveillance society. Unfortunate in that they fail to catch the importance of things in this proliferation.
Interested in how things come to extend and mutually enhance certain senses while at the same time they dull and silence others. Surveillance technologies as sensory prosthetics.
The All-Seer
The overpowering and ubiquitous eye of God is considered as a prototype to hegemonic vision.
From earlier than the 15th century the symbol of the eye of God began to develop into a stereotyped image that had, by the early 19th century, become internalized as a “divine gaze regime that implied a normative practice of surveillance” (22).
1785 Jeremy Bentham begins working upon the panopticon. Jail cells arranged in a circle radiating around a central observation tower.
The mechanization of vision occurs with the camera and the optical turn of a society guided by pictures has led to new practices of observation and surveillance. (31)
So the omnipresent divine eye is well preserved in the modern police state through the leading medium of the computer…
The Listening Ear
Zbikowski seems to suggest eavesdropping originated from hunting terms? I have no idea where they got this impression…
The etymology of eavesdropping is one of listening at the eaves drip of the house and this is actually a more appropriate entry point for the essay.
They begin by enumerating the forms of mechanized ears (34). The variety of surveillance technologies…
The panopticon, though occularly centristic also had ears. Surveillance is about much more than vision.
Things and spaces commonly have eyes and ears…
Point: “Even if no monitoring is actually taking place, humans today are so sensitized to the fact of potential eavesdropping, that they no longer need to be certain whether it is in operation to feel observed or overheard” (49).
The Eye of Power—Foucault, p94
Bentham “poses the problem of visibility, but thinks of a visibility organized entirely around a dominating overseeing gaze” (96).
Inside Echelon—Campbell, p158
General history and discussion of Echelon, which is a coorperative global surveillance venture of the USA, Great Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia that “sniffs” all data traffic around the world.
Big Brother, or, the Triumph of the Gaze over the Eye—Zizek, p224
“In short the most elementary fantasmatic scene is not that of a fascinating scene to be looked at, but the notion of “someone out there looking at us”; it is not a dream but the notion that we are the objects in someone’s dream” (225).
What we see in reality soaps “are fictional characters, even if they play themselves for real” (227) I.e. what sustains ones interest are the fantasies of fiction.
This connects to Baudrillard’s telemorphosis…
Postscript on Control Societies—Deleuze, p316
Revisits the Foucault thesis: “Control societies are taking over from discipline societies” (318). The chapter is essentially about both identifying and the finding new weapons against the ever-transforming manifestations of power. Factories, schools, and prisons are turning into businesses.
The business is a new beast.
The technological developments we are witnessing today are “more deeply rooted in a mutation of capitalism” (319). It is “a capitalism no loner directed toward production but toward products, that is, toward sales or markets” (320).
“We’re no longer dealing with a duality of mass and individual. Individuals become “dividuals,” and masses become samples, data, markets, or “banks”” (319).
“Control is short-term and rapidly shifting, but at the same time continuous and unbounded, whereas discipline was long-term, infinite, and discontinuous. Man is not longer confined but a man in debt” (320).
The old system of factories, schools, and hospitals is breaking down and we are witnessing the wide-spread progressive introduction of a new system of domination” (321).
Modern Surveillance Machines—Manovich (382)
“The effectiveness of such war technologies as radar, infrared imaging, laser sensors, and 3-D computer graphics depends on the automation that began with the Renaissance perspective” (383). But its continued development has since become a struggle against it.
Manovich discusses Lefebvre, Ivins, and Latour in relation to linear perspective. Linear perspective allows one to precisely represent the material world in two-dimensions and thereby circulate it.
For Ivins, perspective “allows creating precise maps of three-dimensional reality, to record the shapes of concrete objects and the layout of concrete spaces” (384).
Latour developed this “idea by pointing out that this relationship made possible by perspective allows us not only to represent reality but also control it” (384).
Latour regards inscriptions based upon linear perspective as the “most powerful instrument of power,” because they mobilize resources at a spatiotemporal distance, thus facilitating the manipulation of those resources from a spatiotemporal distance.
Ivins regards linear perspective as the most important invention of the Renaissance, while Latour held the scientific revolution not as a revolution of a more rational mind, but of the sight. (385)
Perspective geometry developed in two ways so that it became the standard visual language of modern engineers and architects as well as automated into photographic technologies. As Ivins points out, “Nièpce and Talbot, the founders of photography, were contemporaries of Monge and Poncelet, the decisive figures in the development of descriptive and perspective geometry” (385).
“Radar is the best example of the rationalization of sight in the twentieth century. All it sees and all it shows is the position of objects”… but this sight is not “limited by the human or camera eye”… And the “recording takes place in real time” (386).
Perspectival geometry was a key aspect of the perspective-generating algorithm executed by computers in 3-D graphics. “With the perspectival algorithm and other necessary geometric operations embedded in silicon, it became possible to display and interactively manipulate models of non-existent objects as well” (390).
Manovich then moves on to computer vision, which was born simultaneously with 3-D computer graphics, “automation of imaging and of sight” (390).
Since the development of 3-D objects on the basis of perspectival representation in photographs and video images, “the subsequent history of computer vision research can be seen as a struggle against perspective inherent to photographic objects” (393).
To the Vector go the spoils—Wark, p396
Vector power is an integrated form of power based upon elements of surveillance, “the capacity to receive and transmit information, the capacity to archive and analyze information, and the capacity to move resources to and from given destinations in a time and accurate fashion” (396).
“A vector is a technology that moves something from somewhere to some where else, at a given speed and cost and under certain specified conditions” (398).
These vectors can either move things or information… An arbitrary divide is set up here…
“It is not Bentham’s Panopticon but the British Navy that is the key technological regime for putting into practice the rational ambitions of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment… After Trafalgar and Waterloo, French power turns inward, and becomes disciplinary, but English power remains vectoral, and becomes a model for the open, expansive powers of empire ever since” (398).
Guilty Pleasures—Batchen (447)
This essay surveys the history of surveillance photography. Barchen makes the point that “far from being a marginal perversion, seeing without being seen has been a central tenet of the practice of photography throughout its history” (459).
…”a panoptic principle has always been inscribed at the very heart of photography’s operation in our culture’ (448).
Surreptitious street photography began with the early pioneers in photography. Both Talbot and Daguerre snapped pictures of people clandestinely.
Suggests that the camera allowed one “to produce non-subjective images that appear to let us see without being seen” (449)
This is the basis of the photographic aesthetic associated with surveillance imagery and it was practicable from the 1870’s.
In 1881 Thomas Bolas introduced the detective camera—this was a camera which allowed one to observe with out being observed. They were designed to look like other things—“watches, books, parcels, cravats, buttons, purses, hats, revolvers, and even walking sticks!” (450)
“So from about the turn of the twentieth century, all photographers had the technical means at their disposal to take pictures unbeknownst to the subjects of those pictures” (451).
Discusses Walker Evans work of the Depression and War years. Evans is said to have unconsciously captured “the claustrophobia and anxiety” of the nation at that time without some every knowing it (453).
Moves on to candid camera and photojournalism.
Ernst in Beyond the Rhetoric of Panopticism; Surveillance as Cybernetics (460) makes the point that “no longer is panoptic surveillance being felt as a treat, but as a chance to display oneself under the gaze of the camera” (461).
“Algorithms… replace the panoptic regime” (462).
Video surveillance and postmodern subjects, Pauliet
Telemorphosis—Baudrillard, p 480
The degeneration of the spectacle which will ultimately lead to the entry of death. However, “death reappears as a pseudo-event, because – and therein lies the irony of all these experimental masquerades – parallel to the multiplication of these spectacles of violence grows the uncertainty as regards the reality of what ones sees” (483).
“Visions “in real time” only adds to the unreality of the thing” (483).
“The twentieth century will have seen all sorts of crimes – Auschwitz, Hiroshima, genocises – but the only genuine and perfect crime is, according to Heidegger, “the second fall of man, the fall into banality.” (484)
Baudrillard describes this as “a genuine Stockholm syndrome on the collective scale – when the hostage becomes complicit with the hostage taker – an thus, with a revolution of a concept of voluntary servitude and of the master-slave relation” (484).
In the process of telemorphosis the screen becomes not that of the television but that of reality itself” (485).
“Reflectionism” and “Diffusionism”: New Tactics for Deconstructing the Video Surveillance Superhighway, Mann (531)
Goes through various surveillance possibilities.
1) Automatic face recognition… 2) Television set top-boxes, for recognizing viewers… 3) “Smart spaces” 4) Experimental bedroom: wake up and it starts the coffeemaker… 5) Bathroom camera for recognizing abnormalities… 6) Pressure sensors in office chairs…
This paper asks at what price do these surveillance systems come?
Counters the panopticon principle through the use of Webcam, a form of group vision. The panopticon reversed.
The Rhetoric of the Temporal Index: Surveillant Narration of the Cinema of “Real Time”, Levin, p. 578
A culture under surveillance, from CCTV to digital information tracking known as “dataveillance.”
Explores the Rhetorics of surveillance through film. How does television equip us to deal with the these surveillance societies?
