Introduction to Futureproof: Security Aesthetics and the Management of Life (original) (raw)

Futureproof: Security Aesthetics and the Management of Life

2020

Security is a defining characteristic of our age and the driving force behind the management of collective political, economic, and social life. Directed at safeguarding society against future peril, security is often thought of as the hard infrastructures and invisible technologies assumed to deliver it: walls, turnstiles, CCTV cameras, digital encryption, and the like. The contributors to Futureproof redirect this focus, showing how security is a sensory domain shaped by affect and image as much as rules and rationalities. They examine security as it is lived and felt in domains as varied as real-estate listings, active-shooter drills, border crossings, landslide maps, gang graffiti, and museum exhibits to theorize how security regimes are expressed through aesthetic forms. Taking a global perspective with studies ranging from Jamaica to Jakarta and Colombia to the US-Mexico border, Futureproof expands our understanding of the security practices, infrastructures, and technologies that pervade everyday life.

The Mediation of Affect: Security, Fear and Subversive Hope in Visual Culture

[Back cover] How is affect produced and how does it create meaning within the aesthetic experience? In what manner are aesthetic and affective strategies, tactics and techniques used in order to legitimate or counter-legitimate the hegemonic discourses that claim the protection of society? In this study, the role of the visual in relation to affect and the cognitive in meaning-making processes is considered through four separate articles. In particular, four cases which in one way or another are related to security, defined here as a series of praxes that officially aim to preserve and protect society. The first article analyses the Swedish legal system, specifically how audio-visual images are used as evidence and how they participate in the legitimisation of punishment. The second article analyses the state military use of YouTube and mobile games in terms of selfpresentation tactics to attract military recruits, which, as the author suggests, circulates within a narrative of adventure and identity beyond the official discourse of democracy and threat. In a third article, the author discusses how affect runs through the political aesthetics of social movements and is cultivated as a counter-hegemonic strategy. Here, the Anonymous movement in particular is studied, which, through image practices, works to engage and mobilise collective resistance to the politics of mass surveillance and control. The final article examines the Spanish political movement, Podemos, in relation to how the group makes use of symbolic and affective strategies in order to contest political hegemony and the wave of cuts to the fabric of social safety nets implemented by, in a broader security framework, the politics of austerity which are said to lead to macro-economic stability. Important in the author’s argument is that one cannot analyse individual visual events without simultaneously looking at the social, political and economic context in which these events and practices take place. He also shows that an in-depth understanding of the way in which visual perceptions and affective sensations interact in the mediation of the social imaginary is crucial. Especially, it seems, when we move within contemporary representations and promised realities of the (in)secure.

Safe is a Wonderful Feeling: Atmospheres of Surveillance and Contemporary Art

Surveillance & Society, 2020

This paper examines how the combined prism of contemporary art and the notion of atmosphere may offer alternative perspectives on our encounters with places and practices of surveillance. Specifically, this article investigates the atmospheres of surveillance surfacing in the video installation Safe Conduct (2016a) by British contemporary artist Ed Atkins. The artwork recreates the well-known situation of going through an airport security check. Through a combination of visual narrative and a soundscape blending the sounds of the conveyor belt and X-ray machines with heavy breathing and Ravel’s Boléro, the work builds up an uncanny anticipation of something awful. Death and violence linger at its edges, and a disquieting atmosphere fills the exhibition space. The objective of the article is twofold: First, it explores the shifting and ambiguous atmospheres produced by contemporary surveillance practices through an immersive reading of the artwork Safe Conduct. Second, and connected ...

Violence and Vision: The Prosthetics and Aesthetics of Terror

Public Culture, 1997

To what extent visual perception in emergency zones is informed by, if not actually modeled on, acts of violence; seeing and killing, being seen and being killed, are entangled and exchangeable in the ecology of fear and anxiety. Further, visual appropriation, because it is always pregnant with the potential forviolence, has become a metonym for dominance over others: power lies in the totalizing, engorged gaze over the politically prone body, and subjugation is encoded as exposure to this penetration. In the war zones of Northern Ireland vision can be aggressive: weapons, in turn, become instruments of political image making—weaponry makes ideological objects, objectives, and scenography appear. This is the politically visible, that horizon of actors, objects, and events that constitute the worldview and circumscribed reality of the political emergency zone—the gathered and linked components of crises.This symbiosis means that political subjects are formed, in part, within a circuit of visual prosthetics: the surveillance camera, the helicopter overflight, the panoptic architecture of the interrogation room and prison,13 and the aimed gun. These instruments of fatal vision can be divided into hardware and software technologies, and among the latter must be included the human eye, subject to a high degree of spatial and temporal extension and electronic supplementation. In turn, the fabrication of the politically visible infers the concomitant creation of that which is politically invisible. The circuit formed by vision and violence is itself circumscribed by zones of blindness and inattention

The Everyday Life of Security: Capturing Space, Practice, and Affect

International Political Sociology

Security shapes everyday life, but despite a growing literature on everyday security there is no consensus on the meaning of the “everyday.” At the same time, the research methods that dominate the field are designed to study elites and high politics. This paper does two things. First, it brings together and synthesizes the existing literature on everyday security to argue that we should think about the everyday life of security as constituted across three dimensions: space, practice, and affect. Thus, the paper adds conceptual clarity, demonstrating that the everyday life of security is multifaceted and exists in mundane spaces, routine practices, and affective/lived experiences. Second, it works through the methodological implications of a three-dimensional understanding of everyday security. In order to capture all three dimensions and the ways in which they interact, we need to explore different methods. The paper offers one such method, exploring the everyday life of security i...

Chromatology of security: Introducing colours to visual security studies

Security Dialogue, 2015

The agenda of this article is to highlight how security becomes intelligible, is enacted, contested and (re)appropriated in part through colour use. Even though colours are a natural phenomenon, their meanings are societal products, and part of our constructed visibilities. These can be investigated through chromatology, the study of colour in relation to people. We illustrate this by applying multimodal social semiotics to view highly securitized sites, those of concentration and enemy-combatant camps. We show that the colour uses instituted to classify and govern prisoners not only structure the inmates socially, but also become vehicles for resisting the security discourses associated with them. The aim of the article is to highlight how security and international relations are intersemiotic relations, and to open up the study of security to an expanded range of semiotic modalities and methods of inquiry.

Introducing Paranoid Fixations Art and political discourses since 9/11

2017

Global terrorism has presaged the emergence of new security states accompanied by heightened levels of social anxiety and irrational fear. This thesis investigates how contemporary screen and digital cultures have fuelled a collective sensibility of paranoia since the September 11 2001 attack on the World Trade Centre towers—a catalyst from which spectacles of irrational fear have emerged through global media networks. I contend that the escalating culture of paranoia, animated by the screen and digital media circuits of post 9/11, has resulted in a fixation with the repetitious potential of disaster as media events, which in turn becomes part of public consciousness. The thesis considers recent work by artists alert to this dynamic such as Gregor Schneider, Harun Farocki, Hito Steyerl, and Jane and Louise Wilson, all of whom are increasingly conscious of the power of contemporary screen and visual cultures in escalating societal fears.