Essay Artveillance : At the Crossroad of Art and Surveillance (original) (raw)
Related papers
Resisting With Art: The Surveillance Art Against Surveillance
Handbook of Research on Aestheticization of Violence, Horror, and Power, 2020
Surveillance has become an element of everyday life. Modern society is used to surveillance. It has become inconspicuous. But art makes surveillance apparent. In this chapter, the notion of surveillance art was debated, and surveillance art was evaluated as activist art. In surveillance art, there are artworks created by singular artists or art groups. In this chapter, two groups were analyzed: Surveillance Camera Players and Manifesto for CCTV Filmmakers. The two art groups focused on CCTV. Surveillance Camera Players tried to take attention by playing in front of the CCTV in the public sphere. Surveillance Camera Players created awareness for surveillance cameras that normalized in everyday life. Manifesto for CCTV Filmmakers also invited to make a film via CCTV footage. The manifesto noticed to determine with the act. Consequently, surveillance art creates social awareness, and it is a way to resist surveillance.
In the last few years several artistic projects have been inspired by surveillance practices and the social processes they capture. In the same way that Surveillance Studies have debated the differences between different forms of counter-surveilllance, many of these projects offer different understandings of what it means to recreate, co-opt or expose surveillance, and so they relate to surveillance in different ways. By selecting six of these art projects and looking at what they say about power, technology and agency, this paper uses art as a stepping stone to explore questions that remain open in the academic debate -what does it mean to subvert the surveillance society? What are the differences between recreation, co-option and exposure when raising awareness of the day-to-day aspects of the surveillance society? By looking at different surveillance-related artistic projects and the issues they raise, this paper explores how counter surveillance, sousveillance, privacy and data protection have been presented in artistic practices, and mirrors them against recurring themes and arguments in Surveillance Studies. While most academic debates are based on academic contributions, this paper brings new insights into the current state of Surveillance Studies using artistic practices and the reflections they bring about as a starting point, to find surprising similarities between these two perspectives –and their current shortcomings.
Surveillance to Art: “Flipping Around the Paranoia”
Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies (JCLIS), 2018
This photo essay explores a particular (but not uncommon) historical nexus and regime of information and control—the operations and recorded remains of a police surveillance program—and the ways in which today two artists, through politico-aesthetic practices, re-vision and make public, alter and share knowledge about past invasive acts on individual privacy and previously covert documents.
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 ...
Reimagining Resistance: Performing Transparency and Anonymity in Surveillance Art
Surveillance & Society, 2016
In response to being detained and interrogated at an airport by the INS under false accusations, multimedia artist Hasan Elahi launched the project Tracking Transience, a website designed to constantly publicize his activity. Rather than uphold claims to privacy, Elahi aims to enact a resistive posture to contemporary techniques of digital surveillance by releasing his personal information. Paradoxically, he voluntarily forgoes his privacy in order to feel more secure. This form of resistance registers his project of self-surveillance as a performance of transparency. In this context, he turns the normative flow of power in digital surveillance into a new critical posture, one in which the artist is anonymous to surveillance systems. Through anonymity, the artist participates with digital surveillance in order to avoid it. By tracing the methodologies that generate data on Elahi's activity, this paper will speculate on how creative interventions can produce resistive strategies against surveillance systems by moving beyond the historical limits of privacy into the outer reaches of anonymity in our contemporary age of transparency.
Creating Killing Machines: On the Relationship between Art and Predation in Surveillance Capitalism
This article explores artistic responses to emergent technologies of surveil- lance. It suggests looking at the military drone as the paradigmatic surveil- lant eye and proposes that the primary characteristic of “droning,” or of sur- veillance as a type of image-creation through algorithmic data gathering, should be thought of as predation-by-aesthetics. This term is introduced as a concise paradigm for the features of surveillance capitalism that this article sees as fundamentally transformative of the world overall: namely the way algorithmic data gathering captures information about individuals and communities and uses it to govern the world through feedback loops that operate at the level of sensation and affect. The figure of the drone sheds light on the way cybernetics has fundamentally transformed the idea of an image, loosening it from a merely optic connotation to a kind of synes- thesia. How does the eye of the drone “program” the political potentialities of those it is watching, and can this be harnessed by artists? I interrogate how effective the artistic techniques of camouflage and hyper-visibility are when they try to use the very machines and techniques of surveillance they purport to disrupt. I ask whether, in creating and viewing these works, we become complicit in surveillance networks.
Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies
This photo essay explores a particular (but not uncommon) historical nexus and regime of information and control—the operations and recorded remains of a police surveillance program—and the ways in which today two artists, through politico-aesthetic practices, re-vision and make public, alter and share knowledge about past invasive acts on individual privacy and previously covert documents. Pre-print first published online 11/25/2018
In this paper the author outlines multiple approaches regarding surveillance research in the visual arts and art education. The notion of the parasite is used to diagram power relationships that are addressed by visual artists and activists engaged with the mechanisms of both surveillance and dataveillance. These parasitic practices are then compared with actions from art educational spaces, allowing for the surveillance that is inherent to pedagogy to be analyzed and critiqued. Beyond Sight I have lived the past four years of my life becoming increasingly aware of eyes: the eyes that I use to watch, and the eyes that watch me, the mechanical lenses that mimic these biological processors, intertwining to create complex networks of seeing and being seen. As a result, the intersections between power and vision have become central to my research and my teaching. These are intersections that are particularly relevant when discussing such practices within the context of the visual arts, ...
Critical assessment of current convergences of contemporary art and surveillance studies.