Surveillance & Society 3(2/3): 240-250 'Doing Surveillance Studies' Para-Sights: Multiplied Perspectives on Surveillance Research in Art Educational Spaces. * (original) (raw)
Related papers
Para-Sights: Multiplied Perspectives on Surveillance Research in Art Educational Spaces
Surveillance & Society
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.
Essay Artveillance : At the Crossroad of Art and Surveillance
2010
Introduction. Into the field of surveillance art In this article I review a series of artworks, artistic performances and installations that deal with the topic of surveillance.1 My aim is twofold. On the one hand, I want to look comparatively at how different artists interrogate, question, quote, or criticise the surveillance society. On the other hand, I take these artistic actions as themselves symptomatic of the ways in which surveillance interrogates contemporary society. In other words, my claim is that surveillance does not simply produce substantive social control and social triage, it also contributes to the formation of an ideoscape and a collective imagery about what security, insecurity, and control are ultimately about, as well as the landscape of moods and affects a surveillance society like ours expresses.
Surveillance & Society, 2013
An engagement with the aesthetics, rhetorics and methodologies of surveillance presents a canvas on which visual artists can critique, subvert or just play with emergent technologies. This paper probes artistic methodologies that implicate surveillance and the ethical tensions of appropriating the surveilled lives of strangers for creative pursuits. The ethically challenging practices of several contemporary artists are discussed including Sophie Calle, and the author reflects upon her own body of work. The role of the artist, the nature of the gaze, privacy versus artistic expression, surveillance as an art platform and the eternal tensions between objectivity and subjectivity of using a mechanical device/prosthetic eye are explored.
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
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.
Critical assessment of current convergences of contemporary art and surveillance studies.
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.
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.
This thesis engages with surveillance as a pervasive theme presented in several modes of modern visual culture and is approached with particular reference to Guy Debord's theory of the spectacle. Through an historically contextualized analysis, I locate the centrality of surveillance in Western culture as a visual regime that institutionalizes spectacle. This is revealed in a number of prominent events between 1920 and 2008 that illustrate ethical shifts in the historical subject in which the presence or the absence of the witness becomes a meaningful consideration. Surveillance is thus linked inextricably to two main discourses regarding the spectacle and the witness, a theme that is expanded upon through the analysis of specific films and other representations of modern visual culture, including painting and television. The spectacle within our ocularcentric society has, as I see it, not enhanced the world so much as it has separated us from it, and has thus consistently obscured instances of moral reflection by the individual in the form of witness. I link this concept to the thinking of Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger and others.