K&K. Kultur og Klasse · Nr. 110 · Årgang 2010 - Aarhus University ...

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K&K · Kultur&Klasse · 110 · 2010
SØREN BRO POLD:
THE ART OF SURVEILLANCE
For many years surveillance was perceived in a negative way, but this has changed and we
increasingly are surveilled by cameras and sensors and our behaviour on-line is logged and
tracked by both companies and (inter-)national intelligence. Far from generating overwhelming
protests, this development is often furthered by people willingly posting personal
and private data to commercial services and companies on the web. Consequently today,
surveillance seems unavoidable and an integrated part of the different social and urban interfaces
spreading around us. This article will discuss this cultural shift in the perception of
surveillance and follow how the cultural perception of surveillance has changed from George
Orwell’s dystopian 1984 to Apple’s liberating 1984 in the advert for the first Macintosh and
to contemporary urban interfaces. It will do so by discussing contemporary urban surveillance
art with a focus on Manu Luksch’ film Faceless (2007), which is a film made exclusively
from ready-made surveillance camera footage. Besides a critical surveillance narrative, this
film also shows dehumanised images of an invisible sociality that have a paradoxical beauty.
LONE KOFOED HANSEN AND CHRISTIAN GAD:
RESISTANCE IS FERTILE – ON THE
OLIGOPTIC GAZE OF SURVEILLANCE
This article sets media artist Jill Magid’s performative artefact “Surveillance Shoe | Legoland”
(2000-7) in dialogue with Bruno Latour’s notion of oligopticon. Both address and
discuss the possibility of conceptualizing surveillance as an always specific, multiple, and
situated phenomenon, and thus question dominant metaphors in surveillance discourse,
e.g. panopticon and Big Brother.
The surveillance of Danish citizens commences at their first breath, as they are assigned
a personal identification number immediately after being born. This enables inspections and
interventions in many diverse ways by the state and other actors during the citizen’s life.
Being merely one example of how surveillance seems to penetrate every aspect of everyday
life, it seems fair to suggest that surveillance is, indeed, a ubiquitous phenomenon of modern
society. On first glance, Jill Magid’s artefact exemplifies this ubiquitous surveillance situation.
The artefact comprises a stiletto, an IR surveillance camera, a battery pack, and a wireless
transmitter. The surveillance camera is pointed up the performer’s leg, thus presenting us
with an extreme worm’s eye view of the world, focusing on the performer’s lower leg and
often on her thigh and crutch as well.
From one perspective, Jill Magid’s “Surveillance Shoe” addresses how everything is potentially
subject to a surveillant gaze — nothing is too intimate. From another perspective,
however, the artefact is an example of how contemporary art investigates the limits and
detailed aspects of particular surveillance situations, and of how surveillance tech nologies
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ABSTRACTS