Societal control and surveillance have always
been critical themes in art and popular culture.
The eye, for example, a symbol of such ideas,
has undergone tremendous iconographic
transformations and interpretations from a
theological representation of the Although this series is a fictionalizing
enterprise, it finds a thematic variation in
today’s reality where the possibilities of
computer surveillance seem to be technically
unlimited. Everyday life is continuously fast
forwarded and digitized with parasitic and
invasive technologies. Communications are
intercepted, information is streamlined and
stored and the cult of celebrity is
commoditized and erected as a collective value
through popular entertainment like reality TV
shows. As the Web 2.0 phenomenon expanded,
self-exposure through video-sharing websites
and social networks exploded, generating
When the net.art movement duo Eva and
Franco Mattes conceived a The Mattes’ tech-based interactivity in Vopos
and Life Sharing is utterly based on a remote
interaction that abstracts the viewer from the
morally problematic act of viewing. The formal
characteristics of this contact abolish all sense
of guilt hic et nunc. It is as if the distance
between the observer and the subject (the
Yet, looking is implicating, as clicking bears in
it the performative effects of the intention
behind it. The viewer’s distant location,
however, almost intrinsically, makes this type
of act morally acceptable. Both the viewer (in
the double role of voyeur and witness) and the
subject under scrutiny are dupes and
accomplices in this tacit relation. In this
ambiguous play between public and private
spheres, the voyeur is indulged and physically
freed of the constraints of his moral crime
while the viewer is not viewed in return. This
mismatch indisputably raises issues about the
capacity of such simulacra not to be selfentrapped
by the situation it originally
intended to critique. If we accept that the
viewer is determinant in the efficiency of the
Mattes’ voyeuristic scenario, the spatial
disjunction the work imposes radically
modifies the viewer’s self-conscious perception
of what is morally acceptable. This dissociation
flaws the attempt to denounce the immorality
of the sinful act by precisely limiting the
viewer’s physical entry into the sordid
voyeuristic scene. His identity is protected and
nullified through the absence of any direct
social control. The most powerful critiques against
surveillance systems seem to reside in what I
call the moral effects of context. This notion
refers to the capacity of a place (public or
private) to function as a moral trap for the
viewer because the context prefigures not only
viewer participation (obviously guilty) but also
his moral acceptance (or repulsion) of such
complicity. Everything happens as if the
viewer was engaged in a social dilemma and
was abruptly hastened to clarify his moral
position in the presence of others, themselves
entrapped in the same moral prison as
witnesses and ambiguous accomplices. The
others, as mechanisms of moral reference and
social pressure, hang more heavily on the
viewer the sense of guilt as they intensify the
dilemma by their physical presence.5 In Julia Scher’s installation The Surveillance
Bed III (mixed-media, 2000), there is no
physical body to watch, only the crumpled bed
sheets reveal the viewer as voyeur. This
breach in the rhetoric representation6 of the
body accelerates the viewer’s psychological
disturbance, which is, in return, exaggerated
by another artifact, the threateningly engaging
presence of close circuit-television cameras.
The presence of this Scher’s The Surveillance Bed III obliquely
intersects with Jonas Dahlberg’s Safe Zone
N°9 (2004, mixed media) through its formal
characteristics. Here again the viewer of Safe
Zone N°9 confronts confused curiosity as he is
privy to a video monitor broadcasting the
private and intimate space of public lavatories.
As the viewer can hardly determine whether
the monitor he is watching is an illusion or
reality, this subterfuge seals his moral and
guilty complicity to the temporal dilation on
what he suspects might happen. The question
of the viewer’s morality intensifies as he
remains by his Truth and falsity. The question of surveillance
and control closely intersects with the
narrative structure of duplicity. The ambiguity
of what is moral and what is not. The fluid
boundary between the viewer as voyeur or
witness of others’ intentions makes visible the
moral fracture of the self. The hypnotizing
experience of suspended time coupled with the
abstraction of distance sequentially
exaggerates the moral dilemma in the viewer’s
mind. The three-fold relationship of viewer,
viewed and artist (through his/her work)
unleashes its most powerful moral effects
when the physical context of fateful
interaction makes you already guilty. Antoine Thélamon is a Paris-based
independent curator and scholar. During his
doctoral studies in political science, he taught
advanced seminars in sociology as a lecturer at
Paris X-Nanterre University. His current
research focuses on the theory and practice of
exhibitions in contemporary museums. His
interests also include popular culture, new
media and aesthetic strategies and innovation
in periods of social turmoil.
1 The All-Seeing-Eye represents an omniscient and
omnipresent God. From Egyptian mythology to the
U.S. one dollar bill, the All-Seeing-Eye has taken on a
myriad of forms but is perhaps best recognized in
the form of radiating light from the crown of a
pyramid.Antoine Thélamon
All-Seeing-
Eye
to heterogeneous appropriations by mass
media that create derivatives of the film noir
tradition in series such as the Twilight Zone
(1964) and The Prisoner (1967).1 In The
Prisoner, the All-Seeing Eye is depicted as an
icon of malevolent control in the Village
council chamber. In the Village, everything
happens as if the eye functions as the
theoretical locus of a whole drama. The formal
characteristics of the series orchestrate a
paranoid fictional artifact. The space-frame of
the plot (supposedly an island), the oppressive
surveillance of close-circuit television cameras
located throughout the Village, and observers,
who continually spy on villagers and foil
Number 6‘s attempts to escape, create a class
language of what we assume to be a life-ordeath
and self-interrogation situation for
Number 6 in his quest for freedom. The Village
becomes a closed system and the eye the core
narrative structure of the irreversible
repressive nature of a society of
interchangeable and anonymous inmates.
real
images and films from millions of
extroverted strangers who broadcast the
minutiae of their lives.
self-surveillance
system for complete digital transparency
2
they undeniably pushed the panopticon
scheme rationale into the territory of
pervasive absurdity. Their works Vopos and
Life-sharing (anagram of file-sharing) are
parts of Glasnost a project they initiated in
2000 that consists of monitoring and making
public, in real time, the biggest quantity of data
concerning an individual in actual society.
3 In
Vopos and Life-sharing, data was uploaded
from a GPS transmitter worn by the artists so
that anyone could precisely map their
whereabouts. Moreover, internet users had
access to the Mattes’ computer including their
private emails. In another project, the
Matteses gave their audience real-time access
to all of their phone conversations for one
month. Such interactive performances
abruptly conflate the distinction between
private and public spheres into one straight
line. While the Mattes’ works are simple in
their construction, they unleash powerful
effects as they make us contemplate the guilt
and morality of monitoring someone else’s life.
The viewer intervenes decisively in the Mattes’
moral trap but might not consider his viewing
in moral terms beforehand, if ever.
docile body
,4 to speak like Foucault, in this
particular context) could suspend the
potentially sinful act and redefine the core
nature of what is at stake in the interactivity.
collective
potentially
amplifies the discomfort the viewer may
experience in a context that literally requires
his physical participation. The viewer is
entangled in an ethical dilemma and is asked to
take a position. Will he stop and watch or, will
he walk away conflicted by what he considers
as a sinful behavior?
crime scene
, staring
continuously at the monitors. If the absence of
movement diverts the viewer from the scene,
the time he spent waiting for something to
happen still serves as a guilty sentence
through the complex play of anticipation
whether he witnesses the climax or not,
whether something happens or not. Since he
was free to walk away, his continuous presence
brands him as a voyeur. Time and context split
the viewer’s self into a guilty voyeur.
Endnotes
2 http://www.0100101110101101.org/home/vopos/
concept.html
3 Ibid
4 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth
of the Prison, [trans. from the French], (New York:
Vintage Book, 1995).
5 From a pure theoretical point of view, the absence
of the subject
raises the issue of the performative
effects of figuration over abstraction in such
aesthetic practices and the weight such strategies
carry in the critique of surveillance behaviors in
modern society.
6 Theodor W. Adorno, The Authoritarian
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950); Erving
Goffman The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
(New York: Anchor, 1959).
