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 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 6s 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.
Although this series is a fictionalizing
enterprise, it finds a thematic variation in
todays 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
real
images and films from millions of
extroverted strangers who broadcast the
minutiae of their lives.
When the net.art movement duo Eva and
Franco Mattes conceived a 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 elses life.
The viewer intervenes decisively in the Mattes
moral trap but might not consider his viewing
in moral terms beforehand, if ever.
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
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.
Yet, looking is implicating, as clicking bears in it the performative effects of the intention behind it. The viewers 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 viewers 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 viewers 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 Schers 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 viewers psychological
disturbance, which is, in return, exaggerated
by another artifact, the threateningly engaging
presence of close circuit-television cameras.
The presence of this 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?
Schers The Surveillance Bed III obliquely
intersects with Jonas Dahlbergs 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 viewers morality intensifies as he
remains by his 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 viewers self into a guilty voyeur.
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 viewers 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.
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.
http://www.0100101110101101.org/home/vopos/
concept.html
Ibid
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth
of the Prison, [trans. from the French], (New York:
Vintage Book, 1995).
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.
Theodor W. Adorno, The Authoritarian (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950); Erving
Goffman The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor, 1959).
