Lindsay Aycan
Ways of surveilling ourselves have transformed rapidly over the past several years due to technological and digital information advancements. The pervasiveness of social media platforms and responses to our current political climate have reshaped how we surveil ourselves and each other (Morrison 5; Jones 52). It was Michel Foucault’s theory, adapted from Jeremy Bentham’s model of the panopticon—a prison with cells arranged in a circle around a central tower where prisoners could be watched at any time—that previously dominated society’s perception of surveillance (Jones 52), but this “top-down process of discipline in which an unseen body of power polices its subjects” (Morrison 6) has shifted with changes to social and surveillance culture. Foucault’s fundamental idea about the way in which social control has the power to influence human behaviour (Foucault 200), although still valid today, looks a little bit different.
Our current preoccupation with online and media sharing has changed how, what and to whom information is shared (Jones 52), and as we have become more complacent and willing to share information about ourselves online, our lives have become a source of data “increasingly subject to surveillance by both governments and private companies” (Jones 52). Media platforms and Google applications, for example, all require surveillance technologies to capture data that advertisers then use to promote products and influence consumers. It is our eagerness to share this information that makes this new period of surveillance participatory (Morrison 6; Jones 52).
Foucault once suggested that the true power of the state lies within the threat of surveillance and its invisibility—when one never knows for sure if one is being watched, one behaves and submits to social norms, rules, and laws as though one is always being watched (Foucault 201). If, as both Morrison and Jones assert, contemporary surveillance has become a participatory act by virtue of our eagerness to provide information, one must also ask how our willing participation impacts or influences our understanding of performance (Enelow 22). This is significant when we consider the current merging of surveillance technology with theatrical performance as a social response to governmental and corporate surveillance. Many groups of artists and activists have used their creativity to outsmart and outwit corporate and state-imposed surveillance interfaces. These artists “capitalize on the participatory nature of surveillance”, and as surveillance art and activism, use participation as a tactic “of political critique and subversive action” (Morrison 7).
Institute for Applied Autonomy
The Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA) is a group of engineers and activists who redesign “military robotic systems and surveillance interfaces in order to infiltrate and actively combat state and corporate control of privatized spaces” (Morrison 9). In an interview with Erich W. Schienke, they explain that projects such as 2004’s iSee, in which New York citizens were provided with GPS mapping technology as a means of avoiding CCTV cameras within the city’s streets, are designed not only to “critique engineering culture”, but to “engage these issues in public” so that they are seen “by the people who most need to see it” (105). iSee empowers users to “play a more active role in choosing when and how they are recorded by CCTV cameras by providing a means for them to avoid surveillance cam[eras] if they want ”(106). IAA aims to examine and unveil the imbalance of power surveillance creates and wants to turn “surveillance systems back on the people that control them” (110).
Their projects, which also include the development of and experimentation with robots such as GraffitiWriter and Little Brother, “were developed as a way to allow free speech to occur in public, in real space, where an activist has the ability to get in someone’s face” but operate from a distance where the activist is far from harm and their identities are protected (Morrison 10; “Anarchic”). The Robotic Graffiti Writer (YouTube)
Kyle McDonald’s work “Exhausting a Crowd” is inspired by George Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (1974). Ian Klaus, author for Bloomsberg.com, writes: “Georges Perec spent three days on Place Saint-Sulpice, creating a portrait of a decidedly different Paris […] his intent was to describe ‘that which is generally not taken note of, that which is not noticed, that which has no importance: what happens when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cares, and clouds’”. Perec’s text is absent of narrative; is it simply a collection and documentation of “moments and details”. Klaus writes: “As Perec knew, the movement of people through a city space is its own kind of performance” (Klaus 2019). This is what McDonald extends on in his work. “Exhausting a Crowd” is an automated, digital, and virtual tableau where online observers are given the opportunity to tag or comment on the actions and behaviours of citizens captured by cameras in some of the world’s most prominent and busiest city centres (International Documentation Film Festival – idfa 2023). McDonald writes of his own work: “Exhausting a Crowd” can be understood as a platform for all individuals that access the website to ultimately do the same thing that Perec attempted to do all by himself (Intercommunications Center – ICC 2015). “Most of the comments posted on the website are innocent messages, but they remind us of the facts that ordinary citizens are constantly subject to surveillance in public spaces, and, on the other hand, surveillance through unspecified anonymous users via the Internet is something that occurs day by day” (ICC 2015).
dataPurge
dataPurge is a performance piece created by Ryan Holsopple with his company 31 Down. The piece, in which individuals allow dataPurge technologists to “carefully dissect their phones, application by application, note by note”, lasts for twenty-four hours and serves as a sort of catharsis or ‘digital dialysis’ (Holsopple 69). Holsopple claims he first began thinking of the project when he considered how “most of us have begun to hide things in the digital age” (70). Leaving oneself vulnerable to discovery, he realized, can create a satisfying tension (72). He equates this sensation to viewing streaming websites and servers, much like Twitch, where audiences watch, captivated for hours, as gamers stream their games in live time. This tension is what Holsopple insists brings a sense of theatricality to dataPurge. He writes: “I was playing with the notion at the onset of the piece that I would ask myself, Could I go completely transparent with my life, agree to give in to all privacy standards, and let myself be completely audible on a daily basis? I would laugh at this idea”, he says, “but I thought it may make for an interesting performance” (72).
Alongside IAA, Elise Morrison turns to The Surveillance Camera Players to explore how theatre artists turn surveillance into political critique. The Surveillance Camera Players is a group of performers who are “unconditionally opposed to the installation and use of video surveillance cameras in public places” (notbord.org 2006). Formed in New York City in 1996, SCP’s first performance in December 1996 was shut down by the NYPD. In July 1998, when Mayor Giuliani and Police Commissioner Howard Safir installed and supported the presence of surveillance cameras in public spaces throughout the city, they became active once again, “performing regularly in front of publicly installed surveillance cameras in New York City” (Morrison 18). In November 1998, they performed their own version of George Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four as a retaliation and criticism of New York City’s surveillance systems.
Works Cited
“31 Down.” 31 Down, http://www.31down.org/.
“Anarchic Vandal Robots from the I.A.A.” Www.otdowntown.com, https://www.otdowntown.com/news/anarchic-vandal-robots-from-the-iaa-HWNP1220001010310109973.
Enelow, Shonni. “And If There’s No More Beholder?: Acting and Surveillance.” Theater (New Haven, Conn.), vol. 48, no. 1, 2018, pp. 21–31, https://doi.org/10.1215/01610775-4250933.
“Exhausting a Crowd.” Exhausting a Crowd, https://www.exhaustingacrowd.com/london.
Foucault, Michel, and Alan Sheridan. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Penguin Classics, 2020.
“H2K (2000): The Robotic Graffiti Writer.” YouTube, YouTube, 11 Sept. 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVX-e9TOun0.
Holsopple, Ryan. “Artist’s Journal: dataPurge.” Theater, vol. 46, no. 2, Jan. 2016, pp. 69–75, doi:10.1215/01610775-3547695.
“Institute for Applied Autonomy.” The Influencers, 28 May 2013, https://theinfluencers.org/en/institute-applied-autonomy.
Jones, Matt. “Forced Entertainment? Gamified Surveillance in Theatre Conspiracy’s Foreign Radical.” 2023, https://doi.org/10.32920/21950363.
Klaus, Ian. “When Writer Georges Perec Tried to ‘Exhaust’ Paris.” Bloomberg.com, Bloomberg, 20 Dec. 2019, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-20/when-writer-georges-perec-tried-to-exhaust-paris.
Morrison, Elise. “User-Unfriendly: Surveillance Art as Participatory Performance.” Theater, vol. 43, no. 3, Jan. 2013, pp. 5–23, doi:10.1215/01610775-2284856.
Nicholas, Teddy, and Andy Horwitz. “31 Down.” Culturebot, 8 Jan. 2015, https://www.culturebot.org/tag/31-down/.
Oberon Amsterdam, http://www.oberon.nl. “Exhausting a Crowd (2015) – Kyle McDonald.” IDFA, https://www.idfa.nl/en/film/35167690-7923-4c6a-b077-57fb82f8524a/exhausting-a-crowd.
Perec, Georges, and Marc Lowenthal. An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris. Wakefield Press, 2010.
Schienke, Erich W., and Institute for (IAA). “On the Outside Looking out: An Interview with the Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA).” Surveillance & Society, vol. 1, no. 1, 2002, pp. 102–119., https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v1i1.3396.
Surveillance Camera Players, https://www.notbored.org/10-year-report-long.html.
“Surveillance Camera Players: 1984.” YouTube, YouTube, 12 Oct. 2006, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RILTl8mxEnE.
“Twitchgaming.” Twitch, https://www.twitch.tv/twitchgaming.
Wagner, Ian. “ISEE.” 21st Century Digital Art, 21st Century Digital Art, 6 June 2017, http://www.digiart21.org/art/isee.
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