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Surveillance as Medium
Kris Paulsen
University of California, Berkeley
Abstract
Sony's release of the PortaPak in 1965 was revolutionary. From that moment onward, television was no longer an oppressive broadcast medium controlled only by corporations and institutions. It had the potential to be something quite different. Television suddenly became accessible to artists as a medium to be actively explored, introducing new conceptual possibilities and formal attributes that have, over time, yielded compelling contemporary artworks. We propose that urban public surveillance is at a similar turning point. The tools to set up visual surveillance systems webcams, wireless video cameras, and low cost security cameras have dramatically dropped in price and complexity. As a consequence, artistic engagements with urban public surveillance are becoming far more nuanced than knee-jerk critiques of Big Brother. More complex, and even constructive, models of surveillance have emerged. Artists are beginning to appropriate, repurpose, and liberate technologies that have previously been an exclusively oppressive apparatus: Surveillance is becoming an artistic medium. The omnipresence of webcams and live streaming video, Paul Virilio writes, transforms the computer from a ³personal, domestic device into an apparatus of behavior control, a post allowing us to see, in the very same moment, what is happening around the globe. But there is a price, which is to agree in return (in a counter image) to be ourselves visually controlled, and now not only by institutions specializing in investigation, whether police or military surveillance, but by anybody and everybody.² This Orwellian nightmare is tempered by the unforeseen ³democratization² of surveillance both in terms of who is being watched and who is watching. The surprising consequence of ubiquitous surveillance technology is not that we are being watched by security forces, but that individuals are using this technology both to watch the watchers, and as a mode of self-expression and self-revealing. What can surveillance cameras reveal about urban life that was previously invisible? This paper proposes an art historical account of appropriation of surveillance as a medium of expression and social commentary. In this paper, we investigate a series of artists and works that repurpose surveillance equipment in unexpected ways in search of constructive and transformative potential, ranging from Vito Acconci to Bruce Nauman to Julia Scher to the Surveillance Camera Players to Rafael Lozano Hemmer to Marie Sester. Can artists as active agents discover a deeper potential for these robotic eyes beyond law enforcement? Can experimenting with these technologies help us cope with the cities of the future?
Biography
Kris Paulsen, a Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities Fellow and PhD Candidate in Rhetoric with a Designated Emphasis in New Media at UC Berkeley, received a dual BA in Art-Semiotics and the History of Art and Architecture from Brown University. Her dissertation, Real Time over Real Space, examines the history of the artistic use of telecommunications media and the epistemological and phenomenological issues raised by privileging synchronicity over proximity. She is a member of Ken Goldberg¹s Automation Lab (formerly Alpha Lab), which has recently exhibited their work at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany. More information about Kris Paulsen and her work can be found at her website, www.kpaulsen.com.
Ken Goldberg & The Alpha Lab. Demonstrate, 2004. www.demonstrate.berkeley.edu