Monday, April 20th, 2009

Thanks for the support, everyone.
There will be a few bonus videos in the days to come.
What will be on your videotape?

Thanks for the support, everyone.
There will be a few bonus videos in the days to come.
What will be on your videotape?
Who watches the watchers?
A new system monitors the operators of CCTV as they are on the job watching live surveillance footage. An intrusive irony.

Live surveillance camera footage from the University of Central Florida campus.
Refresh for updates.



Art by Stanley Donwood, collaborator with Radiohead on their album artwork since 1994.
Teeth

Borealis

More here, and more to come.
Holding:

Spectator Entrance:

Try this out:
Spend one day finding surveillance cameras every place you go.
School, stores, parking lots, restaurants, road intersections, toll booths, etc.
Since starting meetings about putting the show together, doing this on occasion has (for better or worse) changed my perceptions about some of my favorite places. Comfortability levels have shifted, regardless of what I am actually doing at those locations. There must be even more places where they are watching which haven’t been listed…


Surveillance art by Willam Betts. More here.

flickr.com/photos/surveillance
I read an article last summer about a journalist’s experience in Rangoon, Burma (Myanmar). About the military government’s stifling of entertainment industry, and the effect on its people. What stuck with me was the “ghost” presence effect that the government’s surveillance program has created on the streets. Here’s an excerpt:
“In a 1977 book called Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault discussed the social effects of surveillance, using a prison designed by Jeremy Bentham in 1787, called the Panopticon, as a model. The cells are arranged in a circle around a central observation tower, so that one person inside the tower can see into every cell at all times, but the prisoners, while able to see the tower, never really know whether there is a person in there watching them, or not. The observer can see out, but the observed can’t see in.
Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers.
This was why there was no visible military presence in the city. It wasn’t necessary. The people controlled themselves.”
Full article by Scott Carrier.

“Despite being observed by CCTV cameras, elusive grafitti artist Banksy managed to create his latest - and biggest - work to date.”