The work of artists in a databased society: Net.Art as online activism - Features - Internet standards and a Free Society - Excerpt

Afterimage, March, 2002 by Richard Miranda Zuniga

* TO SUBVERT: REVERSING SURVEILLANCE

If Singer's "SPV2" presents the first activist step through awareness and pedagogy, how can art and the electronic network be used to take the second activist step, action? [paragraph]

Over the last three years the Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA) has been searching for tools that turn the camera upon the authoritarian figures that impose surveillance on the public sphere. IAA "an organization concerned with individual and collective self-determination" asks itself: "How can we monitor surveillance?" Most recently, Germany's Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie (Center for Art and Media Technology), offered IAA the opportunity--by providing funding--to produce the project "iSEE" (15) as part of the exhibition titled "CTRL[SPACE]," an exhibition that uses Jeremy Bentham's conception of the Panopticon as a point of curatorial departure. (16) [paragraph]

Once the exhibit was scheduled IAA approached the New York-based Surveillance Camera Players (SCP) to ask for permission to use the SCP's mapping of all closed-circuit television cameras (CCTV) in the Manhattan borough. (A couple of years ago the SCP had a team of people document all CCTV surveillance cameras in the streets of Manhattan.) Using the data provided by SCP, IAA constructed "iSEE," "a Web-based application charting the locations of closed-circuit television surveillance cameras in urban environments. With 'iSEE,' users can find routes that avoid these cameras--paths of least surveillance--allowing them to walk around their cities without fear of being 'caught on tape' by unregulated security monitors." (17) Granted that this data is now outdated and from the onset contained an unknown margin of error, the collaboration does not take away from its symbolic, pedagogical potential. "iSEE" is composed of both an online mapping application and an essay discussing the public use of CCTV surveillance cam eras. Although "iSEE" is primarily a pedagogical discourse and a symbolic gesture engaging a wide audience about CCTV, it appears that the application is also being used practically, as users are mapping routes, zooming into the map and printing the path of least surveillance--and, fittingly, most resistance. [paragraph]

In contrast to Singer's "SPV2," which depends upon the dynamic data existing in networked databases to stir questions of online privacy in its viewer/user, "iSEE" tackles the issue of optical surveillance in "real" space. When asked which form of monitoring has the greatest significance today, IAA responded that it is the move to link public optical surveillance with an electronic network Although most surveillance cameras are currently single channel, new applications are being designed to interface surveillance camera documentation with various network databases. (18) In a phone interview, an IAA operative stated that "CCTV is evolving and continues to be developed by corporate and university research through face recognition. (19) Beyond face recognition, we have seen software that studies human gestures and activity to figure out what one is doing. If the software interprets one's gestures as suspicious, well, you may be picked up." (20) The fact that such software, particularly face recognition software, may easily be used for racial profiling presents a frightening parallel to nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century categorizations of race as well as to the, now discredited, science of phrenology. It appears that although technology has advanced at an alarming rate, its applications to divide and control society has not changed at all since efforts to categorize abject behavior on physiological terms emerged, in one incarnation, with the archive more than 150 years ago. Hence, these seemingly disparate forms of surveillance, i.e. online versus physical public space, are not distinct or separate issues, but rather will lead to enhanced surveillance of an enlarged public sphere--physical and virtual. To IAA physical and virtual surveillance represent a continuum toward a surveillance society, which, to bring in a topical agenda, will present surveillance, under the guise of national security, as integral to the fight against crime and terrorism. [paragraph]