A report written as a summary for my video piece completed in March 2017.
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For this photography unit, I decided to explore an aspect of street life that is ubiquitous in the public domain but is considered ordinary and overlooked, even with its looming and large presence. That presence being surveillance and its many cameras in London, 422,000 to be exact.
I have always been fascinated with the concept of surveillance, constructed as a means to protect individuals, but always felt like spying to me, photographing unwilling subjects as a means of control (Phillps 2010). Learning about Foucault’s panopticon in my first year of university heightened my interest in the subject. The panopticon prison contains a guard in the center, surrounded by inmates, the guard can view the inmates but the inmates can never see the guard therefore they wouldn't know if and when they were actually being watched (Foucault 1991). This produced the haunting discovery that not all cameras could be on, and as there isn’t a clear differentiation between what might be real and what might be fake, blurring the lines between reality and construction. This poses the questions; When are we really being watched? Are we watched at all? Or is this a power tactic of deterrence to undermine and discipline society?
Issues of privacy arise when discussing surveillance, and I am further interested in how it has maintained, evolved and creeped its way into the private sphere. In the past, there was heightened paranoia about microphones within the household. Today, they are embedded into our phones, smart TVs and individuals are even bringing smart speakers into their homes to improve their daily tasks. Amazon itself can’t confirm that the speaker, Echo, is wire tapped or not (Whittaker 2016).
The idea of wiretapping became a starting point in my research after watching the “bugging scene” from The Lives of Others. The word play and connection of SPY to FLY was almost immediate to me, while other forms of culture that contained bugs was brought to my attention; such as Black Mirror’s ‘Hated In The Nation’ episode of controlled drone bees and Slaves’s song ‘Sugar Coated Bitter Truth’ which opens with the lyrics “Do not trust the flies, they are government spies”. Audio birthed my project and helped me decide the medium of experimental mixed media video art, with the intention of highlighting surveillance in the city while correlating the theme of bugs, and referencing other forms of audio and visual culture pieces.
The formation of my video was opaque at the beginning and only began to take shape after countless hours of research into media culture; compiling a list of films, tv shows, documentaries, songs, youtube clips and sound effects. The research acted like a moodboard for me to pick and choose from as I made notes of specific parts such as visuals of eyes and phrases e.g. “this is for your protection.” From this, a specific vision unearthed and I could see a style of video manifesting, in the form of an artistic announcement of current issues, visually inspired by something in my subconscious of works I’ve viewed before.
I wanted to communicate the concept that we are all being watched for our “protection”, inspired from the V for Vendetta audio, that as a society we are constantly being fed ideas by political and institutional forces that surveillance is “for the good of the people”, but in actuality surveillance can be seen as a mode of punishment, to discipline and document individuals (Foucault 1991). I also wanted to communicate the voyeuristic ideals of surveillance, which came from my artist research of Sophie Calle and her unconventional approach of photographing people. Her work of Suite Venitienne, where she documents her journey following Henri B, inspired parts of my video as I incorporated the aspects of filming the backs of people as I followed them, with a black and white filter to represent a thriller-esque theme that comes with the dystopian ideas of being surveilled. Calle’s work questions what it is to be an observer and the observed, and while filming the general public and especially CCTV cameras, I put myself in the perspective of the surveilled now becoming the surveyor, fluctuating from being completely unknown to my subjects like Calle, to holding a selfie stick in the air and making the public aware of my actions. This created a contrast within my video, with some parts documenting reality, by videoing people and capturing their faces, to the constructed stalker narrative of following individuals.
From my early stage ideas of bugs, I wanted to show a unique visual perspective of a fly, inspired from flying scenes of The Acid House. I adopted unconventional methods of photography which included waving a selfie stick above people in central London, to represent the people watching narrative, while complementing the theme of overlooking and surveying the city. I also embraced and experimented with iPhone culture and the many apps on offer, such as camcorder apps for time stamped CCTV aesthetic and glitch apps with their endless possibilities. The narrative structure of the whole piece was altering throughout, but represented an informational “public announcement” style video with the statement voice overs, radio static and text.
Editing and experimentation took the most time as different creative decisions were made, requiring the trial and error of piecing my own work with visual findings, whilst also aligning them with relative audio. The decision making for editing was very sporadic and I concluded with several sections that represented different themes of surveillance cameras, stalking, birds eye view perspectives and flies. The themes and aspects of the video including the repetition and slowing down of sound and words, flashing text, bass heavy audio, harsh bleeps, cutting of eyes and overlaying of flies, creating a distorted and uncomfortable response to surveillance in the city and represents my work as transgressive, to shock and disturb the viewer.
Visiting the Tate Modern helped me envision what my work might look like in a gallery space. The digital section inspired me the most, with videos being played on old CRT TVs by artists of Nam June Paik and Harun Faracki. An ideal exhibition space would be to have a blacked out room with 9 CTR TVs stacked in rows of 3 to represent the composition of a CCTV feed, all playing at the same time with increased audio as the voice overs and sound play an important aspect in my video.
Andrejevic, M. (1964) iSpy: Surveillance and Power in The Interactive Era. University Press of Kansas
Barnard-Wills, D. (2012) Surveillance and Identity: Discourse, Subjectivity and The State. Farnham; Ashgate
Calle, S. (2015) Sophie Calle - Suite Venitienne. Siglio Press
Foucault, M. (1991) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of The Prision. London: Penguin, 1991
Phillips, S. (2010) Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and The Camera. Tate Publishing
Whittaker, Zack. (2016) “Amazon won’t say if Echo has been wiretapped”. Zdnet. Available at: http://www.zdnet.com/article/alexa-have-you-been-wiretapped-by-the-fbi/ [Accessed on 10th March 2017]
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