August 2010, Issue 3(Link Is External)
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lorem ipsum issue #, date Issue 3, August 2010 NEWT NEWS Message from the Director Issue 3, August 2010 We’re delighted to update you with this issue of NewT News. I don't have to add anything to the details. They speak for themselves. The past In this Issue: year has been an extremely busy but also satisfying one as we have seen the fruits of our research collaboration mature and flourish. The Message from the Director workshops, the books, the completed dissertations, the academic 1 advancement and other markers all exude evidence of that. I The ‘Security Games’ Workshop congratulate the team for your achievements and for your ongoing Report work, new network configurations and your commitment to both high By Adam Molnar quality research and to well-placed research communication. 2 What strikes me particularly as I write is the timely nature of our work. Exhibiting Surveillance Every week, sometimes each day, newscasts include surveillance items By Jan Allen that demand our attention and indeed, are often accompanied by 3 comment from one team member or another. In the global north, the The Surveillance Studies Summer fall-out from 9/11 continues to bolster security states and thus drive the Seminar 2009 surveillance industry. In the global south, much commercial as well as By Jimena Valdés Figueroa global north pressure is placed on countries to adopt surveillance 4 techniques as part of their modernizing drives. Some surveillance serves Publications the cause of human rights and civil liberties but much, at the present 5 - 7 time, does not. Thus the ethical and political dimensions of our research Team News and Resources become ever more critical, as seen for example in the Vancouver Statement following the recent Surveillance Games workshop. These are 7 - 9 serious challenges for academics as well as activists and finding the best Upcoming Events ways forward will once again draw on our collaborative skills and 9 wisdom. I know that you are up for it! David Lyon lorem ipsum issue #, date Issue 3, August 2010 The ‘Security Games’ Workshop Report: November 20-21, 2009, SFU Harbour Centre, Vancouver By Adam Molnar protest and associated surveillance practices in the lead- jurisdictional challenges; and up to the Vancouver 2010 Winter As the recent G8/G20 summit RCMP and CSIS “visits” to Olympic Games. The closing of unfolded into Toronto, media political critics are just a handful the workshop also presented an headlines on mega-event of the issues appearing in media opportunity to draft a collective security appears to be history and public discussions. Mega- political statement that led to repeating itself. Just five months event security issues have found considerable public crossover. following the largest peacetime new local expression, this time security operation in Canadian 3300km from the site of where The workshop opened with history, the Vancouver 2010 ‘Security Games’ Workshop Assistant Privacy Commissioner, Olympic Games was eclipsed by participants gathered to address Chantal Bernier, joined by (the the G20 operations in Toronto many of these very same issues. now former) B.C. Privacy that featured a reemergence of Commissioner David Loukidelis, familiar, though more Delivered by members of the and civil liberties advocates contentious issues: the chiding of New Transparency Project, and Micheal Vonn (BCCLA) and the exorbitant $1billion dollar in association with Simon Fraser Olympic critic Chris Shaw on the price tag for security; the uses of University’s (SFU) Centre for opening panel, setting a context new surveillance technologies Policy Research on Science and for the workshop that and their contested legal status; Technology, the ‘Security foregrounded local challenges new strategies of policing public Games’ Workshop held on involving civil liberties and November 20-21, 2009 at the SFU privacy rights at Vancouver Harbour Centre in Vancouver, 2010. Research participants were BC, presented an important able to use this local empirical opportunity for discussions on backdrop as a touchstone for security, surveillance and mega- cross-historical comparisons events. The workshop’s involving events such as Athens successes were largely 2004, Torino 2006 and the attributable to the participants’ upcoming London 2012 Summer broad range of international Games. Theoretical questions at backgrounds and involvements the workshop addressed the surrounding mega-event relation between what emerged security, including academics, as the common transnational public sector representatives, dimensions of mega-event NGO reps, and community security, such as knowledge- activists. The range of sharing in policy communities, participants and their various strategies for policing public interests were reflected through protest, the political economy of a workshop featuring a rich mega-event security with their array of theoretical and historical localized manifestations at Photo by Joan Sharpe comparisons and an art particular mega-events. Panel G: Security and Surveillance exhibition expressing the often in Vancouver 2010 powerful aesthetic dimensions The ‘Security Games’ conference related to how urban space is Left to Right: Philip Boyle, Laureen Snider, Continued on page 5 Adam Molnar and Martin French recoded through security and 2 Issue 3, August 2010 lorem ipsum issue #, date Exhibiting Surveillance features convex surveillance mirrors arranged on the wall as Braille cells spelling out 18th-century moral philosopher Adam Smith’s optimistic formulation of capitalism. Other works focus on data-capture systems. Dave Kemp’s Data Collection (2009) is a photographic grid of “portraits” of the identity cards carried in the wallets of volunteer research subjects. This project registers changing attitudes, from a conception of identity as a private object of value to be closely controlled, to identity as a network of affiliations Hidden Camera 2006, by Kathleen Ritter that is enhanced/actualized through use, permeable By Jan Allen This artist work transforms an accessory and in constant flux. Soliciting cards that into a surveillance tool represented connections to databases, Kemp Visual and media artists have kept pace with the developed this piece in affiliation with Dr Andrew emerging surveillance society, scrutinizing its Clement and the Performing Identities research social, political and aesthetic dimensions. Tapping cluster at the University of Toronto. David Rokeby’s into this phenomenon, the Agnes Etherington Art Sorting Daemon (2003) snares visual data: the images Centre, in partnership with The New of unsuspecting passersby are sent to a “theatre” Transparency, developed the exhibition Sorting where they are tugged apart to disturbingly Daemons: Art, Surveillance Regimes and Social Control. beautiful effect. Rokeby has cannily made colour his The show, featuring sixteen Canadian and system’s criterion, a choice both irrational and international artists, presented work in a range of charged in its reference to race. media, from painting and photography to responsive electronic works at this Queen’s Sorting Daemons includes a continuous-run 3-part University gallery and its sister space, the Union compilation of artists’ video spanning 1981−2004 Gallery in Kingston. Jan Allen and Sarah E.K. Smith offering an overview of surveillance-related themes, curated the exhibition, which took place from 16 from security and popular culture to self-control January to 18 April 2010. and the complex entwining of anxiety and allure that such systems entail. A 72-page illustrated Each work in Sorting Daemons is a “research” publication under the same title, with essays by Jan statement based on the artist’s response to Allen, Kirsty Robertson and Sarah E.K. Smith, was surveillance technologies and effects. Tran T. Kim- released at the launch of the exhibition in January. Trang’s astonishing 1997 video Ocularis: Eye A tour of the exhibition is now under development. Surrogates is among the most moving works in the show. The artist solicited first-person accounts of Jan Allen is the Chief Curator/Curator of Contemporary Art, Agnes individual’s experiences, perceptions and fantasies Etherington Art Centre, Queen’s University. of surveillance through a temporary 1-800 number. If you are interested in receiving more information about the travelling exhibit, The power of these at times bizarre stories is please contact Jan Allen at [email protected]. amplified by the intimacy of the unscripted recordings. In another video work, Brooklyn artist For more information about the exhibition, see: http://www.aeac.ca/exhibitions/upcoming/daemons.html Jill Magid’s Evidence Locker: Trust (2004) probes Liverpool’s famously thorough Citywatch system The show was held in conjunction with ‘Camera Surveillance in Canada: A by instigating encounters with camera operators, Research Workshop’: http://www.sscqueens.org/projects/scan/workshop/program humorously confusing the flow of authority. In a subtle but pointedly political piece, Antonia As well as the official launch of the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen’s Hirsch’s the invisible hand (after Adam Smith) (2009) University: http://www.sscqueens.org/ 3 lorem ipsum issue #, date Issue 3, August 2010 The Surveillance Studies Summer Seminar 2009 By Jimena Valdés Figueroa Well let´s talk about the Surveillance Studies Summer Seminar, which was also such an May 2009 was a very special month for me, experience! because I travelled to Kingston ON, in order to attend the Surveillance Studies Summer On