DISCIPLINE AND DESIRE: SURVEILLANCE, FEMINISM, PERFORMANCE

BY

ELISE R. MORRISON

B.A., UNIVERSITY OF OREGON, 2000

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

in

THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE STUDIES

in the department of

THEATRE ARTS AND PERFORMANCE STUDIES

at

BROWN UNIVERSITY

Providence, RI May 2011

© Copyright 2011 by Elise R. Morrison

ii CURRICULUM VITAE

Elise Morrison was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1977. She spent her childhood in Japan, Australia, and Atlanta, Georgia, and moved to Corvallis, Oregon for highschool. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree with Honors in Theatre Arts and Music from University of Oregon in 2000. Elise moved to New York City (from 1999-2004) where she participated in the development of a number of new plays through Tina Howe’s playwriting class at Hunter College (CUNY). Elise worked as an Acting Apprentice at Actor’s Theatre of Louisville for the 2001-2002 season. While enrolled in the Ph.D. program in Theatre and Performance Studies at Brown University, she has participated actively in both the scholarly and artistic activities offered by the Brown/Trinity Rep Consortium and has received multiple Creative Arts Council grants to develop new work. Elise was awarded the prestigious Brown-Wheaton Faculty Fellowship in 2009-2010, through which she developed and taught a class at Wheaton College in Norton, MA.

Her article “Witness Protection: Surveillance Technologies in Theatrical Performance” will be published in Bastard or Playmate? Adapting Theatre, Mutating Media and Contemporary Performing Arts, a special issue of Theater Topics (Amsterdam University Press) in Spring 2011. Her article “Staging the Streets: Mutability in a Military State” was published in Critical Planning: Special issue on Spatial Justice (Journal of UCLA Dept of Urban Planning) in Summer 2007. She has presented conference papers at the annual meetings of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, Performance Studies International, and the Festival of Original Theatre Conference. She is also active in the leadership of the Performance Studies Focus Group of ATHE. She is a recipient of the Joukowsky Family Foundation Dissertation Research Grant and a dissertation fellowship from the Brown University Graduate School. Elise continues to be active as a teacher and performing artist. While in graduate school, she taught courses in Theatre History, Persuasive Communication, Acting, and Surveillance, Performance, and Culture, and was nominated for the Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2009. As a practicing artist Elise has devised a number of works that explore the intersections between surveillance, performance, discipline, and feminism. Along with fellow graduate students Michelle Carriger and Molly Flynn, she created Cabaret Murderess (2007) and Mirror Stage (2008), and she has also performed several surveillance art pieces on the public thoroughfares of New York, Providence and the INTERNET. She is currently a resident artist at Perishable Theatre in Providence where she is developing a multi-media cabaret adaptation of Wedekind's LULU. She has also recently become an Associate Editor on the board of the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media. Elise is currently teaching at Harvard University as a Visiting Lecturer in Dramatic Arts.

iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Although naming my colleagues and friends here is not adequate thanks for the support they have provided over the past number of years, I wish to publicly express my deepest gratitude for the various modes of assistance, challenge, and friendship during the writing of this dissertation. From the first time I sat across from Rebecca Schneider in her office in the fall of 2003, I knew I wanted to come to Brown to study with her. Her quick wit, rigorous scholarship, sharp editorial eye, and critical associative thinking that so impressed me in our first meeting have driven me to think bigger, dig deeper, work harder, and begin again and again and again throughout the years I have spent as her advisee. Her warmth, enthusiasm, and support have kept my spirits up and my interest in my work alive and well; she has been a tremendous guide, and I am grateful for her mentorship and her friendship. I thank Patricia Ybarra for lending her historiographical expertise and pragmatism to this dissertation; she has been a model of rigor, humor, and sanity, and I cannot thank her enough for her advice and support at numerous, critical points in my graduate career. John Emigh has been a tireless and exuberant supporter of my work as a scholar and as an artist over the years; he has provided detailed and inspired feedback at several points in the writing of this thesis, and has made time to attend nearly every one of my performance projects, always giving thoughtful feedback to those endeavors as well.

Barbara Tannenbaum has been an invaluable colleague and friend; working with her has made me a stronger and more confident teacher, presenter, and communicator in all areas of my life.

My colleagues and fellow graduate students at Brown University have become my family through the best and worst of graduate school, and their support and friendship continues to spill over into life and the world beyond academia. Paige McGinley, Christian

iv DuComb, Ken Prestininzi, Katie Chavez, Pannill Camp, Molly Flynn, Michelle Carriger, Per

Janson, Christine Mok, Andrew Starner, Hans Vermy, Eleanor Skimin, Jim Dennen, Anna

Fisher, Gregory Moss, Joe Waechter, Parker Leventer, and Amanda Lahikainen, along with all of my graduate student colleagues, have shared their strength of spirit, mind, and body in more ways than I can name. Paige McGinley, in particular, has been an invaluable support as my roommate, outside eye, ‘big sister,’ and tireless cheerleader throughout this process.

Colleagues from the wider world of Theatre and Performance Studies – Jennifer Parker-

Starbuck, Gwendolyn Alker, Joseph Cermatori, Donovan Sherman, Chloe Johnston, Jon

Sherman, Harvey Young, Tracy Davis, Vanessa Gilbert, Charlotte Meehan, Tina Howe, Lisa

D’Amour, and Paula Vogel – have enriched my thinking and my work as a scholar, teacher, and performing artist.

Dear friends near and far, from past and present – Cascade Sorte, Jenny Semadeni,

Kris Dyer, Kate Umstatter, Jake Goodman, Amy Guillory, Rene Ragan, Mark Hayes, Colin

Sullivan, and Aly and Andrea Fox – have helped me maintain perspective and joy in life through and beyond graduate school; thank you all. I want to give special thanks to Brian

Samas for standing by me and learning to love me through the final stretch of this process: your quiet strength and abiding interest have given me the courage and comfort I needed to complete these chapters and to step into to the brightness of the future.

Finally, my wonderfully supportive family has been behind me through every step before, during, and after the writing of this dissertation. Time and again, my sister Laura has given me a shoulder to cry on, a fist pump to cheer me on, and a travel companion in adventures both near and far. My brother Ted and his partner Mo Essen have offered sage words of advice, lively senses of humor, and a healthy model for getting through a graduate degree without compromising your life, love, or love of life. My father Clint Morrison has

v always inspired me with his love of learning and his deep store of intellectual curiosity; he has been one of my greatest enthusiasts, supporting all my artistic and scholarly pursuits, and ending every conversation or email with the cheer to “keep spinning” my mess of straw into a room full of gold. My mother Nancy Rosenberger was the one who, quite literally, made the mold that started me on this journey; her success as a passionate academic, a caring teacher, a savvy feminist, a loving mother, and a wise friend has kept me believing that I, too, can do it all. My aunt Cynthia and uncle Paul have given me a home away from home in the Northeast, and I thank them for generously sharing their own experience as academics and their unconditional love over the years. Thank you to all of my extended family near and far, and to the previous generations of sharp minds, kind hearts, and strong spirits that have come before me.

vi TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION Camera Letters: Through the Looking Glass 1

CHAPTER ONE Surveillance Performance and Culture: Re-Visioning Discipline and Desire 34

CHAPTER TWO Witness Protection: Surveillance Technologies in Theatrical Performance 84

CHAPTER THREE User-Unfriendly: Surveillance Art as Public Intervention 123

CHAPTER FOUR Through the Looking Glass: Performing Gender in Surveillance Art 161

CHAPTER FIVE Shattering Glass: Women’s Voices in Surveillance Art 196

CONCLUSION Stepping Out: The Secret of the Looking Glass 246

BIBLIOGRAPHY 252

vii

INTRODUCTION

Camera Letters: Through the Looking Glass

Black dress, large sunglasses, a long red scarf over the head, under the chin, tossed back over the shoulders. A pair of pouty red lips and an active imagination, all trained on The Man. I am ready. Ready to Return the Gaze, Return the Real, Return the Repressed. I am ready to Re- Present and Return to Sender, A Dress Unknown. Is any body there? My body, here, begs the question of you, the hidden laborer, hidden watcher, hidden disciplinarian who already has a home through the looking glass in my head. Do you copy? Copy-right, copy-left, copy this: Through the looking glass I ask, if we both play the roles we’ve been assigned, but this time with a twist, will the script fall apart? Will the house crumble and fall? Will they want their money back? I am hungry for answers, you are hungry for my image. I step into the frame, and ask again, “Is Anyone Watching?”

In October 2006, I embarked on the inaugural run of my surveillance art project

Camera Letters: Through the Looking Glass. I dressed as an “International Woman of Mystery,” fashioning my “look” after a conglomeration of glamorous femme fatales from the silver screen, at once given to be seen, and kept from being known. My mission was to script myself into a letter that I could send to anyone who might be on the other side of CCTV surveillance cameras around New York City. As my series of signboards announced – “Is

Anyone Watching?” “What is life like on your end of the camera?” “Please Write Back!”

“Your friend, [email protected]” – my goal was to solicit correspondence from the other side of the lens to the email address [email protected].

1 I sent over 50 camera letters in two days, targeting roughly 30 private corporation cameras, 5 UN cameras, 4 New York City Transit Authority cameras, and 12 NYPD cameras. In Camera Letters I wanted not only to “send” letters through the surveillance cameras, but, by performing on the public thoroughfares of New York, to highlight the usually invisible relationship between the passerby and the ubiquitous surveillance cameras lining the streets. I wanted to re-imagine the productive power of the surveillance apparatus, to challenge the received notion that surveillance cameras can only function in one direction, to make visible the hidden labor upon which state and corporate video surveillance in urban public space relies, and to connect the laborers on both ends of the looking glass of contemporary surveillance.

While I received quite a few emails to [email protected], to my knowledge none of them came from someone on the other end of the camera. Did this mean that no one was watching? Or that surveillance guards are too dedicated to their jobs to break their role in the architecture of surveillance? These questions remain unanswered, but the emails that I did receive, most of them sent from BlackBerrys and other wireless internet devices, revealed another vital audience that the project had reached. Whenever I stopped to send another camera letter, a group of passersby would inevitably stop to gather, looking back and forth between me and the camera I addressed. I have come to believe that this audience was at least as and perhaps even more important than the audience of surveillance guards I initially intended to reach. The people who gathered around me stepped out of their routines of passing by, however briefly, to join me in re-imagining the form and function of surveillance in public space.

Moreover, Camera Letters highlighted a critical aspect of my own experience and desire under the gaze of surveillance. I appeared before the surveillance cameras of New

2 York as a Mysterious Woman, wearing a costume both to attract attention and to protect my own identity. I wanted to twist the classic role of the femme fatale who poses for the camera with studied non-chalance, looking like I “should” but behaving like I “shouldn’t.” Over the two days that I walked the streets with my camera-ready signboards, I felt intoxicated by the way I looked and was looked at; I was acutely aware of myself viewed from above, picturing my image caught in the viewfinders of the surveillance cameras I addressed. My boyfriend at the time accompanied me for most of the project, acting as my photographer. “You look like you’re flirting,” he remarked at one point as I turned away from a camera outside a midtown hotel. I realized that I was flirting, trying to catch the eye of another, who, regardless of gender, was figured as “The Man,” the classic male gaze of visual culture. In my direct address of state and corporate surveillance, I was seeking to catch the desirous gaze within the disciplinary one.

A Small History of Surveillance Art

Camera Letters is an example of an emergent genre of contemporary art and performance that I am calling “surveillance art,” defined here as theatre, installation, and performance art works that stage and engage with material technologies and techniques of surveillance. Since performing my first surveillance art piece back in 2006, I have become fascinated with the wide variety of ways in which surveillance artists tactically utilize and reconfigure commercially available technologies of surveillance in order to create new and different ways of interacting with and understanding contemporary surveillance society. By appropriating surveillance technologies from military, state, and consumer markets into public and private spaces of performance and interactive installation, surveillance artists re- contextualize these technologies and the power dynamics that historically attend them,

3 provoking critical inquiry of the disciplinary function and human-technology interface of surveillance.

As of 2010 there is already a wide range of surveillance art being performed in a variety of contexts ranging from national theatres, art galleries, political protests, academic and corporate conferences, quotidian urban spaces, and online websites. Such groups as The

Surveillance Camera Players, the Institute for Applied Autonomy, The Builder’s Association,

Blast Theory, and the Shunt Collective and artists as Sophie Calle, Jill Magid, Steve Mann,

Janet Cardiff, Mona Hatoum, Giles Walker, and Edit Kaldor stage performances and interactive installations that show up, critique, and/or re-structure dominant surveillance technologies and techniques. The increased popularity and visibility of surveillance art works is also evidenced in the growing number of visual art installations curated around the theme of surveillance techniques and technologies. These include “ctrl[space]” (ZKM,

2001), “Anxious Omniscience: Surveillance and Contemporary Cultural Practice" (Princeton

University Art Musuem, 2002), and Open_Source_Art_Hack (New Museum of

Contemporary Art, 2002), “Balance and Power: Performance and Surveillance in Video Art,”

(Urbana-Champaign’s Krannert Art Museum, 2005), “On Patrol” (De Appel, Amsterdam

2005).

In the process of exploring the growing array of surveillance art pieces, many of which are analyzed in this dissertation, I found myself returning to several central questions that haunted me from the first moment I stood on a street corner and raised my sign board to an audience of beady-eyed surveillance cameras. How can individual performances of surveillance art make a lasting impact within our contemporary moment of increasingly ubiquitous surveillance? Can surveillance technologies be used as tools with which to challenge and critique the monolithic systems of discipline and control that the self-same

4 technologies have been used to build? How can individual acts of theatre and performance intervene in the expansive networks of contemporary surveillance systems? What is the place of surveillance art within the history of surveillance? What is its place in the history of theatre and of performance? How do changing practices in watching and being watched, heralded by new technologies of surveillance and information exchange, influence habits of representation and reception in theatre and performance? Do we have a desire for discipline, even as structures of surveillance discipline our desire? What forms of desire attend practices of surveillance? What is the relationship between the so-called ‘male gaze’ of visual culture and the so-called ‘disciplinary gaze’ of surveillance?1 Is there a desirous as well as disciplinary gaze attending and shaping practices of surveillance?

As a scholar and practitioner, I have struggled with and rejoiced in these questions regarding the efficacy, scope, and strategies of surveillance art as a genre. Over time, even as my queries have become increasingly complex and intertwined, I have begun to find some answers. My initial questions began to become clear to me, at least in theory, when I re-read

1 In “Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema” (first published in 1975, reprinted in Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), Laura Mulvey argued that classic Hollywood cinema, and in particular the female body within Hollywood films, is constructed according to a ‘male gaze,’ producing images and narratives that cater to and reinforce a masculine, heteronormative rhetoric of desire. As Mulvey put it, “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly” (Visual Pleasures, 19). The ‘male gaze’ came to be an important critical term for second wave feminist film theorists who, like Mulvey, were concerned with the internalization of such a gaze (and attendant rhetoric of desire) by cinematic spectators, regardless of the spectator’s gender. The notion of a ‘disciplinary gaze’ was first articulated by Jeremy Bentham, the 18th century founder of Utilitarianism, in his theoretical design of the Panopticon. In this famous prison design inmates would be constantly under surveillance by a visible but unverifiable gaze, the conditions of which would eventually cause them to internalize the behavioral expectations of that gaze. See Michel Foucault’s 1977 analysis of Bentham’s Panopticon and the disciplinary gaze of surveillance from the 18th century onward in Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 173-177, 200-209.

5 Walter Benjamin’s “A Small History of Photography” with these questions in mind. In this

1931 essay, much like his later “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”

Benjamin takes up the enduring and complex question of the relationship between representational technologies and the making of history. For Benjamin, photography could be put to positive or negative cultural uses; the medium could be used to monumentalize objects and moments, securing history as a series overarching, naturalized, and even Fascist events. Or, in the hands of photographers such as Atget, the camera could be used to “pass by the great sights and the so-called landmarks” to focus instead on the details of everyday living that are often overlooked and forgotten in the making of history.2 In other words, photography had a split capacity: to reproduce scenes that were already culturally legible, adhering to the dictates of social and political norms, or to capture and reveal the radically specific detail that “punctures” the placid surface of normalized vision and behavior.3

The historical moment in which Benjamin was analyzing the uses of photography held some important parallels, I sensed, with the contemporary conditions under which surveillance artists were working. In 1931, with the invention of modern photography nearly a century old and a range of snapshot cameras firmly in the grasp of thousands of amateur photographers,4 Benjamin’s essay acknowledged the simultaneous gifts and threats posed by

2 Walter Benjamin, “A Small History of Photography,” in One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans by Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: New Left Books, 1979), 250. 3 Benjamin’s construction of the hegemonic scene (recognizable for its adherence to cultural norms and dictates of large scale policies) versus the detail (that which stands out as radically specific and contradictory) in photography is mirrored by Roland Barthes’ notion of the ‘studium’ and the ‘punctum.’ See Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 25-28. 4 Self-capping shutters, a mechanism that was always closed except when the shutter was triggered and which consequently gave rise to the term ‘snapshopt’ in photography, were introduced in the 1880s and quickly used to develop new amateur hand-held and 'detective' cameras. The most popular model was the Kodak ‘Brownie,’ which was released onto the consumer market in 1900; the Brownie sold for a dollar and was marketed as so easy to use

6 the medium of photography to the recording of social and political life. In 2010, surveillance technologies have come to be familiar, widespread, and used in a range of quotidian transactions; surveillance cameras, gps tracking devices, and a host of other digital surveillance gadgets are available to the everyday consumer. The risks of corporate and state control through digital surveillance systems that track and monitor transactions are tempered or even eclipsed by the benefits many see in the freedoms of the internet, such as online shopping, ATM’s, locating old highschool friends via Facebook, or watching the newest

Reality TV show.

‘Surveillance society,’ which has come to be a common term, was coined in 1985 by sociologist Gary T. Marx to describe the rapidly increasing permeation of state and military technologies and techniques of surveillance into social and cultural spheres.5 As a practice and metaphor, surveillance has emerged in a variety of cultural instances, ranging from

Reality TV, social software systems like Facebook and MySpace, cell phone and PDA technologies, and personal security devices such as nanny cams and digital spyware. A quick glance at any in-flight magazine will reveal that surveillance technologies are ready to aid and

that even the youngest family member could take a perfect picture. See “Brownie Camera Features” by Kodak, last accessed August 25, 2010, http://www.kodak.com/US/en/corp/features/brownieCam/, and “The Kodak Brownie” by the Franklin Institute, last accessed August 25, 2010, http://www.fi.edu/learn/sci- tech/kodak-brownie/kodak-brownie.php?cts=photography-recreation. 5 In “The Surveillance Society: The Threat of 1984-Style Techniques,” Gary T. Marx wrote “…lasers, parabolic mikes, sub-miniature tape recorders, remote camera systems, viedeotapes, periscopic prisms, sensor and tracking devices, heat-sensing imaging devices that can tell if a house is occupied, voice analyzers, light-amplifying night vision devices, and techniques for reading mail without breaking the seal are among the new devices…[which can] send information to a central source, permitting a few persons to monitor a great many… Today’s surveillance society can prod even deeper into physical, social and personal areas. It hears whispers and penetrates walls, windows, clouds, and darkness. The categorical monitoring associated with video cameras, metal detectors, … and the computer are creating a society in which everyone, not just a few suspects, is a target for surveillance” (1985: 22-24).

7 entertain the amateur sleuth in any number of quotidian undercover missions. Through

SkyMall, one can purchase a “Locate I: a hidden wireless GPS [that] tracks anything that moves – your car or your kid…or your kid in your car!”6 Also available for suspicious consumers is a “Tracking Key” that, once hidden in a spouse or significant other’s car, uses an “internal computer [that] accurately determines the location of the device within 2.5 meters and records this data every second.” The “Giggle Bug Toddler Tracker,” which is a gps-embedded plastic ladybug clip that can be attached to a child’s backpack or shirt, advertises that “peace of mind is only a beep away, thanks to the Giggle Bug!” Provided that one can afford the price of entry into this ever-expanding market of consumer surveillance – the devices mentioned here range from $19.99 (Giggle Bug) to $499.95 (Locate I) – the everyday citizen can actively participate in the work of watching and being watched.

Even though these gadgets are marketed to the individual consumer as ‘made’ for his or her particular needs, such surveillance devices are in fact miniature representations of much larger systems of surveillance. A few years ago I purchased my own personal surveillance kit – for serious performance-based reasons, of course – and I can still recall my amazement at how clearly the device reflected dominant ideologies of discipline. The kit, advertised as a “Do-it-Yourself (DIY) Security kit: Real and Imitation Camera Monitoring

System,” features a 5.5 inch black and white monitor, two real (functioning) surveillance cameras, and two imitation (non-functioning) surveillance cameras. These are a few of the

“Tips for using the Swann DIY Security Kit” featured in the manual:

• Deterrence is the best and most cost effective security method: The Swann DIY Security Kit is an example of cost effective security utilizing the ‘art of deterrence’ to outsmart thieves and criminals • Position cameras and dummies where they can be easily seen for maximum deterrence

6 As seen in SkyMall Magazine, (SkyMall Inc.) November 2006.

8 • Add extra dummy cameras to give the impression of heightened security • Position VCR tapes or boxes close to the monitor for added effect, implying there is a security video recorder even if there isn’t one7

The kit, purchased from the mainstream catalogue of B&H Photography, embodies more clearly than several pages of theory could that the ideology of Jeremy Bentham’s notorious 1779 Panopticon is alive and well in the current consumer culture of surveillance technologies. Bentham’s functional monument to surveillance, which Michel Foucault famously theorized as the ur-model of modern surveillance systems, mapped perfectly onto my inexpensive little surveillance kit. I was perturbed at how completely the kit interpellated its user into the overarching ideology of surveillance, virtually unchanged since the 18th century. Why was so small and dispersed a technology functioning, automatically it seemed, as an agent for something so huge, so far reaching and monolithic?

Suddenly, a particular word in Benjamin’s title leapt out at me, arresting my eyes in a way it never had before. This word – small – which I had previously assumed was an explanation of the brevity of his essay (indeed, it has more often been translated as ‘short’ or

‘brief’ instead of ‘small’), insistently pointed out the importance of scale in the making of history, and moreover, in the scale of the history being made. I became acutely aware on one hand of large, capital H History – the History of Bentham’s Panopticon and the History of

Hitler’s Third Reich – and, on the other, of small, lower-case ‘h’ histories that could record alternative, multiple, and even subversive accounts of techno-human interactions. “A Small

History of Photography” suggests that while the camera could function as an agent of large,

7 Swann Security. “Security Tips that really work!” Swann DIY Security Kit User Manual (SW244-SK1), received May 2007.

9 Fascist History,8 it could also function as a tool with which to stubbornly carve out small, everyday, alternative versions of history.

Amidst the poetic lamentations over loss of aura within processes of mechanical reproduction, which are more often taken as the salient points of Benjamin’s writings on photography, I saw that Benjamin was articulating his profound hope that photography could, in fact, have a small history. He believed that photography did not have to be a tool for the totalizing forces of capitalism and Fascism; instead, it could reveal the small details that hide within and oppose the monumental. Benjamin’s bitter critiques of the induction of photography into the sphere of commerce, advertising, and political propaganda, were driven by his political opposition to use of photography to make large History that covered over individual traumas. Conversely, his approval of Atget’s attention to a row of unlaced boots, an empty Paris courtyard, or dinner tables, empty save for the yet to be cleared dishes, was motivated by his belief that photography could make visible the valuable labor and even political power within small, individual details of everyday life.

In his 1940 “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin describes a “state of emergency” that must be recognized and recorded by individual citizens in order to fight the horrors of Fascism, which “in the name of progress” are treated “as a historical norm.” 9 He

8 As Susan Sontag astutely notes in her 1975 essay “Fascinating Fascism,” the aesthetics and architecture of Fascism involve huge, larger than life structures that dwarf and overwhelm the individual human subject in order to exert total control (republished in Under the Sign of Saturn, New York: Picador, 1980: 86-88).

9 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Walter Benjamin Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Pantheon, 1968), 257. “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical

10 insists that the (capital H) History being produced and naturalized by Fascist Governments must be countered by individuals and small collectives committed to using alternative history-making techniques. A small history of photography, and photography deployed in the interests of a small history, Benjamin implied, could document, represent, and enact radical social and political resistance by a wide range of users. It could combat the totalizing force of large scale Histories and, as Benjamin puts it, “bring about a real state of emergency… [that] will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism.”10

In order to make and record a ‘small history’ of photography, Benjamin advocated for Marxist materialist tactics in photography that, through “the illumination of detail” could set a scene of “estrangement between man and his surroundings.”11 As a proponent of formalist and materialist uses of technology, Benjamin applied the theories of his friend and fellow socialist Bertolt Brecht, asserting the value of tactics of “unmasking” and conscious

“construction” within representational media.12 With his practical theories of defamiliarization and estrangement, Brecht aimed to reframe and make visible previously obscured devices of representation in theatre in order to effectively show up the normalized blind spots and fascist ideologies within Realist theatre. Benjamin, like Brecht, insisted that the tactical use (and abuse) of representational technologies was a political act, and photography and theatre could be used towards either fascist or revolutionary ends. The photographic capacity for representation and reproduction could be used to highlight and

norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are 'still' possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge-- unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.”

10 Benjamin, “Philosophy of History,” 257. 11 Benjamin, “Small History,” 251. 12 In “A Small History of Photography,” Benjamin cites Brecht, along with the Surrealists, constructivist photography, and Russian film as examples of tactical estrangement (255).

11 critique fascist portraiture, advertising, and photojournalism that were already widely practiced in the 1930’s.13

Benjamin’s message was a cautionary one that presaged the introduction of technologies of capture into ever expanding capitalist structures of economic and political power. Surveillance photography can be used to capture and hold that which will be included in History as either permissible or criminal. At the same time, surveillance technologies can also be employed in the services of a small history, functioning as tools with which to document a multitude of alternative ‘truths’ and to thereby destabilize the stronghold on Truth and History sought by large-scale governments and sprawling consolidations of capitalist power.14 On one hand, state and corporate entities use surveillance to amass information, track, and control consumers and social subjects, while on the other, artists and activists employ surveillance technologies to show-up, reconfigure and challenge totalizing systems of dataveillance and normalized discipline.

While I am hesitant to fully invoke Benjamin’s ‘state of emergency’ to describe our current surveillance society, I have come to think of surveillance art as a means of writing and enacting a vital small history of surveillance. As an especially valuable outgrowth of contemporary surveillance society, surveillance art both participates in and critiques the ways in which techniques and technologies of surveillance have become deeply integrated into the experiences and aesthetics of everyday social life. Many surveillance artists engage performance-based materialist critiques, such as those practiced and recommended by

Brecht and Benjamin, in order to intervene in and critically re-frame techniques and

13 Benjamin, “Small History,” 252-55. 14 For example, groups such as Copwatch use video and photography to document and bring to justice incidents of police brutality against everyday subjects. See Laura Huey, “Cop Watching in the Downtown Eastside,” in Surveillance and Security, ed. Torin Monahan (Routledge: New York, 2006), 149-166.

12 technologies of surveillance, working to make visible, and thereby available for critique, naturalized blind spots in the quotidian interface of surveillance.

As part of enacting a materialist approach, surveillance artists frequently employ the strategy of defamiliarization, a central precept in materialist critique and technique.

Defamiliarization was first coined in 1917 by Viktor Shklovsky in his essay “Art as

Technique,” to describe a literary strategy by which artful or poetic language can be made to appear strange and unfamiliar to the reader; as he put it, “Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.”15

By using defamiliarization as a tactic of representation, artists could thereby challenge habits, expectations, and “over-automatization” in reception of literature. Theatre practitioners and theorists, such as Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht, soon applied this theory to theatre making, using formalist, materialist strategies to re-frame familiar gestures, scenes, and narratives as new and unfamiliar, thus opening a cognitive space for refreshed consideration and critique. Similarly, surveillance artists create performance events in which audiences can pause and consider contradictory aspects of surveillance society, providing a valuable space of critique amidst the dizzying, imbricated risks and benefits of watching and being watched.

The Surveillance Camera Players (SCP), whose work I explore in Chapter Three, have been creating performances that defamiliarize physical and psychological relationships between social subjects and surveillance cameras for over a decade. The SCP builds performances that directly address surveillance cameras with news of a coffee break, text from George Orwell’s 1984, or with requests to a church surveillance camera that God see

15 Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 12.

13 them. In doing so, the SCP breaks the normal rhythm of pedestrian traffic on city streets, causing passersby to stop and look anew at the surveillance cameras dotting their urban landscape. Their performances not only make visible the techno-human interface between surveillance cameras and passersby in urban centers, they also suggest alternative uses for these interfaces, using the security cameras as a potential means of two-way communication and empathetic relationships, rather than only one-way discipline.

In doing so, the SCP rehearse a materialist approach to surveillance technologies, deliberately counteracting the more rigid standpoint of technological determinism, which assumes that technologies can and should only be used for the purposes they were originally designed. Taking a materialist standpoint to the history of surveillance technologies, techno- cultural theorist Manuel de Landa points out that technological and commercial developers have frequently expanded the uses of surveillance technologies far beyond their initial applications. Whereas the Internet was originally developed as a means of coded communication for government officials during the Cold War, the World Wide Web has overwhelmingly come to be a means of social, cultural, and economic communication and transaction.16 Proliferating websites such as youtube.com or googlevideo, alternative news- sites such as democraticunderground.com, americanfreepress.net, and drudgereport.com, and any number of personal blogs allow users to rapidly broadcast and exchange a wide range of viewpoints and accounts, radically augmenting mainstream versions of local and world events. Similarly, surveillance artists such as the SCP have reconfigured the ‘use- value’ of surveillance cameras, which have most commonly been represented and marketed

16 Manuel de Landa, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 179-182.

14 as a technologies that function as ‘one-way’ receivers of information rather than ‘two-way’ broadcasters of communication.

Other surveillance artists capitalize on co-present relationships between audience and performers that characterize theatrical performance in order to re-interpret the form and function of surveillance in everyday life. Projects such as the Shunt Collective’s Contains

Violence and Edit Kaldor’s Point Blank, which I explore in Chapter Two, stage live events that are focused on the scale of their particular audience in a given space and time, utilizing theatre and performance traditions to re-enliven and reframe large-scale techniques and technologies of surveillance. In doing so, Contains Violence and Point Blank illustrate the capacity of surveillance theatre to performatively critique the totalizing scale of contemporary dataveillance. At the same time, introducing surveillance technologies into a theatrical frame provocatively defamiliarizes habits of representation and reception in theatre, re-framing habits of spectatorship to which theatre-goers have become so accustomed that they are overlooked. By overlaying surveillant and theatrical media, surveillance theatre productions such as these defamiliarize the concept and experience of watching and being watched.

Brechtian materialist tactics used by these surveillance artists to prompt audiences to see events, objects, and bodies in new ways have likewise been central to feminist criticism and practice.17 While the majority of the surveillance artists I write about do not self-identify as feminist, many of them employ tactics similar to those used earlier by feminist artists in

17 Feminist performance theorist Jill Dolan describes ‘materialist feminism’ as an “apparatus-based theory and practice” that effectively emphasizes the repressive and exclusionary production of gender through a focus on the traditional architecture of representation and reception in theatre. Dolan promotes a materialist approach to theatre making and spectatorship, arguing that “when the representational apparatus is foregrounded, its once mystified ideology becomes clear.” See Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988), 14-15.

15 film and theatre to critique and unsettle the invisible, naturalized processes of what film theorist Laura Mulvey termed the “determining male gaze” of visual culture.18 I am particularly interested in a kind of ‘return’ of a feminist line of inquiry in surveillance art that does not draw explicit allegiances to feminism, but that is implicitly in conversation with feminist approaches to defining, critiquing, and building alternatives to a patriarchal gaze in visual culture. The works of Jill Magid, Sophie Calle, and Mona Hatoum, among other gender-focused surveillance artists, reflect tactics and concepts articulated in feminist theory, mobilizing Elin Diamond’s theorization of “gestic feminist criticism,”19 and Judith Butler’s notions of “parodic repetition” and the “possibility of a failure to repeat” within the performativity of gender.20 By implicitly referring to feminist definitions and deployments of a ‘male gaze’ in visual culture, these artists elucidate complex ways in which the ‘disciplinary gaze’ of surveillance in turn disciplines desire and fosters a desire for discipline.

As such, surveillance art can prompt critical inquiry into the ways in which dominant surveillance systems function as what Teresa de Lauretis, writing about the capital H

Hollywood cinema industry, would call a ‘technology of gender.’ In Technologies of Gender

(1987), Teresa de Lauretis reformulated Foucault’s concept of ‘technologies of sex’ from his

History of Sexuality (1978) in order to address the short-comings in his theory of cultural discipline, arguing that he did not pay enough attention to the ways in which ‘technologies of sex’ address men and women differently. This is to say that, as valuable as Foucault’s contributions to the study of surveillance have been, his widely read theorizations of

18 Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, 19. 19 Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis, (London: Routledge, 1997), 82-94. Diamond also theorizes this practice as a kind of critical feminist mimesis in “Mimesis, Mimicry, and the ‘True-Real’,” Modern Drama 32.1 (1989). 20 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 192.

16 discipline, punishment, and sexuality need to be interrogated by ‘small’ histories of gender performance in surveillance art.

The (Over)-Looking Glass

While curators, critics, and the artists themselves have contextualized surveillance art works as critical aesthetic responses to contemporary socio-political surveillance, surveillance art has, as of yet, been under-theorized as a genre. Surveillance, performance, and feminist theorists have touched upon issues central to surveillance art, but only a few have reached across disciplinary boundaries to explore the intersections between surveillance, performance, and feminism. Moreover, within discourses of mixed media performance, surveillance, and feminism surveillance art has not been explicitly or deeply theorized as a means by which to analyze and critique the gendered and gendering gaze of surveillance technologies.

On the whole, scholars and practitioners working in surveillance studies have not yet seriously examined the specialized labor of surveillance artists, such as the Institute for

Applied Autonomy and the Surveillance Camera Players, who work to critique and disrupt state and corporate surveillance networks. Capital ‘H’ histories of surveillance have been written by Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, David Lyon, Oscar Gandy, and James Rule, among others. Within the discourse of contemporary surveillance theory, only David Brin

(1998) has emphasized the importance of amateur consumer-users who work to intervene in contemporary networks of surveillance. Employing the biological metaphor of ‘t-cells,’ Brin describes amateur surveillance networks that function in dispersed and cellular form to correct social and political oversight (intentional or accidental) that occurs as a result of asymmetrical access to informational networks and data gleaned from socio-political

17 surveillance.21 However, while Brin describes a few examples of ‘informational t-cells,’ citing online blogs and alternative news sites, his analysis does not address the substantial body of art and performance that has critically challenged the flows of information and power dynamics of contemporary surveillance networks. My dissertation aims to address this gap by identifying and analyzing some of the ways in which surveillance artists use their expertise in engineering and performance to expose, disrupt and build alternatives to networks of surveillance information.

Moreover, although cultural theories of surveillance share concerns with feminist theory regarding the disciplinary effects of a dominant gaze on social bodies and behaviors, the effects of such a gaze on the category of gender has been under-represented and over- looked in surveillance studies. Many surveillance theorists fundamentally misread gender in the context of surveillance, claiming that surveillance has an ‘equalizing effect’ in regard to gender difference because, as prominent surveillance theorist David Lyon puts it, it “exposes men to an uncomfortable degree of scrutiny… all too familiar to women.”22 Histories of surveillance tend to analyze developments in techniques and technologies of surveillance through the lens of post-colonial theory.23 Contemporary theories, such as Lyon’s ‘panoptic

21 David Brin, The Transparent Society: will technology force us to choose between privacy and freedom? (Reading, MA : Addison-Wesley, 1998), 131-137. As Brin describes, T-cells function as ‘deputies’ within the body, detecting the myriad of potential perils and odd behaviors of invader or other native cells. They “drift randomly toward each new danger zone” and this form of defense works remarkably well for the health of the body (134). Brin links the idea of T-cells to the necessity of criticism in society as a reliable antidote to error. Online alternative media groups, or groups such as “Cop Watch,” are critical to the health of society. 22 David Lyon, Surveillance Society: Monitoring in Everyday Life (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2001), 20. 23 See James Rule, Private Lives and Public Surveillance (London: Allen Lane, 1973); Gary T. Marx Undercover: Police Surveillance in America (University of California Press, 1988), and Christian Parenti’s The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America from Slavery to the War on Terror (New York: Basic Books, 2003).

18 sort’ and Wood and Graham’s ‘differential mobility’ discussed in Chapter One, are likewise more substantially concerned with issues of racial profiling and economic discrimination in state and corporate surveillance. While attention to race, economics, and colonialism is by no means unmerited, these studies do not consider surveillance as a ‘technology of gender’ with important ramifications on the formation of gendered identity and representations of gender difference.

Various feminist theorists have responded to and critiqued the categorical exclusion of gender from analyses of surveillance, from Foucauldian disciplinary societies to Deleuzian societies of control. In addition to de Lauretis’ critique in Technologies of Gender, feminist theorists such as Meaghan Morris (1988), Griselda Pollock (1994), and Monique Deveaux

(1999) have revisited Foucault and disciplinary society through the lens of gender studies and feminism. More recently Hille Koskela’s work on gender and power relations in urban space critically addresses issues of gendered violence, fear, and surveillance in contemporary societies of control.24 I join these feminist theorists in advancing the field of techno- feminism, taking their critiques into new territory as I explicitly frame surveillance within performance-based practices of visual representation.

In doing so, I draw and expand significantly on the work of second wave feminist film theorists such as de Lauretis, Mary Ann Doane (1987), Kaja Silverman (1988), and

Laura Mulvey (1977). As I described above, the definition and deployment of a widely disseminated ‘male gaze,’ and its effects upon female performers and spectators, has been foundational to ongoing feminist criticism of and alternatives to film, television, photography, theatre, and performance dominated by patriarchal ideology. In this study, I apply feminist definitions of the ‘male gaze’ to surveillance art, explicitly framing surveillance

24 See Hille Koskela “Video surveillance, gender and the safety of public urban space: “Peeping Tom” goes high tech?” Urban Geography 23:3 (2002), 257–278.

19 as a visual system of representation dominated by mainstream heteronormative patterns of desire. By applying a feminist lens to the work of contemporary surveillance artists, I hope to contribute a deeper understanding of surveillance as a technology of gender and a gendered technology.

Surveillance art offers a new model for feminist performance that resonates most directly with feminist theory from the older, so-called ‘second wave’ of feminism, hailing from continental, British, and American feminists in the 1970’s and 80’s. As described above, the critiques of vision, fetishization, and the gaze developed within that period of feminism are imperative to understanding the form and function of the gendered and gendering gaze of surveillance. In contrast, more recent feminist discourse has, for better or worse, become less focused on theorizing a disciplinary and/or patriarchal ‘gaze,’ as digital culture and techno-feminism has tended to move away from theorizing vision as a primary determining factor of gender. Donna Haraway (1991), Margaret Morse (2005), Judith

Wajcman (2004), and Sue Ellen Case (1996) have offered valuable analyses of gender in relation to technological changes brought about by the digital age, posing provocative questions about how the body is destabilized in the overlapping regimes of information in virtual space. 25 However, within these feminist discourses that are temporally closer to many of the surveillance art works I study, the potential for alliances between surveillance, as

25 In her 1991 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), Donna Haraway uses the cyborg metaphor to deconstruct binaries of control and lack of control over the female body. The cyborg functions as a hybrid concept that Haraway uses to move feminist discourse beyond formulations of women and gender that are reduced to the body. Similarly, Margaret Morse has written about the radical potential of the cyborg to “rewrite” the interface between human and machine, creating new formulations of embodiment and radical feminist subject formations. See Margaret Morse, “Sunshine and Shroud: Cyborg Bodies and the Collective and Personal Self,” in Cyborg Bodies, ed. Jennifer John and Yvonne Volkart (Leipzig: ZKM, MedienKunstNetz, 2005).

20 a representational media conditioned by a disciplinary gaze, and feminism has become, oddly, less apparent. As I am committed to interrogating surveillance as a representational medium that, like film, television, photography, and theatre, is part of and party to norms and habits of visual culture, I have thus found my analyses of surveillance society and art staging a ‘return’ to ‘second wave’ feminist discourses.

Although I do employ the term ‘second wave’ as convenient shorthand to group certain theorists and categorize trends within feminist discourse, I find the ‘wave’ model problematic because it implies that second wave feminist critiques of gendered and gendering vision have, like an oceanic swell, risen and receded from contemporary cultural discourse. Ednie Kaeh Garrison’s 1995 essay “Are We on a Wave Length Yet?” offers an alternative to the oceanographic wave model and its inherent problems. In place of this oceanographic wave model, Garrison proposes a metaphor of radio waves or wavelengths.26

She suggests that radio wavelengths can help us conceptualize multiple forms of feminism occurring simultaneously. Just as there are different wavelengths we can tune into, there are different modes of activism and critique we can engage. In light of Garrison’s re- formulation of the historicization of feminist discourse, I attempt to portray various ‘waves’ of feminism not as peaks and troughs that can be graphed on a timeline, but instead as radio waves, dispersing across time and space in an ongoing transmission.

My work in this dissertation is also indebted to and inspired by increasingly robust discourses of mixed media and digital performance. Recent studies such as Jay Bolter and

Richard Grusin’s Remediation (2000), Steve Dixon’s Digital Performance (2007), Gabriella

Giannacchi’s Virtual Theatres (2004), and Greg Giesekam’s Staging the Screen (2007), have

26 Ednie Kaeh Garrison, in Different Wavelengths: Studies of the Contemporary Women’s Movement, ed. Jo Reger (London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group: 2005), 243-45.

21 described and interrogated the increasingly popular practice of incorporating emergent technologies of sound and music, virtual reality, video and digital media, web casting and email dialogue into theatre and performance. As these techno-performance theorists are careful to note, the inclusion of new technologies and forms of media in theatre is not a new phenomenon. Artistic creators from the fields of dance, theatre, film, and digital media have long experimented with overlapping methods and technologies in order to build innovative performance forms and experiences.27 And yet, the study of mixed media performance – and surveillance art in particular – has been galvanized by the rate at which contemporary theatre artists are integrating new technologies and forms of information exchange into theatrical spaces and conventions in order to respond to particularly rapid techno-social changes in the late 20th/early 21st centuries. Within mixed media performance, theatrical space becomes a particularly valuable site in which contemporary habits of viewing different forms of media

(eg, film, live performance, email, surveillance footage) are put in overlapping and contestational relation to each other.

Led by Donna Harraway and her 1991 “Cyborg Manifesto,” a robust study of digital media and performance has also emerged within contemporary feminism, focusing on representations of gender and the body within the expanding field of digital technologies.

Sue-Ellen Case’s The Domain Matrix: Performing Lesbian at the End of Print Culture, Margaret

Morse’s “Sunshine and Shroud: Cyborg Bodies and the Collective and Personal Self,” and

Judy Wajcman’s TechnoFeminism, among others, have written critical histories of the relationship between gender and technology, and developed theories of an emerging

27 See Steve Dixon, Digital Performance (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 37-46; and Greg Geisekam, Staging the Screen: The Use of Film and Video in Theatre (London: Palgrave, 2007), 5-6.

22 ‘techno-feminism.’28 However, neither techno-feminist theorists nor digital performance theorists look directly or exclusively at surveillance technologies as representational media within digital culture.

While mixed media and digitial performance theorists examine many issues that are also applicable and important to surveillance art, such as appropriation of new technology into performance, overlapping habits of representation and reception within and between media, and new models of embodiment within virtual space, surveillance art brings a unique set of socio-political and technological issues into the space of performance. As surveillance artists integrate new and familiar surveillance technologies into spaces of performance

(which range from theatres, galleries, or found spaces in the urban landscape), they submit the disciplinary function of the surveillant gaze and the evidentiary status of surveillance data to the complex and slippery processes of representation and reception that characterize theatrical frameworks.

As I explore at greater length in the following chapters, representational practices within theatre and live performance depend upon metonymic relations between performing bodies and their referents, as actors, props, and sets within the theatre reference but do not fully become external events, gestures, and conditions of the ‘real world’ outside the theatre.29

28 Sue-Ellen Case, The Domain Matrix: Performing Lesbian at the End of Print Culture, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996); Margaret Morse, “Sunshine and Shroud: Cyborg Bodies and the Collective and Personal Self,” in Cyborg Bodies, ed. Jennifer John and Yvonne Volkart (Leipzig: ZKM, MedienKunstNetz, 2005); Judith Wajcam, TechnoFeminism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004). 29 Performance theorists Erika Fischer-Lichte and Janelle Reinelt have described theatre as a system of inter-related signs and referents. Fischer-Lichte writes of theatre as the production of “signs of signs” (“Theatricality: A Key Concept in Theatre and Cultural Studies,” Theatre research international 20.2, 1995: 85), while Reinelt points out that the play of signs is a fundamental process of theatricality: “spectators must perceive that the process of using signs as signs prevails over their customary semiotic function in order for the process to be

23 Even while theatrical events are constructed through representational practices in which one set of material bodies, objects, and gestures within the theatrical frame indicate material or ideological referents from the ‘real’ social world outside the theatre, there remains a kind of slippery uncertainty for spectators, as they move between layers of signification, seeing the performing body on stage as well as the ‘real world’ events it signifies. In contrast, surveillance systems, like photography and film, are understood to represent a stable, evidentiary, and indexical relationship between that which exists or has occurred in the ‘real world’ and the visual record of those events.30 By staging quotidian surveillance technologies in live, interactive spaces of performance, in which ‘reality’ is suspended and yet kept always within signification’s reach, surveillance artists put the evidentiary status and disciplinary function of contemporary surveillance systems under scrutiny.

My observation that technologies appear on stage as simultaneously ‘real’ and

‘representational’ socio-political objects is not, in itself, new. Performance theorist John

McGrath describes this phenomenon in his 2004 study of surveillance and performance,

Loving Big Brother: “For surveillance art, the link to daily spatial practices is particularly apparent. We still do not see a surveillance camera in a gallery without thinking of surveillance cameras in the street.”31 McGrath introduces important questions of

theatrical” (“The Politics of Discourse: Performativity meets Theatricality.” Substance 31.2, 2002: 208). 30 In The Burden of Representation, and particularly in his chapter, “A Means of Surveillance: The Photograph as Evidence in Law,” cultural theorist John Tagg traces the use of photography in surveillance practices throughout the last 150 years. He notes the ways in which photography, as a technology of capture, stabilized the ‘truth value’ of surveillance data, establishing a new domain for “legal and political apparatuses in which photography functioned as a means of record and a source of ‘evidence’” (John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993: 66). 31 John McGrath, Loving Big Brother: Performance, Privacy, and Surveillance Space (London: Routledge, 2004), 142.

24 performance and performativity into surveillance discourse, and draws upon his experiences as a career theatre director to observe that “the introduction of surveillance technology in theatrical space could, it seem(s), re-enliven that space with a sense of agency and choice.”32

However, despite similarities in scope and focus, my approach to analyzing the intersection of theatre and surveillance differs from and moves beyond McGrath’s in several significant ways.

First, whereas McGrath argues that representations of surveillance created in theatre and installation pieces are inevitably linked for audience members to everyday experiences of surveillance space, he does not explore the degree to which theatre, as a representational apparatus in which audiences are accustomed to suspending their disbelief, can suggest new models of interfacing with and understanding socio-political technologies of surveillance. I argue that surveillance art and performance is valuable not only for its references to actual socio-political conditions of surveillance, but moreover for its capacity to rehearse alternative ways of viewing and being viewed by technologies of surveillance. Live, co-present, theatrical practices, especially those that feature some aspect of interactivity on the part of audience members, can represent aspects of contemporary surveillance society in such a way as to offer audiences a valuable opportunity to critically consider their relationships to and interactions with everyday disciplinary interfaces.

Secondly, McGrath’s analyses of surveillance art overlooks the degree to which surveillance technologies, in turn, challenge and reframe habits of representation and reception in theatre. In order to address this oversight, I use Jay Bolter and David Grusin’s concept of ‘remediation’ to show how surveillance theatre pieces such as Contains Violence and Point Blank strategically interrogate the ways in which paradigms of theatre and of

32 McGrath, Loving Big Brother, 4.

25 surveillance have reflexively shaped each other. In my analysis, ‘remediation’ comes to function in the context of surveillance theatre not only as “the representation of one medium in another,” as Bolter and Grusin define it,33 but also as a means by which to ‘re- teach’ contemporary audiences about the power dynamics, histories, and habitual assumptions that construct contemporary understandings of and responses to socio-political surveillance and theatre.34 In Chapter Two, I explore the ways in which surveillance theatre artists David Rosenberg (of the Shunt Collective) and Edit Kaldor employ strategies of remediation to productively revitalize and reframe contemporary understandings and experiences not only of surveillance systems, but also of theatrical practices. Surveillance theatre pieces such as Contains Violence and Point Blank emerge as performative critiques of two modes of watching – photographic surveillance as evidence on the one hand and theatrical habits of passive spectatorship on the other hand.

Thirdly, I distinguish my project from McGrath’s with my claim that surveillance, both in Large and small histories, functions as a technology of gender. Unlike many other analyses of surveillance, McGrath does examine the effects of the disciplinary gaze upon expressions of sexuality and desire in public space. He analyzes the impact of surveillance on

33 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, “Remediation,” Configurations 4:3 (1996): 345. In Remediation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), their book-length genealogical analysis of remediation from the Renaissance to the present, Bolter and Grusin sustain that representational media have always emerged through processes of remediation, arguing that photography remediated perspectival painting, film remediated stage production and photography, and television remediated film, vaudeville, and radio (59-60). Bolter and Grusin use the concept of ‘remediation’ to articulate developmental narratives of new visual media, asserting that the Internet, virtual reality, and digital art are culturally significant less as technological novelties and more for the ways in which they refashion and remix existing forms of visual representation. They write, “what is new about new media comes from the particular ways in which they refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media” (15). 34 I draw instead upon the common social usage of the term ‘remedial’ to refer to the process or act of re-educating a deficient or under-educated student.

26 performances of homosexuality in public space, exploring the capacity of ‘surveillance sex’ – by which he means sex caught on or performed for surveillance cameras – to expose the gaze of surveillance as an agent not only of discipline, but also of voyeuristic pleasure, homosexual narcissism, and ‘perverse’ desire.35 McGrath’s formulations of surveillance as a vehicle to extend Freudian pathological diagnoses of homosexuality into contemporary public spaces are invaluable.

Focusing on a different aspect of desire and sexuality under surveillance, I theorize the gaze of surveillance as simultaneously gendered and gendering, exploring ways in which surveillance culture functions according to representations of sexual difference and male heterosexual desire. In doing so, I draw explicit connections between the disciplinary gaze of surveillance and the male gaze of visual culture, arguing that in surveillance art, as in film, photography, and theatre, Women tend to be figured as fetishized objects of male heterosexual desire. As I argue in Chapter Four and Five, gender-focused surveillance art works such as Jill Magid’s Evidence Locker, Mona Hatoum’s Deep Throat, Janet Cardiff’s Eyes of

Laura, and Sophie Calle’s The Detective, elucidate the notion of a ‘desirous’ gaze of surveillance by re-investing in feminist definitions and deployments of a ‘patriarchal gaze’ in visual culture. Moreover, I argue that performances of discipline can, in fact, reveal transgressive desires within the disciplinary gaze of surveillance. In Chapter Four I analyze

Julia Scher’s Security Bed for the way in which the disciplinary gaze of surveillance can be mapped, to a degree, on to sado-masochistic matrices of desire. I posit that surveillance art can function as a particularly unique performance form that can make visible a critical and transgressive desire for discipline, even within seemingly normative scenes of surveillance.

35 See McGrath’s chapter “Perverting Privacy” in Loving Big Brother (56-98). McGrath draws on Freudian concepts of narcissism, voyeurism, and perversion to analyze performances of homosexuality under the gaze of surveillance.

27 In theorizing the disciplinary gaze of surveillance through the lens of performance studies, I build on Jon McKenzie’s important theorization of performance as discipline. In

Perform or Else (2001), McKenzie updated the Foucauldian understanding of discipline by arguing that performance ontologically replaces discipline in 20th and 21st century matrices of power and knowledge. Like Foucault’s concept of discipline, McKenzie argues, performance produces a new subject of knowledge, one who more effectively embodies the processes of socio-technical systems in the digital age. Contemporary forms of capital accumulation and service economies in a post-industrial age help to create the user consumer of contemporary surveillance society.36 As I described above, ‘user-friendly’ software systems significantly recast contemporary subjects of surveillance society as ‘users’ of technology as well as consumers, viewers and subjects of a disciplinary gaze.

With these formulations in mind, I take McKenzie’s analysis and apply it directly to the performance of discipline, exploring the ways in which surveillance art produces new models of how contemporary ‘user-consumers’ of surveillance technologies can interface with surveillant and theatrical apparatuses. Hailed as user-consumers of surveillance, audiences approach surveillance art as user-spectators, primed to actively interface with surveillance technologies. In Chapter Three, I examine the ways in which surveillance artists such as

Steve Mann and the Institute for Applied Autonomy performatively challenge the notion of

‘user-friendly’ surveillance technologies (ATMs, online shopping, E-Zpass, Facebook, etc), using their technological expertise to re-engineer contemporary surveillance technologies to create what I call “user-unfriendly” surveillance technologies. While their technological products are in fact quite easy to use (they tend to employ technologies that a large percentage of people are familiar with – surveillance cameras, cell phones, gps mapping),

36 Jon McKenzie, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (London: Routledge, 2001), 18.

28 these artist-engineers create software interfaces that support social and political activism, encouraging modes of usership that are pointedly unfriendly towards dominant systems of surveillance, commerce, and information exchange.

Breaking It Down

In Chapter One, I contextualize the genre of surveillance art within historical and contemporary landscapes of surveillance, beginning with the historical growth of surveillance as a means to power (Foucault, 1977; Althusser, 1971), and moving on to explicate the complex and ambivalent relationships between engineers and consumers, police and political activists, and surveillance artists and their audiences in contemporary ‘societies of control’

(Deleuze, 1990; Ranciere, 2001). In order to catalogue some of these central tactics and aesthetics of surveillance art as an emergent paradigm of performance, I lay out some of the principal commonalities between surveillance practices and theatrical conventions in historical and contemporary contexts. Finally, I (re)turn to second wave feminist definitions and deployments of the ‘male gaze’ of visual culture in order to explore theoretical and practical resonances between that gaze and the disciplinary gaze of surveillance. In doing so,

I reassert gender – and vision – as important and valid categories of analysis within the purview of information-based, digital surveillance.

In Chapter Two I explore theatrical performances that use surveillance technologies

(specifically Shunt Collective’s Contains Violence and Edit Kaldor’s Point Blank) to overlay habitual understandings of and interactions with surveillance media onto traditional habits of theatrical spectatorship. I look at the ways in which theatrical habits of representation and reception challenge assumptions about the evidentiary status of surveillance technologies.

Conversely, I also consider the significant impact that surveillance technologies can have upon theatrical habits of representation and reception.

29 Chapter Three is focused on the work of surveillance artists that work to strategically intervene in surveillance systems in public urban spaces. Emulating Guy Debord and the

Situationists, artists such as Steve Mann, the Institute for Applied Autonomy, and the

Surveillance Camera Players radically trespass on the carefully landscaped borders and thoroughfares of corporate visual culture, aiming to expose and disrupt informational networks of surveillance and the powerful elites who control them. The IAA, SCP, and

Steve Mann labor to make their critiques legible and useful to a wide range of audiences, from passersby on the street to political activists to professional engineers.

In Chapter Four, I apply a feminist lens to the genre of surveillance art, identifying a sub-set of artists who critically examine representations and receptions of gender through the gaze of surveillance. As I noted above, feminist film, theatre, and performance art provide valuable tactical precedents to the work of contemporary surveillance artists, particularly in regard to making visible the apparatuses and processes of a disciplinary gaze in surveillance. Works by Jill Magid, Mona Hatoum, Steve Mann, Gilles Walker, and Julia

Scher invest in the feminist performance tactic of explicitly ‘looking back’ at the disciplinary gaze of surveillance and challenging constructions of the female form as passive ‘fetish,’ given-to-be-seen by a male gaze. Their work resonates with feminist theorists such as

Jaqueline Rose (1982), Kaja Silverman (1988), Teresa de Lauretis (1987), Mary Ann Doane

(1982), Laura Mulvey (1996), Craig Owens (1994), Rebecca Schneider (1997), and Elin

Diamond (1997) who have utilized the psychoanalytic terms ‘fetish’ and ‘fetishism’ to analyze and critique dominant patriarchal representations and receptions of femininity in cinema, theatre, and photography. The artists in this chapter build works that show female bodies ‘looking back’ through the looking glass that has marked and disciplined their bodies

30 and behaviors as gendered, troubling habitual representations of femininity with female bodies that are given-to-see as well as given-to-be-seen.

In the final chapter, I articulate a second category of feminist surveillance art that is characterized by critical formulations of the female body as un-representable by visible surveillance techniques. Sophie Calle’s The Detective, Jill Magid’s Evidence Locker, and Janet

Cardiff’s Eyes of Laura move beyond the visually organized regime of patriarchal power and knowledge often attached to mainstream surveillance to powerfully voice affective and embodied accounts of being female under the gaze of surveillance. These artists augment and contradict visual representations of their female-gendered bodies with voiced accounts of their own affective experiences, personal memories, and internal fantasies. The relationship between ‘embodied writing’ and visual self-representation in the work of Calle,

Cardiff, and Magid situates their projects at the crux of important feminist debates about the critical relationship between female voice and image. I contextualize their work as surveillance artists in relation to the theories of feminist film and linguistic theorists such as

Luce Irigaray (1974), Helene Cixous (1975), Audre Lorde (1984), Mary Ann Doane (1985), and Kaja Silverman (1988) Shoshona Felman (1980), Amy Lawrence (1991), Britta Sjorgen

(2006), and Juliet Flower MacCannell (2007).

Tipping the Scale of Surveillance

The Large History of surveillance technologies has been written by Jeremy Bentham and Michel Foucault, and continues to be articulated by cultural theorists such as Gilles

Deleuze, David Lyon, Oscar Gandy, Kevin Haggerty and Richard Erikson. Even as these contemporary theorists have articulated radical shifts in the form of surveillance, as

Foucauldian disciplinary societies have changed under new conditions of information-based surveillance or dataveillance, their focus remains on large social and political structures that

31 dominate the terms and uses of surveillance. Foucault’s theorization of Bentham’s

Panopticon, Delueze’s rhizomatic structures that make up contemporary ‘societies of control,’ and Haggerty and Erikson’s notion of the “surveillant assemblage,” track important changes in the History of surveillance through modernity and into our current ‘information age.’ As I explore in the following chapter, these contributions to the History of surveillance reflect and reflect upon central trends within surveillance society; they are essential in understanding the directions in which we, the subjects of contemporary surveillance society, are headed technologically, politically, and culturally.

However, I aim more broadly with this dissertation to augment and trouble these

Large Histories of surveillance by bringing to amplification the small histories of surveillance art. I explore the ways in which artists have used surveillance technologies to interrupt and critique larger structures and processes of surveillance. Digital performance group Critical

Art Ensemble has succinctly mandated that amateur artists and engineers should “use elements from the emerging theatre of information and its attendant technologies” in order to strategically disrupt and expose the “rising tide of informational control” in surveillance systems.37 This directive has been taken up by a growing number of surveillance artist- engineers, giving rise to such surveillance art projects as Institute for Applied Autonomy’s project iSEE: Now More Than Ever (2001-2003), which maps CCTV surveillance cameras in urban areas and provides ‘paths of least surveillance’ for users; Josh On’s They Rule (2004), which plays upon transparency of information flows by mapping and exposing networks of powerful elites; and the Surveillance Camera Players, who lead tours through neighborhoods

37 Critical Art Ensemble, Digital Resistance (Autonomedia, 2001), 98-99. The CAE encourages ‘hacktivist’ practices that support ‘copy-left’ (as opposed to copy-right) practices of open source software and information sharing. In War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Manuel de Landa also writes about hacker ethics as part of the free software movement, describing an era before hackers were cast in the public imaginary as criminals and terrorist threats (225).

32 in cities around the world, pointing out all the corporate, police, and private surveillance cameras.38

In addressing the gaps and oversights I outlined above, I draw on my long-running interests as a scholar and practitioner in feminist theory and performance, new media and technology in contemporary performance, and socio-political responses to the ever-changing structures and expressions of power in surveillance practices in the US and internationally.

Bringing these diverse interests together, I explicate issues central to the cultural, aesthetic, and political aims of surveillance art, such as the gaze, in/visibility, discipline, representations of gender, and the appropriation of new technologies into performance. At the same time, I re-assert the centrality of these issues within the fields of performance studies, surveillance studies, and feminist theory, putting these distinct but overlapping paradigms in conversation in order to build a performance theory and genealogy of contemporary surveillance art. In a larger sense, I aim to build a performance-based taxonomy of the ever- changing interface between the performing body and the gaze of surveillance, and between discourses and expressions of discipline and desire.

38 See http://www.appliedautonomy.com/isee.html, http://www.theyrule.net/2004/tr2.php, www.wearcam.org, http://www.notbored.org/the- scp.html.

33 CHAPTER ONE

Surveillance, Performance, and Culture: Re-Visioning Discipline and Desire

A central question that attends surveillance practices, and consequently is repeatedly posed in the surveillance art works I study, is who is watching whom? This question implies a unidirectional, disciplinary gaze in surveillance, a gaze that has been most famously theorized by cultural theorist Michel Foucault in his analysis of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, the

1791 prison design heralded as the dominant model for modern surveillance systems.

According to Foucault, the panoptic principle produces an efficient and sustainable form of discipline based on a visible yet unverifiable site/sight of power:

Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at any one moment; but he must be sure that may always be so.39 The inmate of the Panopticon, realizing any infraction might be punished if observed by the visible but unverifiable surveilling gaze, begins to discipline him or herself, thus internalizing the aims and ideology of the presumed authoritarian gaze. Foucault went on to theorize this model of discipline as the dominant tool for power and control in modernity, tracing similar disciplinary tactics through the structures of modern institutions such as prisons, asylums, hospitals, and schools that divide social subjects into controlled segments in order to instruct, regulate, and normalize behavior to be compatible with capitalist ideology. 40 In this

39 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 201. 40 The concept of internalized discipline, or subjection articulated by Foucault draws upon the work of his mentor Luis Althusser and his notion of interpellation. In his essay “Ideological State Apparatuses” (in Lenin and Other Philosophies, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), Althusser coined the term ‘interpellation’ to describe the process by which individual social subjects are hailed into the social order by a figure of discipline (for him a policeman, for us perhaps a surveillance camera), and in the process internalize and reproduce the disciplinary rules of their society.

34 way Foucualt expanded the question of who is watching whom beyond prison walls and into a network of social, political, and economic institutions through which social subjects pass and are disciplined.

Gender theorist Judith Butler has drawn upon Foucault’s theories of subjection and institutionalized discipline in order to examine the processes by which juridical systems of power produce and condition gendered social subjects (Butler, 1990: 5). In works such as

“Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” (1988), Gender Trouble (1990), Bodies That

Matter (1993), and The Psychic Life of Power (1997) Butler has argued that while gender identity can never be separated from the political and cultural systems in which it is produced and maintained, one’s gender is actively constructed by and through repetition and iterability, making it simultaneously performed and performative. While, like Foucault, she contests the degree of agency inherent in subjects whose identities are reflexively imbricated in powerful social systems and institutions that discipline them, Butler suggests the possibility of insubordination within the disciplined performance of gender. She writes,

If gender is in no way a stable identity…[but rather] an identity constituted through a stylized repetition of acts…then the possibilities of gender transformation are to be found in the arbitrary relation between such acts, in the possibility of a different sort of repeating, in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style.41 In other words, Butler’s theory of the performativity of gender includes within it a radical potential for social subjects to unsettle categories of gender through subversive replication and redeployment of the markers or styles of gender.

Butler’s significant assertions about the radical performativity of gendered identity within powerful systems of internalized discipline and subjection resonate with a rarely emphasized aspect of the panoptic principle, and one that is critical to the central question

41 Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” Theatre Journal 40:4 (1988): 519-20.

35 of who is watching whom. In addition to the principles of visibility and unverifiablity that ensure the sustainability of panoptic discipline, Bentham stated that “anyone” must be able to occupy the overseer position in the prison’s central guard tower.42 While this foundational principle was intended by Bentham to be a means by which the panoptic schema could be amplified and spread throughout the social body, Butler’s notion of performativity suggests that the invitation for “anyone” to become a panoptic watcher constitutes a radical potential within the carefully controlled disciplinary institution. If anyone can occupy the central guard tower (anyone except the current inmates of the prison, of course), then there is potential for a different kind of looking, a different kind of repeating and deployment of the disciplinary gaze of surveillance.

The open invitation to “anyone” effectively describes the position taken by surveillance artists as they re-deploy surveillance technologies to appropriate and subvert the disciplinary gaze in socio-political surveillance. The genre of surveillance art can, to a large degree, be characterized by a radical ‘mis-use,’ or even ‘abuse’ of Bentham’s notion of the panoptic “anyone.” As I described in the Introduction, and continue to elucidate over the course of the coming chapters, surveillance artists intervene in and re-imagine the operations of a uni-directional, disciplinary gaze, effectively problematizing the question of who is watching whom in surveillance. Similarly, feminist theorists both previous to and contemporaneous with Butler have labored against the exact replication of patriarchal ideology and concomitant habits of representation and reception in film and theatre making.

As I explore in more detail below, Laura Mulvey, Teresa de Lauretis, Jill Dolan, Elin

Diamond, and Rebecca Schneider, among others, have urged feminist spectators (the

‘anyones’) to learn to look with a different intent and to be critical of the naturalized

42 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 207.

36 functions of power and discipline at stake in replicating and internalizing the patriarchal gaze.

Looking Beyond Foucault

Even while the Foucauldian analysis of a disciplinary society continues to elucidate aspects of contemporary surveillance systems (such as ubiquitous CCTV cameras in urban centers), and provides a useful model with which to conceptualize the work of surveillance artists and feminist scholars, the panoptic principle as a political and cultural model has been stretched and revised to a great degree in recent decades. Contemporary cultural theorists writing about surveillance have described the limitations of the panoptic model, claiming that contemporary surveillance is increasingly characterized by networked flows of information that significantly supercede visual surveillance of discreet bodies and spaces. In contrast to panoptic models of surveillance, they argue that contemporary surveillance demands an examination of rapid technological developments and the concomitant rise of interconnected computer databases in which personal information rather than material bodies are tracked and monitored.

Cultural theorist Gilles Deleuze responded to these techno-social changes of the late

20th century, effectively updating the Foucauldian notion of a disciplinary society by coining the term “societies of control.”43 “Societies of control” are characterized by continually modulating and interconnected networks of digitized information that track and control the behavior of individuals across a range of markets and spheres of interaction. Surveillance theorists Kevin Haggerty and Richard Erikson expanded upon Deleuze’s concept, describing the “convergence of what were once discrete surveillance systems to the point that we can

43 Deleuze, “Societies of Control,” 3.

37 now speak of an emerging ‘surveillant assemblage.’”44 Deleuze, Haggerty and Erikson, along with Oscar Gandy’s theory of the ‘panoptic sort,’ David Lyon’s ‘phenetic sorting,’ and David

Murakami Wood and Stephen Graham’s ‘differential mobility,’ have challenged modernist notions of discreet institutional enclosures and of a cohesive individual subject. In place of the institutions and individuals that defined Foucault’s disciplinary society, societies of control feature “’dividuals,’ and masses, samples, data, markets, or ‘banks’” that amass and interact digitally across space and time.45 Thus, in societies of control, the human body has been destabilized as a corporeal entity, appearing instead as pieces of personal data that are abstracted from distinct locales and bodies and sorted into a series of discrete informational flows. These flows of personal data coalesce into distinct ‘data doubles,’ correlating to individual subjects that are tracked and targeted by state and corporate entities.46

Such radical shifts in the concept of the body and place in contemporary information-based surveillance complicate the question of who is watching whom. The power dynamics of contemporary surveillance are still closely linked to who has access to these flows of information and who can observe and effect subjects of surveillance through their

‘data doubles.’ However, recent scholarship on surveillance reveals an added concern regarding which bodies, processes, and data networks are made visible and which are kept invisible in the processes of contemporary, information based surveillance. These concerns center around the degree to which vision and visibility continues to condition information based surveillance, revealing a partial (but not total) shift away from a Foucauldian focus on panoptic visibility in favor of a Deleuzean model of partial or relative invisibility within

44 Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson, ed. The New Politics of Surveillance and Visibility (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 606. 45 Deleuze, “Societies of Control,” 4-5. 46 Haggerty and Erikson, New Politics, 606.

38 networked flows of information. Thus, in addition to the question who is watching whom, surveillance theory and art alike addresses the critical questions of what is visible and what is invisible in techniques and technologies of contemporary surveillance?

The relative invisibility of dispersed and digitized flows of surveillance information gives rise to easily obscured links between state and corporate entities that access these networks. David Brin has identified the lack of transparency in the processes by which surveillance data is stored and shared to be the most insidious and dangerous aspect of contemporary surveillance systems.47 Personal information is quickly dissociated from the contingent time, place, and body of its gathering, and is radically decontextualized as it enters virtual databases and flows of information.48 And yet, the assessments of personal information (performed by various interconnected state and corporate entities) come back to bear on the material lives of social subjects through boundaries and barriers to mobility and opportunities.49

Surveillance theorists Lyon, Gandy, and Wood and Graham have described the software interfaces of contemporary surveillance as productive of a less visible and thus more insidious mode of discipline. Their concepts of the ‘panoptic sort,’ ‘digital divide,’ and

‘differential mobility,’ all refer to the creation and maintenance of techno-social borders and boundaries that “threaten to divide contemporary societies more decisively into high-speed, high-mobility and connected and low-speed, low-mobility and disconnected, classes.” 50 In

47 David Brin,Transparent Society, 13-15. 48 Oscar Gandy, The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993), 15-18. 49 David Murakami Wood and Stephen Graham, in “Permeable Boundaries in Soft-ware Sorted Society: Surveillance and Differentiations of Mobility” in Mobile Technologies of the City, ed. Mimi Sheller and John Urry (London: Routledge, 2006), have described this process as “differential mobility” (177-78). 50 Wood and Graham, “Permeable Boundaries,” 177-8.

39 The Panoptic Sort, Gandy asserts that these invisible and dispersed processes of sorting and dividing social subjects are the product of the engineering and programming of surveillance- software systems.51

However, these systems tend to be promoted as unbiased, logical, and morally neutral for both programmers and users. As Wood and Graham put it, “these techniques of prioritization and inhibition are often so invisible and automated that neither the losers nor the beneficiaries are even aware that they are in operation within the complex sociotechnologies that increasingly constitute the ordinary and taken-for-granted environments of contemporary societies.”52 This process of ‘social sorting’ reinforces a preferred social order that threatens to decisively divide contemporary societies into classes of high-speed, connected ‘kinetic elites,’ and disconnected citizens further disadvantaged by low-mobility and limited economic chances.53 The relative invisibility of surveillance networks that enable this process of ‘social sorting’ makes the discriminatory effects all the more alarming. The programmers themselves may not even realize that they are potentially implicated in the discriminatory effects of surveillance systems, and social subjects who suffer the discriminatory effects may likewise not know to look critically at the programming of the surveillance technologies with which they interface.

Balanced between the risks and benefits of such an arrangement, our subject position as everyday ‘users’ of surveillance technologies has likewise come to involve more dispersed, and de-centered, and less visible processes of interpellation and discipline. Cultural theorists such as Giles Deleuze, David Lyon, and Wendy Chun, among others, have noted that the shift towards subjects using surveillance technologies constitutes a shift in Althusserian and

51 Gandy, Panoptic Sort, 18-20. 52 Wood and Graham, “Permeable Boundaries,” 188. 53 Wood and Graham, “Permeable Boundaries,” 177-8.

40 Foucauldian models of discipline and interpellation associated with modern systems of surveillance. In contrast to more overtly disciplinary models of surveillance – such as Jeremy

Bentham’s Panopticon or Althusser’s “Repressive State Apparatuses” – we are hailed by contemporary technologies of surveillance into user-consumer subject positions. We engage with virtual and automated digital surveillance technologies to perform our communication, travel, and commercial transactions.

Thus, in the dispersed, user-friendly processes of contemporary surveillance society, a different kind of disciplinary site/sight emerges: the software interface. It is the interface itself – through which the individual subject uses digital surveillance technologies – that becomes the mode and space of discipline and control. Techno-cultural theorist Chun has insightfully analogized digital software interfaces to ideology, noting that “software and ideology fit each other perfectly because both try to map the material effects of the immaterial and to posit the immaterial through visible cues.”54 Digital software for personal computers, cell phones, ATM’s, and so on, provide material markers through which users can interact with and understand the immaterial and invisible operations of digital technologies. Ideologically, these personal interfaces with digital surveillance software hail us into a sense of personal ownership and control that is in fact already limited and controlled by previous programming. As such, the software interfaces of digital surveillance technologies function as updated Althusserian Ideological State Apparatuses, subtly conditioning the user’s behavior, choices, and socio-economic outcomes.

A Modern Day Trojan War

54 Wendy Chun, Control and freedom: power and paranoia in the age of fiber optics. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 44. In The Domain Matrix, Sue-Ellen Case theorizes the portrayal and construction of user/consumer identities within the contexts of queer theory and virtual technologies, posing provocative questions about how the body is situated and destabilized in competing and overlapping regimes of print, the screen, and virtual space.

41 Concerns over the socio-political effects of invisible (or carefully concealed) processes in contemporary systems of surveillance are also central to the tactics and goals of many surveillance artists.55 As I explore in Chapter Three, surveillance art groups such as the Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA), Surveillance Camera Players (SCP), and Steve

Mann work to expose (make visible) the invisible processes of data sorting in information- based surveillance and the obscured networks of state and corporate entities that perform them. Influential artist-activist group Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), while not explicitly engaged in surveillance focused art, has outlined effective and influential tactics for artists and amateur engineers to disrupt and expose state and corporate information networks.

CAE describes tactics of ‘digital resistance’ that engage strategic in/visibility in performance as a means of disruption. As they put it, digital resistance “challenges the existing semiotic regime by replicating and redeploying it in a manner that offers participants in the projects a new way of seeing, understanding, and … interacting with a given system.”56 In other

55 While I am not strictly using the terms ‘strategies’ and ‘tactics’ according to these distinctions, French theorist Michel De Certeau usefully distinguished strategies and tactics in relation to power relationships within dominant culture. In light of his definitions, however, I most frequently use the term ‘tactic’ to describe the work of surveillance artist- activist working within the dominant terrain of state and corporate surveillance. In The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) de Certeau writes: “I call strategy the calculation (or manipulation) of power relationships that becomes possible as soon as a subject with will and power (a business, an army, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated… it is an effort to delimit one’s own place in a world bewitched by the invisible powers of the Other.” Tactics, on the other hand, is “a calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus… The space of the tactic is the space of the other. Thus, it must play on and with a terrain imposed on it and organized by the law of a foreign power;…it is a maneuver ‘within the enemy’s field of vision,’… and within enemy territory. It does not, therefore have the options of planning general strategy and viewing the adversary as a whole within a district, visible, and objectifiable space” (35-37). 56 CAE, Digital Resistance, 8. CAE has explored the generative aspects of digital age hackers in Digital Resistance and Electronic Civil Disobedience (Autonomedia, 1996). CAE deems attacks waged by surveillance artist-engineers against state and corporate dominated technological systems to be valuable acts of digital and electronic resistance. Advocating a form of hacking and ‘re-engineering’ which they call ‘digital resistance,’

42 words, CAE argues that by replicating and redeploying dominant technologies and techniques of surveillance (or other information based systems), amateur engineers and artists can expose the capitalist interests driving dominant systems of surveillance while simultaneously building alternative, resistant models.

The IAA has taken up CAE’s tactics of exposure and intervention, building surveillance technologies that contain subversive political messages and actions within familiar, ‘user-friendly’ exteriors.57 The IAA has consequently termed their products ‘Trojan

Horses,’ applying the term from the Bronze Age story described by Virgil in his epic poem

The Aeneid more broadly to mean any trick that causes a target to invite a foe into a securely protected area.58 The ‘Trojan Horse’ metaphor accurately describes the tactics of several interventionist surveillance artists (including the IAA, SCP, and Steve Mann) who aim to help user-consumers ‘see differently’ through surveillance technologies. Amateur engineers and artists, such as the IAA, Steve Mann, and SCP use clever and creative tactics of appropriation and re-engineering to transform familiar digital technologies into politically visible and user-unfriendly Trojan Horses, poised to ambush and disrupt the smooth flow of capitalist systems of commerce and surveillance. The dispersed, autonomous channels through which they circulate their products and performances help to distribute these

‘Trojan Horses’ throughout an ever broadening range of consumer-users.

But lest we jump too quickly on this shiny Trojan Horse and ride off into the sunset of artist-activist utopianism, let us first take a closer look at our digital age Troy. In our

57 The IAA writes that their works “act as Trojan Horses, carrying our critique through the gates of detachment that guard engineers against taking responsibility for the products of their labour” (“Engaging Ambivalence: Interventions in Engineering Culture,” Autonomedia, 2005, 96). 58 The computing software trade has already adopted the term ‘Trojan Horse’ to describe a kind of malicious software – known as malware – which appears to perform a desirable function but in fact allows computer hackers unauthorized access to the host machine.

43 updated, downloaded and reconfigured city-state, we have become the citizens of a new digital mythology; cast as unwitting Trojans asleep in our beds, we trust that the gifts showered upon us by advances in digital technologies – gifts of credit cards, online banking,

EZ-passes, and cell phones – are, in fact, boons to our social, political and economic lives.

These gadgets and remote transactions appear as victory trophies, celebratory markers of the prowess and progress of digital engineering, increasingly sophisticated surveillance technologies, and the seeming freedoms and conveniences these advances make possible.

Such technologies, which have come about through particularly rapid developments in digital surveillance over the last two decades, do in fact benefit us in many ways: surveillance technologies have come to function socially as tools that enable faster and more convenient communication, commerce, and geographic mobility, as well as produce new forms of entertainment.59 And yet, digital technologies that are deeply integrated into our everyday lives are nearly all functionally under girded by technologies of surveillance: cell phones, credit cards, Facebook, and Mapquest depend upon surveillance networks and technologies such as GPS, radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, and high power zoom lenses. Furthermore, networks of communication, entertainment, travel, and commerce are linked and made accessible to state, military, and corporate systems of surveillance.60

59 For more on new forms of surveillance-inspired entertainment, see Mark Andrejevic Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004). 60 See U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessement, Electronic Surveillance in a Digital Age, (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, July 1995). The 1995 policy required telecommunications companies to comply with government/ federal search warrants in the telecommunication realm. The document centers on the government decision to require that surveillance capabilities should be built into the design of the telecommunications systems. “The Communications Assistance For Law Enforcement Act makes it clear that the service providers must now consider equipment and system design as well as the capability to provide the call content and call identification information needed by law enforcement agencies, and the capacity that the law enforcement agencies need to simultaneously intercept a specified number of wiretaps” (U.S. Congress, Electronic Surveillance, 7-8).

44 The relationship that we, as contemporary social subjects of this digital-age Troy, have with technologies of surveillance has thus changed radically in recent decades. The cultural landscape and technical function of surveillance has been shaped by (even as it has shaped) the continuing expansion of digital information networks, the post-9/11 political climate, social software systems such as Facebook, twitter, and Foursquare, and the cultural success of Reality TV. We have become increasingly facile user-consumers of surveillance technologies, encountering them not only in disciplinary exchanges (with surveillance cameras or policemen), but also in a multitude of quotidian transactions. Cell phones,

ATM’s, and social and commercial software programs such as Facebook and Amazon.com are all functionally under girded by technologies of surveillance, and ever-proliferating

Reality TV shows and smart phone apps utilize surveillance technologies to create entertainment (and consumerism) out of mundane situations.

As a result, we have largely forgotten that these digital gifts to civilian life and leisure are, quite literally, the fruits and spoils of war. Nearly all of the digital technologies that we enjoy are the products of particularly rapid advances in surveillance technologies and techniques developed for military purposes.61 In contemporary surveillance society, the programming and marketing of surveillance technologies as tools of communication, commerce, and entertainment often obscure the connections between consumer and military markets, and shroud ethical questions regarding these connections in the shadowy balance between commercial benefits and martial costs. Even while new GPS mapping technologies in cell phones are marketed as the next must-have social networking software, the technological developments involved in these user-friendly gadgets link state and military

61 David Lyon (2001), Manuel de Landa (1991), and James Rule (1973) among others have explicated the ontology of surveillance technologies as they have historically been developed in service of military operations, crime prevention, judicial evidence, and national security.

45 projects with civilian ones. Recent software applications such as the iphone Friend Finder,

Facebook’s Friend Tracker, and Verizon’s Foursquare use GPS locative media to allow users to ‘find’ and ‘track’ the movements and locations of selected ‘friends’ in real time. These technologies of surveillance function as tools of both greater control and greater freedom, crossing between and blurring martial and civilian spheres of production, circulation and use.

This is to say that surveillance has come to be a deeply ambivalent concept and practice in contemporary society. The surveillance industry, both in commercial and military markets, has been progressively re-shaped through cultural, economic, and social changes in digital media, communication networks, and popular entertainments. No longer is surveillance only a top-down process of discipline in which an unseen body of power polices its subjects, even as this aspect of surveillance has also intensified in response to major terrorist activities, especially in the last decade. Surveillance has also come to be foundational to a range of social media of communication, entertainment, and commerce, through which social subjects are encouraged, even rewarded, to actively participate in the work of watching and being watched. Of course, this model of discipline-by-participation does, in fact, have risks; in the individualized, dispersed, and networked operations of contemporary surveillance society, a different kind of discipline has emerged, one in which the benefits of participation mask the mechanism of discipline and the risks of being involved.

The participation of amateurs working with surveillance technologies and networks has been identified by surveillance theorist David Brin as a potential solution to the imbalance of power resulting from the relative invisibility of the flows and analysis of personal information. As I described in the Introduction, Brin advocates for the active participation of amateurs in contemporary networks of surveillance in order to ensure that

46 information flows not only through the hands of high level executives, corporations and state departments, but also through a multiplicity of well-informed citizens using increasingly available technologies of digital communication and information gathering (such as online social software networks). CAE similarly advocates for amateur participation because

“amateurs have the ability to see through the dominant paradigms,… are not invested in institutionalized systems of knowledge production and policy construction, and hence do not have irresistible forces guiding the outcome of their process such as maintaining a place in the funding heirarcy… or prestige capital.” 62 However, the arguments of CAE and Brin are limited by the embedded assumption that amateurs are not somehow always already invested in institutionalized systems of power-knowledge. This is to say that these

‘solutions’ ignore the fact that amateur participation in open software systems such as

Facebook can ultimately contribute to corporate projects of data gathering and commercial marketing.

The Politics of Sight in State and Corporate Surveillance

The question then becomes, how can surveillance artists and/or everyday users make these obscured connections visible, apparent, and open for critique and revision? While understanding surveillance software interfaces as Althusserian Ideological State Apparatuses helps to focus criticism of the ideological concepts behind the visible symbols of surveillance, disciplinary operations within the contemporary techno-human interface of surveillance have also been shaped by even more powerful strategies of habitual blindness.

Althusser’s former colleague Jacques Ranciere has reformulated and updated Althusser’s famous model of interpellation, arguing that sites/sights of discipline in late capitalism are

62 CAE, Digital Resistance, 9.

47 predicated not only on what is made hyper-visible – advertising, monuments, walkways – but, more importantly, upon what is not given to be seen, or, what is given to be not seen. In a shift away from Guy Debord’s “Society of Spectacle,” Ranciere calls contemporary public space an ‘anti-spectacle,’ asserting that social subjects are interpellated into obedient modes of consumption and usership by a mode of perception control. Replacing the Althusserian

“Hey You!” with another familiar policing phrase, “Move along! There is nothing to see here!” Ranciere writes, “The police say there is nothing to see, nothing happening, nothing to be done, but to keep moving, circulating; they say that the space of circulation is nothing but the space of circulation.”63

This model of discipline is predicated on a ‘user-friendly’ exterior that conditions users to move, behave, and see according to pre-determined architectural and technological interfaces. Commercially designed spaces, such as shopping malls or online shopping interfaces, are visually streamlined to ensure that there is nothing to slow one’s constant circulation as a consumer, leaving no time or space open in which to take on an alternative or critical viewpoint. Personal digital devices, such as cell phones, credit cards, and Facebook are likewise designed to be used in ways that facilitate the smooth workings of capitalist structures, as these technologies reference and reinforce corporate built environments and hyper-visible advertisements that move pedestrians in pre-determined, ‘user-friendly’ routes through commercial public space. Software applications such as Friend Tracker and

Foursquare not only link users to their friends, they also create an interface between registered businesses and users. The software systems map commercial points of interest for users and the businesses in turn provide discounts and special offers for users who frequent their shops or restaurants. Another recent smart phone application, Smartkick, is predicated

63 Jacques Ranciere, “Ten Theses on Politics,” Theory & Event 5:3 (2001): 5.

48 entirely upon building a real time interface between mall shoppers and shop owners; the software uses non-GPS locative media – relying instead upon a high-pitched sound emitted from within participating malls to trigger the smart phones of users currently in the vicinity – to target users who are currently in the shopping mall and send them special coupons and consumer deals.64

Moreover, software interfaces move users swiftly past any unsettling aspects of digital surveillance, aspects that may include military and state involvement in the design and use of the technologies, or the integration of these technologies in larger systems of surveillance. The software interfaces of mainstream surveillance technologies – GPS, cell phones, ATM’s – are designed against giving users time or space to stop and consider alternative, potentially subversive uses for the technologies. However, as in the IAA’s

‘Trojan Horse’ metaphor, political activists and artists can disrupt dominant political control

(Ranciere’s ‘police’) over what can and cannot, should and should not be seen. They can build works that strategically make normalized blind spots visible, highlighting ubiquitous and often hidden placement of surveillance cameras in public or semi-public spaces, or exposing military and state involvement in the design and monitoring of civilian technologies. By re-constructing or re-engineering software interfaces and technologies of surveillance, artist-engineers can demonstrate and make available new possibilities of seeing/being seen and hearing/being heard for user-consumers in public space.65

64 In an August 11, 2010 Associated Press article, “Mall deal gives big boost to cell-phone coupons,” Anne D’Innocenzio and Peter Svensson discussed the new software application. Accessed on August 25, 2010, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20100811/us- smart-phone-rewards/. 65 Indeed, Ranciere emphasizes the need to spatialize politics of this kind, stressing the value of materializing these political goals: “Political argument is…the demonstration of a possible world where the argument could count as an argument, addressed by a subject qualified to argue, upon an identified object, to an addressee who is required to see the object and to

49 The stakes of the contemporary ‘Trojan war’ thus lay in the realm of the visible and the perceivable. Contemporary factions representing the ‘police’ – state and corporate entities controlling privatized public space – employ strategies that make certain symbols, spaces, and interfaces visible while pointedly obscuring or hiding others. Despite being active (and even well-informed) user-consumers of digital surveillance technologies and systems, contemporary social subjects are encouraged to look in certain ways at certain things. Indeed, a police-dominated matrix of visibility has been re-iterated and intensified in the last decade with the post 9/11 campaign, “If you see something, say something.” Most memorably advertised in NYC subway stations, the campaign seems to aim at democratizing surveillance, suggesting that all ‘normal, patriotic’ citizens are or should be on the side of the police in their efforts to report any suspicious persons, packages, or activities. The campaign asks everyday commuters and passersby to act as surveillance cameras, asking them to become as attentive but also as invisible as surveillance cameras.

However, even within this campaign of hyper-vigilance, we, as contemporary social subjects, are not necessarily ‘given to see’ what is there in front of us. As Ranciere puts it, if there actually is something to see – something out of the ordinary, something politically subversive – the familiar phrase, ‘move along, nothing to see here,’ is mouthed by ‘police’ on the scene. Moreover, it is implicit in the “If you see something” campaign that one would report not police action, but rather action requiring police attention. “If you see something, say something” urges action if one has seen something that should not be – and, if so, one is obligated to alert authorities. To say something is to say it to the police so that the offending

hear the argument that he or she ‘normally’ has not reason to either see or hear” (“Politics,” 6). This is to say that the material space must first be altered (and demonstrated as alterable) before a position counter to dominant logic can even be heard or seen as a political argument.

50 person or action – that which should not have appeared – can be addressed within a police- dominated logic of vision: that is, rendered invisible again.

Performance theorist Diana Taylor has coined the term “percepticide,” or “the self- blinding of the general population,” 66to describe a kind of political in/visibility in which it is very clear that people DO see things, horribly unjust things, but they act, under political and physical duress, ‘as if’ they do not. In Disappearing Acts (1997), Taylor describes the politically repressive and violent conditions of Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’ in which the military enacted public spectacles of violence that the civilian population had to witness but pretend to not see:

The triumph of the atrocity was that it forced people to look away – a gesture that undid their sense of personal and communal cohesion even as it seemed to bracket them from their volatile surroundings. Spectacles of violence rendered the population silent, deaf, and blind…. The military violence could have been relatively invisible, as the term 'disappearance' suggests. The fact that it wasn't indicates that the population as a whole was the intended target, positioned by means of the spectacle. People had to deny what they saw and, by turning away, collude with the violence around them….To see, without being able to do, disempowers absolutely. But seeing, without even admitting that one is seeing, further turns the violence on oneself. Percepticide blinds, maims, kills through the senses.67

To combat the blinding strategies of contemporary ‘anti-spectacles’ and

‘percepticide,’ protesters, artists, and activists formulate tactics to make visible the processes, spaces, and people that have been made invisible by various political strategies and oversights. Activist groups such as Copwatch, Witness For Peace, or School of the

Americas Watch pointedly look at and ‘bear witness’ to acts and conditions that military,

66 Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War” (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 123. 67 Taylor, Disappearing Acts, 122-123.

51 corporate, or state entities around the world attempt to erase, overlook, and silence.68

Online blogs and alternative news groups have the capacity to build new models of visibility and transparency through which to broadcast and critique political situations around the world.

For Ranciere, these kinds of political actions – what he calls ‘politics’ – graft alternative, marginalized logic of what can be seen or heard onto a given space that has previously been dominated by a ‘police’ controlled logic of the sensible. Describing such interventions in the policing of public perception, Ranciere writes, “Politics consists of reconfiguring that space, what there is to do there, what there is to see or name there. It is a dispute about the division of what is perceptible to the senses.”69 Ranciere suggests that this kind of ‘politics’ be achieved through strategies that consist of “making visible that which had no reason to be seen… of lodg[ing] one world into another.”70

However, Ranciere’s arguments regarding the capability of critical political sight to combat over-sights practiced by those in power do not necessarily account for the ways in which the exposure of certain kinds of violence or injustice may leave other forms of systemic violence stranded in the dark recesses of habitual blindness. In her examination of the violent political over-sights practiced during and since the Argentine Dirty War of 1976-

1983, Taylor takes an importantly critical stance towards civilian groups that work to ‘make visible’ only certain kinds of atrocities; in doing so, she interrogates obscured forms of

68 See http://www.soaw.org/, http://www.copwatch.org/, and http://www.witnessforpeace.org/ (accessed August 19, 2010) for more information on these politically independent, nationwide and international grassroots organizations. 69 Ranciere, “Politics,” 6. 70 Ranciere, “Politics,” 6. He writes of this process as “the manifestation of dissensus” or “the presence of two worlds in one,” describing dissensus “not [as] the confrontation between interests or opinions,” but rather, “the manifestation of a distance of the sensible from itself” (6).

52 systemic violence by which Argentine culture has come to be more broadly defined. In particular, Taylor argues that domestic violence against women preceded and outlived the state sponsored violence of the Dirty War, and, moreover, that representations of atrocity, hostility, and loss suffered during and after the war period have been made to appear all the more vividly in contrast to the backdrop of ‘naturalized’ violence against women.71 She considers the ways in which Paso de dos, a highly popular play from 1990 that was understood to be part of Argentina’s cultural recovery from the ‘Dirty War’ years, perpetuated

the blinding of the population that the military promoted…by making what was so obviously visible, the woman’s humiliation and destruction, seemingly invisible to the audience and resistant to critique… Just as the ‘disappeared’ were dragged away in full view of family, neighbors, and other observers, violence against women disappears and reappears as pure metaphor.72

Performing what she called a “theatrical ‘disappearing act’,” the play mirrored mechanisms of violence and percepticide that had characterized the Dirty War, and yet, by virtue of the victim’s gender, the violence within the play was reinscribed as invisible. In this play, and in a host of other Argentine cultural representations, Taylor saw gendered violence portrayed as desirous, sexually pleasurable, and a necessary national sacrifice; in other words, the beating, suffering, and death of women was not given to be seen as violence, or as a kind of violence that should be critiqued or halted.

71 Taylor, Disappearing Acts, 16-17. Taylor writes, “the construction of national identity [has been] predicated on female destruction…. Women have no space in [the struggle for national identity] except perhaps as the contested space itself” (16). 72 Taylor, Disappearing Acts, 10. Taylor describes her reactions to the production of Paso de dos: “I witnessed how a woman was violently eliminated from the public sphere and transferred to the metaphorical realm of redemptive womanhood. This theatrical ‘disappearing act’ all too clearly illustrated the mechanics of nation-building I had previously associated with the Dirty War. She was one more in a series of sacrificial women (both ‘good’ and ‘bad’) circling through the Argentine public sphere whose function was to stabilize a patriarchal version of nationhood and manhood, with all its attending values and boundaries” (17).

53 Taylor also points out a subtle and systemic form of gendered ‘percepticide’ in the representations and receptions of civilian protest groups such as Las Madres de la Plaza

Maya, a group of Argentine mothers that has spent decades publicly performing loss and remembrance of family members lost in the war by pinning pictures of the “disappeared” to their bodies as they march around the plaza.73 During the Dirty War, the ruling junta attempted to attack these protesters through their gender roles, portraying Las Madres as

‘non-mothers’ and thus unreliable witnesses, and claiming that they were failed Argentine women because they had raised political dissidents.74 Las Madres have come to function as an international example of Rancierian politics, as they labor to make visible that which a police-state has attempted to erase. However, as Taylor points out, their labor and suffering as women – like the particularly horrific gender-focused atrocities committed against

‘disappeared’ women during the war75 – has been overlooked by a culture that continues to ignore and perpetuate female-focused violence.

Learning To See Differently Through Surveillance Art and Performance

In many surveillance art works, issues of political invisibility act as barbed points that motivate political critique and dissent. Coco Fusco’s Dolores: From 10 to 10 (2001), Wafaa

Bilal’s Domestic Tension (2007), Hasan Elahi’s Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project (2008- present), and Ricardo Dominguez’s “Transborder Immigrant Tool” (2009-present) re-stage bodies and spaces that have been de-legitimized through government practices of invisibility or hyper-visibility. These projects engage a radical politics of (re)vision in order to exposes normative practices of selective blindness in socio-political surveillance, addressing situations

73 Taylor, Disappearing Acts, 15, 78. 74 Taylor, Disappearing Acts, 83. 75 Taylor, Disappearing Acts, 83-84.

54 such as the 12-hour interrogation of a Mexican maquilledora worker accused of attempting to unionize the workforce at her factory, the entrapment and torture of imprisoned Iraqis, the constant invasive surveillance involved in the formation of an FBI dossier, and the extreme physical and mental trials of illegal border crossings of Mexican immigrants. In doing so, Fusco, Bilal, Elahi, and Dominguez create highly politicized surveillance artist- activist works that frame issues of visibility and invisibility in terms of life and death, imprisonment and empowerment, ethnicity and citizenship.

In Dolores: From 10 to 10, Coco Fusco staged a live web-cast in which she re- enacted/embodied the confinement, interrogation, abuse, boredom, and isolation of

Dolores, a Mexican maquilledora worker who was accused of union organizing.76 Fusco’s piece labored to make visible that which had been socially and politically hidden, and to show Dolores’ experience of isolation and silence to a dispersed international audience. In doing so, she worked directly against the strategies of invisibility and silence employed by the

Mexican government and multi-national corporation to quell unionization efforts and hide harsh interrogation techniques.

In a similar engagement of online broadcasting, Iraqi-American artist Wafaa Bilal locked himself in a studio filled with live web cameras for a full month in the spring of 2007 to perform Domestic Tension.77 Drawing on the familiar rhetoric of multi-user online games, he invited users to shoot him with paintballs through remote-controlled paintball guns. Bilal aimed to make a statement about the situation of Iraqis under American occupation and to instigate political dialogue through interactive art, juxtaposing his isolated, vulnerable

76 See “Dolores” by Coco Fusco, accessed July 10, 2010, http://www.thing.net/~cocofusco/video/dolores/dolores1.htm 77 See “Domestic Tension” by Wafaa Bilal, accessed July 10, 2010, http://www.wafaabilal.com/html/domesticTension.html

55 physical state with the casual sport of Western internet users. Taking a more mobile approach, Hasan Elahi’s Tracking Transience uses consumer GPS tracking technologies to trace his movements in physical and virtual space.78 After being questioned and spied upon repeatedly by the FBI, Elahi decided to take control of his own visibility by creating a website that updates his location on a detailed world map at every hour of every day. In doing so, he aims to critique the FBI’s ‘secret’ surveillance techniques by rendering them redundant; instead, he uses his online visibility and the public eye of the Internet as a means of personal protection.

In a more directly subversive activist project, UCSD professor Ricardo Dominguez designed a mobile GPS device that would help Mexican immigrants to safely cross the US-

Mexico border. In a 2009 interview with Vice Magazine, Dominguez describes the

“Transborder Immigrant Tool,” which he developed in collaboration with members of

Electronic Disturbance Theatre (EDT) and his BANG lab at USCD:

We looked at the Motorola i455 cell phone, which is under $30, available even cheaper on eBay, and includes a free GPS applet. We were able to crack it and create a simple compasslike navigation system. We were also able to add other information, like where to find water left by the Border Angels, where to find Quaker help centers that will wrap your feet, how far you are from the highway—things to make the application really benefit individuals who are crossing the border.79 With the “Transborder Immigrant Tool,” Dominguez radically recasts the user-ship and purpose of GPS technologies in cell phones, which were intended by corporate manufacturers to help users navigate urban and commercial centers, ‘find’ friends and favorite businesses, or, in criminal cases, to enable state and federal agencies to track and

78 See “Tracking Transience” by Hasan Elahi, accessed July 10, 2010, http://trackingtransience.net/ 79 In November, 2009 Alex Dunbar interviewed Dominguez and published “Follow the GPS, ÉSE: The Transborder Immigrant Tool Helps Mexicans Cross Over Safely” in Vice Magazine, accessed August 10, 2010, http://www.viceland.com/int/v16n11/htdocs/follow- the-gps-225.php?page=2

56 monitor cell phone users. In doing so, Dominguez reformulates the material and ideological construction of widely accessible GPS enabled cell phones, turning them into tools to make high-risk border crossing safer.

Perhaps the most subversive aspect of the “Transborder Immigrant Tool” is the way in which Dominguez reframes the ideological stakes of illegal border crossing. Instead of focusing on the ethics and illegality of the action of crossing the US-Mexico border,

Dominguez addresses the devastating risks that such a journey poses to the bodies and minds of Mexican immigrants. Once activated, the cell phone emits a single ping to a GPS satellite (more than one ping would enable officials to track the location of the user), loading an up-to-date map of water locations and potential help stations; the cell phone is also outfitted with audio tracks that share practical survival tips for the dessert journey and poems about fortitude and endurance. As a result, Dominguez’ “Transborder Immigrant

Tool” has become a highly visible technology of dissent. The project has garnered him the attention of the Feds and prompted a range of debates regarding academic funding for political art projects and “irresponsible” uses of technology by artists.80 Although the consequences of Dominguez’ current federal investigation could be quite extreme, these kinds of political reactions are part of his goal to bring arts-activism more fully into

(inter)national political discourse and the headlines of mainstream media.

80 See “Critics blast transborder immigrant tool” by Fox News, accessed August 10, 2010, http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/03/10/critics-blast-transborder-immigrant-tool- irresponsible-use-technology/. The project’s cultural and political controversy builds on those of his previous ‘disturbances’ with EDT, such as the FloodNet system, a participatory website-jamming network that allowed anyone with an internet connection to over-use, or jam, the official sites of the US Border Patrol, White House, G8, Mexican embassy, among others, rendering them inaccessible. FloodNet attracted a Department of Justice investigation, and the deployment of a ‘informational war weapon’ by the US government (Dunbar, 1-2). Dominguez continues to be under investigation by the US federal government for his “Transborder Immigrant Tool.”

57 While surveillance is not necessarily the main subject of inquiry for Fusco, Bilal,

Elahi, or Dominguez, they each employ tools of surveillance to mobilize a politics of vision.

Each of their projects utilizes social surveillance systems in order to counteract regimes in which invisibility can be tantamount to political vulnerability, disappearance, and even death.

These artists recast digital interfaces – the Internet and GPS enhanced cell phones – as publicly accessible, world wide webs of surveillance through which users can look critically at structures of state power and the roles and rights of individual subjects within them.

Taking a similarly disruptive approach, so-called ‘interventionist’ artists such as the

IAA, SCP, and Steve Mann work to make alternative uses of surveillance technologies visible and accessible to everyday user-consumers who have been conditioned to ‘see’ them according to a manufactured, corporately designed logic. These artists, along with a number of other visual and performance artists working in public space, were gathered together by curator and theorist Nato Thompson in a 2004 exhibit at MASS MoCA titled “The

Interventionists.”81 In the case of the IAA, such interventions take the form of materially re- engineered surveillance technologies to strategically counter blind spots in several arenas of civilian life and build subversive tools of vision. The group is best known for transforming consumer and military surveillance technologies into tools for graffiti artists and political activists. Their technological in(ter)ventions, which include “Little Brother,” “Graffiti

Writer,” “TXTmob,”and “iSEE,” further the IAA’s goal of making visible the interconnected networks of information involved in national and international surveillance.

In their project ‘iSEE,’ the IAA used real time GPS mapping technologies

(developed by the military for use in combat situations) to provide civilian users with a software interface that can interactively map ‘the path of least surveillance’ through urban

81 Nato Thompson, ed. Interventionists : Users' Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life (North Adams, MA: MASS MoCA, 2004)

58 centers around the world. This software system can be downloaded for free onto any PDA or smart phone, allowing mobile users to avoid as many publicly installed surveillance cameras as possible. They describe the project on their website:

iSEE is a web-based application charting the locations of closed-circuit television (CCTV) 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. 82

As I explore at greater length in Chapter Three, the IAA’s projects have quite a serious aim – to reveal connections between state agencies such as the CIA, military engineering projects, and private corporations that manufacture consumer technologies. At the same time, their projects are engineered and distributed with a healthy dose of humor. In an interview for “The Interventionists” exhibit, a member of the IAA affirmed, “Humor is a good way to make people pay attention, who might otherwise tune you out. Absurdity can be an effective means for changing the parameters of a debate.”83 Indeed, absurdity and humor has proven to be a vital tactic in many interventionist surveillance art works as a means of productively altering the frame of debate. As the Surveillance Camera Players see it, humor, play, and pleasure are essential to altering public understandings and experiences of surveillance society, “especially given the despair and paranoia usually associated with surveillance and social control.”84

In other words, performances and products that teeter on the edge between ‘real’ and ‘fake,’ absurd and normal, can create a productive confusion or instability on the part of

82 IAA, “iSEE,” last accessed on August 25, 2010, http://www.appliedautonomy.com/isee.html. 83 Thompson, The Interventionists, 78. 84 Thompson, The Interventionists, 86.

59 the viewer, creating a space in which the visual field is defamiliarized and previously invisible or normalized aspects are made visible. In the same interview, the IAA said,

It's always been that we need to have a very pointed conversation, but at the same time we're not going to let you know exactly where it's coming from. We want people to ask, is this 'real' or is it not? We try to get that experience to vibrate between those two poles. The content is real, the message is sincere, the robots- they're real, the stuff we say we do - we do. But at the same people see no apparent rational explanation or profit motive, so they just don't understand... (laughing).85

Placing embodied critiques within a frame of play can allow for greater departures from the normalized ‘rules’ of social life, while at the same time obliquely referring to and critiquing those rules.86

Some of the greatest examples of playful interventions with serious impacts come from the activist group the Yes Men. The Yes Men are known for infiltrating established industries and official information networks, and presenting outlandish propositions regarding contemporary political and economic systems that push executives to articulate the controversial stances of the companies for which they work. The dispersed and mostly anonymous group members pose as ‘fake experts,’ creating websites that appear to be official (like GWBush.org) and booking speaking engagements at corporate and academic conferences. At a 2001 “Textiles of the Future” conference in Finland, members of the Yes

Men impersonated WTO officials invited to speak about textile production in sweatshops around the world. After delivering an increasingly absurd business philosophy, one of the

Yes Men took off his business suit to reveal a new surveillance suit that the WTO was

85 Thompson, The Interventionists, 105. 86 Erving Goffman’s Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1974) describes cognitive frames that encompass formal as well as everyday performative situations and within which participants ‘play’ by a set of commonly understood rules and signals. Gregory Bateson, in his earlier theorization of play and metacommunication, argues that within such a frame a rhetorical substitution can be applied, in which an animal’s playful nip connotes a more serious bite, while not actually being the bite itself (“A Theory of Play and Fantasy” Psychiatric Research Reports 2, 1955: 39-51.)

60 promoting: the “Employee Visualization Appendage.” Designed to be a sparkly visual representation of neo-liberalism, the appendage was a three-foot long golden phallus with a surveillance monitor at the end of it.87 Of this mocking shock tactic, the Yes Men wrote in their classic tongue in cheek manner: “The premise was that managers will be able to see workers in sweatshops and manage them more efficiently… it was a new technology the

WTO was introducing.”88 In this and other projects, the group pushes material and ideological solutions to an absurd level in order to make corporate audiences think twice before accepting business plans without subjecting them to ethical scrutiny.

Similarly, Critical Art Ensemble’s theory of “recombinant theatre” promotes the playful creation and circulation of ‘bad copies,’ or false informational data. CAE advocates for the circulation of fabricated facts and information –‘bad copies’ of ‘real’ facts and information – in order to disrupt the stability and truth-value of corporate and semi- privatized channels of information.89 In essence, bad copies “use elements from the emerging theatre of information and its attendant technologies” to build resistant models of alternative information flow and participation.90 CAE terms these practices “virtual theatre” or “theatre of information,” drawing on the tension between ‘real’ and ‘fake’ that has characterized debates over theatricality for centuries.

As CAE’s deployments of the term ‘theatre’ suggests, the slipperiness of processes of theatrical representation and reception, which I explore more deeply below, can playfully destabilize assumptions about ‘reality’ and ‘fiction’ in surveillance society in order to more

87 See “Tampere Hijinks” by Yes Men, accessed August 19, 2010, http://theyesmen.org/hijinks/tampere 88 Thompson, The Interventionists, 106. 89 For example, CAE constructed a ‘theatre of information’ with a medical site, fabricating virtual ‘facts’ for audience participants in a project called “Flesh Machine.” See CAE Digital Resistance, 105-112. 90 CAE, Digital Resistance, 98-99, 104.

61 seriously re-vision habitual understandings of evidence and discipline. Surveillance technologies emerge as effective theatrical tools with which to foreground, reformulate, and challenge practices of watching and being watched. In destabilizing assumptions about the truth-value of surveillance practices and data, surveillance art and performance can effectively re-vision91 aspects of surveillance society that have become so routine and normalized within everyday space as to be invisible. Moreover, by bringing surveillance technologies into traditional theatre spaces, surveillance theatre artists also bring questions of watching/ being watched to bear on processes of representation and reception in theatre.

This is to say that by theatricalizing surveillance-based practices, surveillance theatre artists simultaneously interrogate paradigms of theatre and of surveillance, as well as the ways in which each paradigm has materially and symbolically shaped the other.

In the following section, I look at historic and contemporary practices within the paradigms of theatre and surveillance in order to both align and distinguish theatre practice from the logic of panoptic surveillance. I critically compare surveillance and theatre as representational media, examining their respective capacities to make objects, bodies, and processes visible or invisible to the observing gaze. I simultaneously examine the contrasting ways in which ‘truth’ and ‘falsity’ have been constructed within each paradigm. These overlapping and competing structures of visibility and invisibility, evidence and fiction lay the groundwork for my analyses of surveillance theatre productions in the next chapter.

Policing the Intersection: Key Issues in Surveillance and Theatre

The play of power and knowledge, representation and reception within surveillant and theatrical media can be analyzed according to the foundational questions of surveillance

91 I borrow this term from the historically significant co-edited volume of feminist film criticism by Mary A. Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, Linda Williams, Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism (Los Angeles: The American Film Institute, 1984).

62 studies articulated above: who is watching whom? and what/who is visible or invisible in those processes? Returning to the disciplinary gaze of panoptic surveillance, we recall that Foucault described the panoptic principle as an efficient and sustainable form of discipline based on a visible yet unverifiable site/sight of power. Accordingly, the inmate of the Panopticon, realizing any infraction might be punished if observed by the visible but unverifiable surveilling gaze, begins to discipline him or herself, thus internalizing the aims and ideology of the presumed authoritarian gaze.

In theatrical practice power and knowledge, as well as practices of representation and reception, are likewise tied to these fundamental questions (who is watching whom? and what/who is visible or invisible in those processes?). Theatrical representations of reality have long been influenced and even determined by the social, economic, and political stature of the watcher. Marilyn Frye, in The Politics of Reality, links the etymology of the word ‘reality’ to the political power of legitimating a range of representations, from law, property, and citizenship to the theatrical arts: “Real in Spanish means royal. Real property is that which is proper to the king. Reality is that which pertains to the one in power, is that over which he has power, is his domain, his estate, is proper to him. … To be real is to be visible to the king. The

King is in his counting house.”92 Indeed, throughout history, theatre artists have often had to gain the right to perform by the permission of a royal or governing body.93 Moreover, the

92 Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1983), 155. 93 See Oscar Brockett, History of the Theatre, 9th Edition, for censoring bodies and government regulations at various points in theatre history: for example, Master of Revels (117-188), and other licensing acts (214-215), regulated what could and could not be shown in theatres in Renaissance England. Regulations of this kind continue to be enacted through government funding organizations, such as the National Endowment for the Arts. In a controversial decision that showed the conservative politics and cultural power of the NEA in 1990, chairman John Frohnmayer vetoed the grants of four performance artists (Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck, and Holly Hughes, known as the “NEA Four”), even after they had

63 ‘best seat in the house’ has, in theatre practices that cross centuries and cultures, been reserved for either gods or members of the royal family. These practices of heirarchized viewing came to be embedded and normalized within theatre architecture and naturalized in theatre-going behavior, as persons of political, economic, and religious power were graced with the most advantageous view of the stage and actors.94 While this kind of royal treatment is by no means trans-historical, similar traditions continue today as regional theatres, Broadway houses, and West End theatres feature great disparities in ticket prices based on the best view of and proximity to the stage.

Furthermore, in both theatre and surveillance, the hierarchy of who is watching whom is expressed through a matrix of visibility and invisibility, as processes of watching/ being watched are strategically made visible or invisible, and certain bodies are socially constructed as either given to be seen or given to see. In the panoptic principle, surveillance is practiced through a strategic balance of visibility and invisibility, as surveillance technologies function as a screen for power, engaging both meanings of the word ‘screen,’ to display and to hide.

The panoptic guard tower (analogous to contemporary CCTV surveillance systems in urban streets and shops), placed prominently in the center of the complex, could be viewed from anywhere within the prison, thus displaying the site/sight of power without ever showing the actual embodied presence of the surveillance guard. In contrast to the distinctly visible

successfully passed through a peer review process. For more details on the aftermath of the controversy, see the Supreme Court case records for National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley, 524 U.S. 569, (1998). 94 See Pannill Camp “Theatre Optics: Enlightenment Theatre Architecture in France and the Architectonics of Husserl's Phenomenology” Theatre Journal 59:4 (2007): 615-633. Camp points out that common architectural layouts in 18th and 19th century theatres (in France and elsewhere in Europe) were constructed according to representation of space that dominated Enlightenment natural philosophy. This is to say that Enlightenment models of knowledge and power (which arguably continue today) conditioned the spectatorial and spatial relationship of theatre audiences to the stage.

64 bodies of the surveilled inmates, the actual gaze of surveillance was designed to be hidden and never verifiable at any one point in time. As such, certain symbols of surveillance were

(and still are) ostentatiously displayed so that subjects of surveillance – be they inmates in a panoptic prison, or contemporary shoppers in a store with CCTV cameras – are always aware of the disciplinary systems in place around them, even while they are never sure if they are being watched in ‘real time.’

In theatre practices, the matrix of visibility and invisibility is somewhat different, but just as powerful and ingrained. Certain bodies and objects within a theatre space are presented as hyper visible (actors, props, set), while others (audience members, backstage area, stage machinations) are carefully produced as invisible or given to be overlooked.95 The actors, sets, and props are made intentionally visible in the theatre; they tend to be centrally located, elevated, and well lit. In contrast, audience members of 20th and 21st century

Western theatre productions have been conditioned to sit attentively and quietly in the dark; they are instructed to unwrap cough drops and turn off cell phones before every performance in order to not disturb the hyper-visible part of theatre – the actors and stage space – with their own visual or aural presence. Although cell phones and pagers have come to be among the expected personal affects of theatre goers in the last decade, our attempts as practitioners and audience members to silence these technologies (in order to avoid the potential disruptions they could stage) indicates that contemporary theatre audiences continue to co-operate according to habits of seeming invisibility.

95 It is also significant that the matrix of in/visibility of theatre has been used, linguistically and materially, to describe that which should or should not be given to be seen, both onstage and in the everyday world. Historically, the term ‘obscene’ derived its meaning from bodies or acts that, due to graphic, immoral, or violent characteristics, were deemed improper to be shown on stage (in a scene).

65 In addition to functioning as visible markers of the theatrical world and narrative, hyper visible elements of theatrical representation such as actors bodies, props, and set pieces reference certain external events, gestures, and conditions of the ‘real world’ outside the theatre, referents that are symbolically present but materially absent. The ‘real world’ referents, themselves ‘signs’ of cultural processes and values, are visible through the representation of theatrical ‘signs,’ making theatrical representation a layered system of signification.96 This is to say that the ‘real world’ haunts each theatrical representation, as the actors’ bodies and gestures, the set, and the props, represent ‘realities’ without ever fully becoming them. As witnesses to this play of signs, audience members must connect the material bodies, objects, and gestures within the theatre to the ‘real’ in several ways: they must reconcile the knowledge that the actors are ‘real’ people with lives outside the theatre, as well as the characters whom they represent within the theatrical narrative.

In effect, whereas user-consumer-subjects of surveillance are conditioned to ‘not see’ certain aspects of surveillance in public space, audience members are disciplined to see double. In the theatre, spectators watch actors and stage objects that perform both as and in excess of themselves. As performance theorist Peggy Phelan puts it,

In moving from the grammar of words to the grammar of the body, one moves from the realm of metaphor to the realm of metonymy… Metaphor works to secure a vertical hierarchy of value and is reproductive; it works by erasing dissimilarity and negating difference; it turns two into one. Metonymy is additive and associative; it works to secure a horizontal axis of contiguity and displacement…. In performance, the body is metonymic of self, of character, of voice, of ‘presence.’ 97 For theatre audiences, the actors and props function simultaneously as theatrical sign, real world referent, and material reality on stage. And yet, within the metonymical processes of theatrical representation and reception, the stage object or body of the performer is eclipsed

96 Reinelt, “Politics of Discourse,” 208; Fisher-Lichte, “Theatricality,” 85. 97 Phelan, Unmarked, 150-151.

66 by the referent that it can simultaneously never fully become. Phelan describes this discomfiting paradox of performance: “in the plentitude of its apparent visibility and availability, the performer actually disappears and represents something else – dance, movement, sound, character, ‘art.’… [P]erformance uses the performer’s body to pose a question about the inablility to secure the relation between subjectivity and the body.”98

Said another way, the theatrical relationship between ‘reality’ and ‘representation’ is

‘unverifiable’ in a similar way as is the panoptic relationship between ‘watching’ and ‘seeming to be watched,’ and both models of un-verifiability are palpably present within surveillance theatre productions. Hyper-visible markers of theatre (actors, set, props) remain, to some degree, unverifiable, as their status as representational objects constantly oscillates between presence and absence, reality and representation. Performance theorist Nicholas Ridout has described this unverifiability as a kind of ‘queasiness’ essential to theatre, an exciting anxiety caused by a fundamental insecurity and instability in the exchange between representation and reception, bodies on stage and bodies in the audience.99 Ridout attributes this

‘queasiness’ to the audience’s encounter with themselves as spectating subjects, an observation that is particularly germane to the interactive performance conditions of Contains

Violence and Point Blank explored in the next chapter. According to Ridout, theatrical media

“turn the spectator into an audience that thinks too much of itself, that exposes itself somehow to its own gaze, that puts itself, improperly, upon the stage, in place of the work that was supposed to have transcended such categories altogether.”100 Just as the panoptic prisoner internalizes the disciplinary gaze from the guard tower to the extent that s/he

98 Phelan, Unmarked, 150-151. 99 Ridout, Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 31-32. Ridout calls this the ‘failure of relation’ that lies at the heart of theatre, a facet he finds most exciting about theatre making and spectatorship. 100 Ridout, Stage Fright, 9.

67 polices him or herself, theatre has the capacity to make spectators critically aware of themselves as they simultaneously watch and are watched.

Phelan underscores the notion of theatre’s ‘unverifiability’ from another angle with her claim that live performance is uniquely characterized by acts of embodied representation that disappear after the moment of enactment, thus making them inherently non- reproducible and un-verifiable. This feature of ephemerality sets theatre apart from visual media – such as film, photography, and surveillance – that produce lasting, material records that can be used to ‘verify’ or reproduce the exact conditions of a performing body after the

‘original’ event has taken place. Thus, for Phelan, live performance works in opposition to the archival logic of visual representation, as theatrical performance “does not reproduce the object, it rather helps us to restage and restate the effort to remember what is lost.”101 In

Phelan’s view, then, theatrical modes of representation and reception are vanishing acts: no sooner than audiences and performers ‘remember’ that which has been lost, the gestures, bodies, and experiences of the theatre are lost again once the performance ends.

While Phelan’s alignment of theatricality with disappearance casts theatre as an

‘unverifiable’ experience shared briefly by co-present audience and performers, other theorists, such as Rebecca Schneider and Joseph Roach, have argued that theatrical practice offers a powerful alternative to the over-privileged archive or material record. They argue that, in theatre and performance, stories, experiences, gestures, and memories effectively

‘remain,’ can be repeated and revived, in ways that defy and pre-figure archival logic. 102 In

Cities of the Dead, Roach importantly argues that “performances so often carry within them

101 Phelan, Unmarked, 147. 102 See Rebecca Schneider “Performance Remains” Performance Research 6:2 (2001), and Joseph Roach Cities of the Dead: Circum Atlantic Performance. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

68 the memory of otherwise forgotten substitutions,” substitutions that may have escaped or been erased from the official archive of History.103 Taking Roach’s argument further,

Schneider asks, “if we consider performance as a process of disappearance, of an ephemerality read as vanishment (versus material remains), are we limiting ourselves to an understanding of performance predetermined by our cultural habituation to the logic of the archive?”104 Schneider suggests instead that through other modes of knowing and remembering, such as re-enactment, repetition, gestural memory, and embodied ritual, performance remains as part of an ongoing historical record that is passed on through non- archival materials and processes.

Despite hotly contested differences, these performance theorists have offered important insights into the politics and processes of theatrical representation and reception, insights that both align and distinguish theatre practice from the logic of panoptic surveillance. In proposing different understandings of remaining and disappearing, and the ability of live performance to do so, Phelan, Schneider, and Roach suggest that theatre and live performance can effectively interrogate and disrupt a cultural dependence on archival remains and stable ‘evidence.’105 Theatrical representations of real or imagined human experiences are unique from other forms of media in that they come to being in the present, again and again, never as entirely fixed meanings or contained narratives, but rather, to use

Peggy Phelan’s words, as performances that admit to “the impossibility of securing the

Real.”106

103 Roach, Cities of the Dead, 5. 104 Schneider, “Performance Remains,” 100. 105 See also Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 106 Phelan, Unmarked, 192.

69 In contrast, “securing the real” is, ostensibly, the central purpose of dominant surveillance systems: to provide stable evidence and seal the past into a cauterized story from a particular point of view. As Foucault, and more recently Lyon, Gandy, and Haggerty and

Erikson, have argued, surveillance systems are built and used to produce a ‘secure’ and

‘reliable’ version of an event or situation. And yet, if we take a moment to reflect the above theorizations of theatricality back on to systems of surveillance, we can see that surveillance systems based on the panoptic principle are fundamentally theatrical: the panoptic guard tower, or CCTV camera, functions as a symbol of visual surveillance, producing a form of disciplinary power that is based less on the material ‘reality’ of being watched and more on the interplay between the sign of visual surveillance and its implied disciplinary threat. That is to say, surveillance technologies in everyday settings, as in theatre, function metonymically as both real and representational technologies.

The representational and metonymical history of surveillance technologies is highlighted within theatrical contexts. In his own experimentations with using surveillance technologies with theatre audiences, director-theorist John McGrath has observed the eagerness and familiarity with which the vast majority of audience members participate in surveillance role playing: “Introducing surveillance-like moments into theatre pieces myself

– sequences in which the audience appeared, through video, on stage, or where the stage space itself was interrogated by its reappearance on screen – I found that the audience reaction was often quite gleeful, very different from the reluctant response that accompanies attempts to bring the audience on stage, or to expose stage illusion through other means.”107

Audience members instructed to ‘act realistically’ as they were placed under surveillance in

107 McGrath, Loving Big Brother, 4.

70 the theatre knew exactly what to do, easily moving into improvised representations of the

‘real’ behavior recalled from their everyday lives spent in front of surveillance cameras.

These parallels and contradictions between historical practices and perceptions of theatre and surveillance are foundational to understanding processes of remediation and re- visioning within contemporary surveillance theatre productions. In Chapter Two I explore some of the ways in which surveillance theatre productions capitalize upon the productive alignments and dissonances between historical practices of representation and reception in surveillance and theatre. In particular, Contains Violence and Point Blank investigate the capacity of theatre to reflect and challenge popular understandings of socio-political surveillance, while at the same time exploring how familiar practices of watching and being watched through surveillance technologies can defamiliarize habits of representation and reception in theatre.

(Re)Visioning Gender Through the Surveillance Camera

In this section, I explore another model of critique of visual representation that is important to, yet often overlooked in surveillance society and in the genre of surveillance art and performance. Returning to the question of what is visible and what is invisible in surveillance and theatre, I address a particular blind spot in surveillance stemming from an overarching tendency in surveillance scholarship and art to exclude gender as a category of analysis. As I established in the Introduction, feminist theory and practice from the last half century has been particularly instrumental in defining and deploying the ideological underpinnings of a dominant, gendered and gendering ‘gaze’ in various visual media. In order to lay the groundwork for my explorations of feminist surveillance art in Chapters

Four and Five, I address foundational feminist arguments that pertain to vision, re-vision, and the gendering/gendered gaze.

71 Second wave feminist theories of the 1970’s and 80’s continue to offer some of the most pertinent critiques regarding sexual difference and fetishization in the field of vision.

Analyses of representational media put forward by second-wave feminist film theorists such as Laura Mulvey, Mary Ann Doane, Kaja Silverman, and Theresa De Lauretis, as well as

(post)-second-wave feminist performance theorists Jill Dolan, Sue Ellen Case, Elin

Diamond, and Rebecca Schneider are invaluable to contemporary analyses of surveillance and visual culture. In “Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema” (1977), perhaps the most widely cited publication defining and critiquing the ‘male gaze’ of visual culture, Laura

Mulvey argued that classic Hollywood cinema has long been constructed according to a normalized ‘male gaze,’ producing images and narratives that cater to and reinforce a male, heterosexual rhetoric of desire. In that essay, Mulvey claimed that “cinematic codes create a gaze, a world, and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire,” a desire, she emphasized, that emerges from an implicit patriarchal perspective and focuses on the female form.108

The female form in classic Hollywood cinema was read by feminist film and psychoanalytic theorists as a fetish, a pleasurable stand in for the visually and socially powerful male phallus.109 Jaqueline Rose, along with Kaja Silverman, Teresa de Lauretis, and Mulvey, argued that naturalized modes of representation and reception of female forms in classic cinema have long been driven by the alignment of Woman with fetishized lack. As

Rose describes it, “woman is constructed … as a negative to the man, woman becomes a total object of fantasy (or an object of total fantasy), elevated into the place of the Other and

108 Feminist performance theorists Jill Dolan and Elin Diamond likewise analyzed theatre as a similarly gendered and gendering matrix of visuality, in their respective books The Feminist Spectator as Critic (1988) and Unmaking Mimesis (1998). 109 See Laura Mulvey’s introduction to Fetishism and Curiosity (London: British Film Institute, 1996), and Freud’s “Fetishism” in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, vol. 21 (London: Hogarth Press, 1961).

72 made to stand for its truth” 110 By emphasizing the fetish as a function of sexual difference and hetero-normative male desire, these feminists significantly critiqued male film theorists

Christian Metz, Andre Bazin, and Jean-Luc Comolli for avoiding issues of sexual difference in their formative analyses of fetishism in classic cinema.111 Despite a heavy reliance upon psychoanalytic concepts such as castration, disavowal, and fetishism to analyze classic cinematic representations of the female body (the cut, suture, close up), they argued that

Bazin, Metz, and Comolli failed to recognize the centrality of sexual difference within the

Lacanian and Freudian terms they borrowed.112

Nearly two decades after “Visual Pleasure,” Laura Mulvey went on to nuance her former analyses of the Hollywood film industry as a system of patriarchal ideology. In

Fetishism and Curiosity (1996), she offers an in-depth study of the function of the fetish in relation to the ‘male gaze’ of cinema and visual culture, pairing her critiques of habits of patriarchal vision with a novel reading of ‘curiosity’ as a feminist strategy of re-vision. In this later work, Mulvey constructs a theory of feminist curiosity in order to articulate a feminist gaze located between the limited, fixed positions of Woman on screen and the female spectator.

110 Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986), 47-50. In The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988) feminist film theorist Kaja Silverman argues that fetishism is a process through which a surrogate replaces an absent real. She posits that the fetish is most often a simulated real, an impression of reality that the subject creates in order to cover over the absence of the full real (4-5, 8). 111 Seminal film theorists such as Andre Bazin and Christian Metz identified the Freudian psychoanalytic notion of the fetish as significant both as a structuring element in the practical construction of cinematic narrative and image, as well as a psychoanalytic explanation for the attraction/affect of film semiotics for/on the cinematic audience. In Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, the phallus is the representation of masculine power and privilege, from which arise fear of losing this (castration complex for the male) and desire for it (penis envy for the female). 112 As Silverman and Rose point out, these male film theorists were preoccupied with the lack that the fetishized female form represents in classic cinema, and yet they make little of the connection between the notion of a cinematic ‘lack’ and centrality of ‘lack’ to the Freudian model of establishing and recognizing sexual difference. See Silverman, Acoustic Mirror, 14.

73 Curiosity, both for the woman represented on-screen and for the female spectator, constitutes a ‘way out’ for the rigid, gendered binary of masculine as ‘given-to-see’ and feminine as ‘given-to-be-seen’ that Mulvey originally assigned to the Hollywood apparatus.

Fetishism, curiosity, and the power of the gaze are most neatly combined for Mulvey in the infamous figure of Pandora and her notorious Box. In the myth, Pandora is famous because she is beautiful and desirable to men, and feared because she is a woman who broke the rules and looked where she was not supposed to – namely inside her ‘box,’ which metaphorically describes the interior of the female body and the attendant horrors it supposedly holds for male viewers.113 “While Pandora’s surface mage, fabricated and fascinating, is highly fetishistic, the inside of the box contains everything that fetishism disavows.”114 Importantly for Mulvey, the Pandora myth embodies curiosity as a powerful feminine attribute by which a woman can come to ‘know’ her desirable exterior and even richer interior. As Mulvey writes, “Pandora’s gesture of looking into the forbidden space, the literal figuration of curiosity as looking in, becomes a figure for the desire to know… If the box represents the ‘unspeakable’ of femininity, her curiosity appears as a desire to uncover the secret of the very figuration she represents.”115 Mulvey goes on to re-read the myth as a feminist scene in which Pandora radically acts out a transgressive desire to see inside her own surface or exterior, and in doing so, unleashes a string of misfortunes upon the male subjects of the world.

Most significantly for the surveillance artists discussed in Chapter Four and Five,

Mulvey critically redeploys the Pandora myth to illustrate an “aesthetics of curiosity” that can

113 Mulvey, Fetishism, 60-61. Mulvey also links the myth of Pandora to Freud’s narrative of Dora, and his pursuit of her ‘secret’ interiority that would unlock her from her hysterical symptoms. Confession, as well as his allusion to a ‘jewelry box’ that was also a direct metaphor of female genitals. (57-9) 114 Mulvey, Fetishism, 59. 115 Mulvey, Fetishism, 59.

74 create feminist subjects – spectators, performers, artists, theorists, and women in everyday life – capable of looking inside the conditions of the male-coded desirous gaze of film or of surveillance.116 Jill Magid, Mona Hatoum, and Gilles Walker build works that, like Mulvey’s reading of the Pandora myth, critically re-vision the gendered landscape of surveillance culture, and make visible the sexual politics embedded in the objects and gazes of surveillance. By ‘looking inside’ with a ‘feminist gaze,’ these artists investigate surveillance as an apparatus that, like Hollywood cinema, encodes ideologies of gender through a carefully produced and regulated relationship between the image and the spectator. As de Lauretis puts it, they begin to operate within the radical and trangressive “no-man’s land” between the visual representations of femininity and the male gaze of the camera:

The woman cannot transform the codes; she can only transgress them, make trouble, provoke, pervert, turn the representation into a trap. She now finds herself in the empty space between the signs, in a void of meaning, where no demand is possible and no code available. She finds herself in the place of the female spectator, between the look of the camera (the masculine representation) and the image on the screen (the specular fixity of the feminine representation), not one or the other but both and neither. 117

In Surveillance Shoe, Jill Magid utilizes classic visual markers of sexual difference in order to stage the technology of the surveillance camera as a fetishized object, while simultaneously representing her own body as a fetishized figure of male desire. In the performance-based installation piece, Magid attaches a mobile surveillance camera to a set of pointy stiletto heels and aims the camera up her short skirt; as she walks, the surveillance

116 Mulvey, Fetishism, 62. Mulvey reframes female curiosity as particularly transgressive, dangerous, and powerful, an assertion she uses to construct a powerful feminist gaze, “an active, investigative look, but one … associated with the feminine, suggest[ing] a way out of the rather too neat binary opposition between the spectator’s gaze, constructed as active and voyeuristic, implicitly coded as masculine and the female image on the screen, passive and exhibitionist” (62). 117 Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 35.

75 camera captures images of Magid’s legs and glimpses of her white underwear.118 Using a similarly intimate mode of surveillance, Mona Hatoum’s Deep Throat, utilizes medical surveillance technologies to make a video of the interior of her digestive track. Hatoum then projects the video onto a plate at a single place setting for her viewers’ consumption. In addition to pointing to cultural fetishes of self-starvation and the consumption of images,

Hatoum’s title references the 1972 soft-porn movie of the same name, in which a woman with an odd birth defect – Linda’s clitoris is located at the back of her throat – finds sexual fulfillment in giving deep throated blow jobs.119 As I discuss at more length in Chapter Four,

Magid and Hatoum each use classically fetishized parts of the female body to highlight the gendered gaze of surveillance. Hatoum’s throat and Magid’s crotch stand as fetishized markers of sexual difference that become, in their artworks, fetishisms of institutional surveillance. In doing so, these artists radically unsettle the assumption/myth that institutional surveillant gazes are gender neutral and non-desiring (medical and educational).

By bringing gender into the purview of surveillance art through exaggerated representations of sexual difference and explicit fetishism, surveillance artist Giles Walker plays with what Rebecca Schneider, Craig Owens, and Kaja Silverman have theorized as

118 Magid’s surveillance art piece has a theatrical predecessor in the work of the avant-garde Squat Theatre. The company of Hungarian ex-patriots emigrated to the downtown New York theatre scene in 1977, performing their vivid compilations of pop culture, mixed media, raw violence, and existential theory in a 23rd street store front theatre. Their first piece, Pig, Child, Fire! (1977) featured, among other startling images, a woman with a camera trained up her skirt, reading a manifesto on the “Theatre of Cruelty” by Antonin Artaud. See Theodore Shank, “Squat Theatre” Performing Arts Journal 3:2 (1978), 61-69. 119 Deep Throat is a 1972 American pornographic film starring Linda Lovelace. Deep Thorat earned mainstream attention, despite bans placed on the film in certain certain regions and obscenity trials raised against it. See Ralph Blumenthal’s article “Porno chic: ‘Hard-core’ grows fashionable-and very profitable,” in The New York Times, 21 January 1973.

76 radical feminist agency enacted through the ‘pose.’120 Giles Walker built his controversial pole dancing surveillance robots, which toured internationally in 2008-9, with hard white plastic bikinis, reminiscent of fem-bot storm troopers, and programmed them to gyrate their molded hips against strip club poles, all the while scanning the viewing audience with their over-sized CCTV surveillance camera heads. Walker may not have been aiming for more than an eye catching mixture of discipline and desire, and yet his ‘pole dancing robots’ provide fertile ground for a sophisticated feminist critique of female bodies striking fetishized poses within the libidinal economies of surveillance and the sex-industry.

In his 1985 essay on “Posing,” Owens compared the panoptic principle with the arrangement of the traditional peep show, suggesting that “the peep show is an inversion of the Panopticon: in the former, the voyeurs occupy the peripheral booths, the spectacle, the central stage; whereas in the latter, the (over)seer occupies the central tower, the prisoners the peripheral cells.”121 Owens applies the system of visual power of the Panopticon to the peep-show, arguing that the ‘given-to-be-seen’ female form at center stage in the classic peep show commands a kind of power through the intentional act of striking a pose. Owens thus reads the consciously posing female body as ‘resisting’ the powerful gaze of the male spectator because, in the act of ‘posing,’ the subject of the gaze participates in, or seems to choose, her own visual capture.122 As such, the pose radically undoes classic binaries of

120 See Craig Owens “Posing” in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture. (University of California Press, 1994); Kaja Silverman The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996); Rebecca Schneider, Explicit Body. 121 Owens, “Posing,” 204. 122 Using the process of posing for a photograph as a quotidian example, Owens posits that the body ‘freezes’ in a pose in order to somehow resist the power of the immobilizing technology of capture itself: “If, posing for a photograph, I freeze, it is not in order to assist the photographer, but in some sense to resist him, to protect myself from his immobilizing gaze” (“Posing,” 211).

77 subject/object and passive/active, creating what Owens has described as a third or ‘middle’ term of agency:

to pose is, in fact, neither entirely active nor entirely passive; it corresponds rather to what in grammar is identified as the middle voice… Both the active and the passive voices indicate activity or passivity vis-à-vis an external object or agent; the middle voice, on the contrary indicates the interiority of the subject to the action of which it is also the agent.123

Thought in this way, the act of posing avoids the reductive logic of binary positions of watcher/watched, passive/active, masculine/feminine, and even human/machine. For

Rebecca Schneider the feminist pose becomes a complicated site/sight of binary terror, as the posing subject ‘looks back’ at the gaze for which it poses.124 In The Explicit Body in

Performance, Schneider writes of the classic view of the feminine as “emblematic of the given to be seen,…virgin territory made passive before a veiled masculine gaze.”125 In contrast, explicit body performance artists provocatively ‘look back’ at their viewers from their poses, troubling habitual representations of femininity as they perform themselves as given-to-see as well as given-to-be-seen.126

In these constructions, the visual fetish of the female body is a site/sight in which

Marxist and Freudian theorizations of the fetish merge. Films, peep shows, and photographs, like Walker’s robots, are themselves commodities that simultaneously put gender, sexual pleasure, and desire – as commodities – on display. These different forms of fetishism converge at a point that “characteristically materializes in the eroticized form of the female star, producing a perfect, streamlined image of femininity which acts as a reminder of

123 Owens, “Posing,” 214. 124 See Schneider on binary terror, Explicit Body, 104. “Current feminist performance terrorizes the careful socio-cultural binary distinguishing fantasy and reality that props phallogocentric desire and fuels the continual crisis of commodities in late capitalism” (104). 125 Schneider, Explicit Body, 71. 126 Schneider describes women who ‘look back’ as radical trouble-makers: “The political whore, the object who doesn’t wait to be ‘invested’ in order to look back, is a trouble- making whore” (Explicit Body, 108).

78 the [female] body’s place in Freud’s concept of fetishism.”127 This is to say that Hollywood cinema relies upon the classic fetish of Freudian psychoanalysis – the fragmented and idealized female body – to stand-in and compensate for castration anxiety and lack, while at the same time using the fetishized female form as a dazzling spectacle to cover over the labor of production involved in the literal construction of a film.

While Freud wrote from the psychoanalytic sphere and Marx from within the socio- economic, both theorized a concept of fetishism in order to explain “a refusal, or blockage, of the mind, or a phobic inability of the psyche, to understand a symbolic system of value.”128 Mulvey interprets disavowal as a cause and effect structure, through which the fetish can indicate a traumatic history that can be traced back to a site of psychic pain (a loss). She writes, “psychoanalytic film theory suggests that mass culture can be interpreted similarly symptomatically. As a massive screen on which collective fantasy, anxiety, fear and

127 Mulvey, Fetishism, 8. 128 Mulvey, Fetishism, 2-3. The Marxist fetish relies upon and produces a “fantasy disavowal” of the worker as well as the labor of production. Capitalism, Marx argued, depended on some kind of a visual guarantor of that which it has erased and disavowed. In late capitalism, that visual guarantor has come to be the spectacular commodity, symbolized through the pristine packaging of the new product, never touched by human hands (virginal). “While money appears as a sophisticated, abstract and symbolic means of exchange, capitalism resurrects the commodity as image… where exchange value no less than use value lost practical meaning, and purely representational value came to fore. Everything desirable, from sex to social status, could be transformed into commodities as fetishes-on-display” (4). The Freudian fetish was likewise constructed to explain a response against and disavowal of a lack. For Freud, this was the lack of a phallus that distinguishes the female from the male (sexual difference). According to Lacan’s interpretation of Freud, fetishized parts of the female form stood for the male phallus in order to cover over the anxiety produced by seeing female genitalia (the ‘wound of castration’), which is to say the anxiety of castration as viewed from a distinctly masculine perspective. Seizing on the necessity of women to be viewed but not viewing in this scenario, Rebecca Schneider cannily argues, “If women can see as well as be seen, then castration anxiety – fear of loss of the prerogatives of vision as linked to gender-marked prerogatives – becomes patently absurd… The operative, driving fear inscribed within the patriarchal Symbolic Order is misplaced. It is not a fear of castration, but a fear of the loss of anxiety about castration, a fear of its discovery as absurd.” (83).

79 their effects can be projected, it speaks the blind-spots of a culture and finds forms that make manifest socially traumatic material, through distortion, defense and disguise.”129

Performance theorist Peggy Phelan argues that these ‘blind spots’ or ‘absences’ in representational practices must be examined because they reveal the habitual ‘blindness’ that we practice in order to ‘see’ the constructed, visual world of representation.130 Taking a different view of habitual cultural blindness than Ranciere would later take, Phelan writes,

“taking the visual world in is a process of loss: learning to see is training careful blindness.”131

In the work of feminist performance artists such as Angelica Festa, Phelan posits that the explicit framing of disappearance or absence can constitute new ways of seeing and being seen for feminist critics of visual culture.132

Within surveillance society, the fetishes of the surveillance camera and the feminine subject of surveillance function to disavow – and thereby index – a range of anxieties, blind spots, hidden labors, and markers of sexual difference. From a Marxist perspective, surveillance cameras are fetishes that stand in for the labor of watching, covering over the absent/unverifiable gaze of a security guard. Familiar markers of police presence, crime- watch, and ‘Big Brother,’ surveillance cameras have come to be the visual stand-ins for the promise of security of civic and commercial security, as well as the actual labor of the surveillance workers themselves. As updated versions of the central tower of Bentham’s panopticon, they are thus visible, commodified markers of an unverifiable, invisible, but nevertheless disciplinary, gaze. From a Freudian/psychoanalytic perspective, surveillance technologies become fetishes similarly constructed against several absences, most

129 Mulvey, Fetishism, 12. 130 Phelan explores the productive potential of ‘blind spots’ in cultural representation as a defense against dominant cultural constructions of a ‘real’ that attempts to reify and prove sexual difference as stable and meaningful (Unmarked, 1-5). 131 Phelan, Unmarked, 13. 132 Phelan, Unmarked, 146-167.

80 prominently the absence (lack) of an actual watcher-watched relationship. As visible stand- ins for the gaze of the Law, surveillance cameras are surrogates for security and personal/civic safety, even as they obscure an anxious reliance on markers of sexual difference in representations of surveillance and cover over latent fear regarding the possibility of a space outside of the reach of the Law. 133

Surveillance artworks such as Magid’s Surveillance Shoe and Hatoum’s Deep Throat foreground fetishism in and of surveillance in order to highlight socio-political blind-spots within surveillance systems, as well as psychoanalytic constructions of sexual difference within practices of watching and being watched in surveillance society. Importantly, even as they stage their own bodies as fetishized objects of surveillance, Magid and Hatoum lay claim to a form of feminist agency through the practice of self-representation. As Schneider eloquently articulates, the crucial question haunting practices of representation and reception of the gendered body in visual culture – “who gets to make what explicit where and for whom” – is driven less by making explicitly sexualized female bodies visible (according to many feminist theorists, female bodies are always already visible), and more by performing explicitly self- authored female-marked bodies through feminist practices of self-representation.134 Building upon De Lauretis’ argument that the female body is problematically unrepresentable except through representation, Schneider advocates for feminist performers whose works bring these historical conditions of female representation to light in theatre, not to banish the

133 For Althusser and Foucualt, the Law is the repeated social formations of Ideological State Apparatuses (through which social subjects are interpellated into proper behavior and order); for Lacan, it is the Law of Father, which is the Law of Language, the Symbolic Order outside of which there is no place from which a social subject can speak. Feminist theorists such as Irigaray (1985), have responded to figurations of the Law in Althusser’s policeman, Foucault’s technologies of sexuality, Lacan’s linguistic structure of the Symbolic Order, and dominant modes of cultural representation such as film and theatre. 134 Schneider, Explicit Body, 20 (itallics in original). Schneider argues that feminist performers must critically consider the question “who…gets to control the unfolding of bodily signifiers?” (20).

81 ghosts of fetishization, fragmentation, and distortion, but to “make them appear as players.”135

Hatoum and Magid each stage their own bodies as explicitly gendered canvases on which they can represent and re-vision the conditions and experiences of the gendered gaze of surveillance. In making these ‘ghosts’ visible as ‘players,’ or perhaps even as playmates, they embody de Lauretis’ notion of “the female-gendered subject as one that is at once inside and outside the ideology of gender.”136 Such layered self-representations of gender under the gaze of surveillance have the capacity to open, in de Lauretis’ words, the

“possibility of agency and self-determination at the subjective and even individual level of micropolitical and everyday practices.”137 Magid’s Surveillance Shoe, which has gone on to tour to museums around the world now features footage of her legs and crotch that she recorded as she walked around the public thoroughfares of Boston and New York. She accompanies touring exhibits of Surveillance Shoe with a statement ripe with feminist self-determination and agency: “It is as if the city is a scroll, and with the kick of my free leg, I can unroll it.”138

The mobility of Magid’s ‘free’ and surveilled legs brings to mind another aspect of

Garrison’s feminist ‘radio-wave’ model, described in the Introduction. Towards the end of her essay, Garrison cleverly proposes that feminism itself can function like a radio: something we carry with us as we both receive and transmit ideas. While this extended metaphor may sound trite at first, the implications are in fact quite useful for thinking about surveillance art as a mobile feminist practice. As mobile subjects in everyday surveillance society, artists such as Magid become walking deployments of feminist fetishism and

135 Schneider, Explicit Body, 23. 136 De Lauretis, Technologies, 9-10. 137 De Lauretis, Technologies, 9. 138 See “Surveillance Shoe” by Jill Magid, last accessed August 25, 2010, http://www.jillmagid.net/SurveillanceShoe.php

82 curiosity, provocatively linking Freudian and Marxist conceptions of the fetish to the gendering gaze of surveillance. Thus walking the razor wire, the ‘no-man’s land’ between subject and agent, watcher and watched, representational and ‘real,’ feminist surveillance artists occupy two positions at once, passing back and forth through the looking glass of discipline and desire.

83 CHAPTER TWO

Witness Protection: Surveillance Technologies in Theatrical Performance

In the Spring of 2008, the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre in London summoned audiences for the Shunt Collective’s Contains Violence with a peculiar request: arrive at dusk, wear gloves, and get ready for an evening of rooftop espionage. Unable to respond to the thrilling invitation in person, I followed the proceedings and responses remotely, reading online accounts, reviews, and blog entries that described the scene. Upon arrival, audience members were ushered onto the rooftop terrace of the Lyric Hammersmith, seated under the darkening sky on the edge of the balcony, and outfitted with a set of in-ear microphones and high power binoculars. A uniform-clad officer brusquely ordered audience members to use their individually issued surveillance equipment to follow a drama that would take place several hundred yards away, across a busy commercial street, in a newly built, five-story, glass fronted office building.

As the office-world drama across the street unfolded, the lighted rooms revealed a disillusioned office worker typing his letter of resignation, a bubbly male coworker watering ornamental plants, and, a couple of floors below, a woman in a neck-brace and polka-dot dress sashaying around a photocopier and talking heatedly on her mobile phone. Over the hour-plus performance, the audience had to piece together the suspenseful Hitchcockian narrative through the clues they gathered via their zoom lens binoculars and specially calibrated earphones, drawing connections between a fragmented series of sounds and gestures that included obscene and threatening phone calls, a passionate embrace, and choice inner thoughts narrated by the characters, all of which are underscored by environmental sounds of typing, phones ringing, paper crackling, water pouring, and mundane office conversation. Finally, much as the title of the show promises, the audience members were

84 witnesses to an act of theatrical violence, a dramatically bloody murder worthy of any televised crime thriller.

Later that year and across the Atlantic, PS.122 in New York was host to another

“voyeur’s paradise,” this time within the confines of an intimate theatre space.139 The touring production of Edit Kaldor’s Point Blank, billed by the theatre as “the definitive spy- ware performance,” featured a young woman’s systematic search for the meaning of life through the high-power zoom lens of her camera, an analytic art project that required a unique kind of audience participation. The show began with the nineteen-year-old Nada, her name a satisfying synonym for blankness, explaining her personal research project to her audience, a group I was fortunate to be among one evening in November 2008. Speaking with a laid-back, scientific detachment, Nada told us that she had spent the last few years traveling through a range of European and American cities and taking surreptitious photographs of intimate, everyday moments from strangers’ lives. She used a 200x zoom lens in order to catch details of everyday life surreptitiously, without the awareness of her gaze influencing the candid ‘reality’ of her subjects’ behavior. Nada emphasized the candid nature of the photographs as a sign of their truth, framing them as evidence of “what you really look like when you think no one is watching.

That evening, Nada was going to share with us her sprawling database of spy photographs – numbering over 75,000 and growing daily – that she was now attempting to organize and interpret. Over the next 90 minutes, she said, she needed our help to analyze the contents of these photographs in order to deduce the secret of a life worth living, and help her avoid the chaos of an un-examined life governed by chance. Before we knew it, my fellow audience members and I found ourselves working as impromptu surveillance analysts,

139 P.S. 122, “Point Blank,” accessed November 9, 2008, http://www.ps122.org/performances/point_blank.html

85 reading and interpreting selected photographs that depicted a wide range of human lifestyles, emotions, and situations that Nada might want to emulate or avoid. At Nada’s prompting, we attempted to autopsy the images and organize them according to qualities of life, such as

‘happiness’ ‘loneliness,’ and, most terrifyingly, ‘blankness,’ laboring to read universal truths that the surreptitious photographs supposedly held. Even while the ‘meanings’ of the glances and gestures in the photographs defied clear interpretation or group consensus,

Nada’s map of analyzed photographs slowly grew. Eventually Nada announced that the labor had exhausted her: she would return to build her digital fortress of photographic evidence with a new set of surveillance analysts the next evening.

The Shunt Collective’s Contains Violence (2008) and Edit Kaldor’s Point Blank (2007-9) are illustrative of an emergent genre of mixed media performance that I am calling

‘surveillance theatre.’ Surveillance theatre pieces are characterized by the significant integration of technologies of surveillance into the form and content of live theatre works, as surveillance theatre artists explore aesthetic and theatrical, as well as disciplinary, capabilities of surveillance technologies. Contains Violence and Point Blank join a growing number of surveillance theatre works that include The Wax Factory’s Quartet v. 4.0 (2010), Juggernaut

Theatre’s Oh What War (2008), theatre two point oh #’s Surveillance (2008), Big Picture

Group’s True + False (2007), The Builder’s Association’s supervision (2006), Rebecca

Schneider’s The Blind (2007), Simon McBurney’s Measure for Measure (2004), and the Living

Theatre in collaboration with Surveillance Camera Players: Not in My Name (2000).

Surveillance theatre artists by and large employ theatre as a medium through which to represent historical and contemporary surveillance practices as well as to reflect upon attendant issues of control, discipline, evidence, and freedom. In productions such as Simon

McBurney’s Measure for Measure or The Builder’s Association supervision, surveillance

86 technologies function as part of the theatrical mise-en-scene for the purposes of representing socio-political conditions of contemporary surveillance. McBurney employed live feed and recorded video on the stage of the Royal National Theatre to infuse the Shakespearean drama with contemporary politics of post-modern, mediatized London.140 The Builder’s

Association overlaid various systems of contemporary digital surveillance to trace the ‘data trails’ of three characters caught in the changing conditions of a ‘post-private’ society.141 In other productions, such as The Wax Factory’s Quartet v. 4.0, Juggernaut Theatre’s Oh What

War, Rebecca Schneider’s production of The Blind, and TEAM’s Architecting, surveillance technologies served as a means of critically exploring attendant issues of discipline, witnessing, voyeurism, and escapism that bore on the narratives they staged.

In other surveillance theatre productions, such as Contains Violence and Point Blank introduced above, surveillance technologies were more radically integrated into processes of spectatorship. Recalling that surveillance and theatre are visual media with distinct – as well as shared – traditions of representation and reception, Contains Violence and Point Blank exemplify ways in which the paradigms of theatre and surveillance continue to be shaped around practices of watching and being watched, carefully calibrated visibilities and invisibilities, and the power dynamics that attend each of these arrangements. As I explored in Chapter One, practices of reception and representation that have come to be normalized

(and thus less apparent or visible) within theatre and surveillance can be effectively overlaid in such a way as to defamiliarize and re-vision such habits in each paradigm. By theatricalizing surveillance-based practices, surveillance theatre artists can interrogate habits of watching and being watched in surveillance and theatre; at the same time, they can utilize

140 D. J. Hopkins and Shelley Orr, performance review of Measure for Measure, directed by Simon McBurney, Theatre Journal 57 (2005): 97–100. 141 “Supervision” by Builder’s Association, last accessed August 25, 2010, http://www.superv.org/

87 complex construction of theatrical ‘fictions’ to challenge the ‘truth-value’ and evidentiary status of surveillance data.

In Contains Violence, David Rosenberg – Shunt Collective member and director of

Contains Violence – employed audio and visual surveillance equipment in order to defamiliarize and challenge habitual modes of spectatorship. Rosenberg actively reframed his audience’s reception and perception of the theatrical event by requiring them to access the performance through the mediating devices of binoculars and earpieces – setting up conditions that served to accentuate and alienate the naturalized behavior of watching and overhearing that is so habitual and familiar to theatre that it generally escapes recognition. In other words, Rosenberg used surveillance technologies to pointedly challenge long-running habits of passive spectatorship induced by theatrical histories of realism. In contrast to customs of representation and reception such as the “fourth-wall” and darkened auditoriums that were inaugurated in the 18th century and that continue to be the norm in Realist theatre today,142 Rosenberg included the audience within the narrative frame and spatial reality of the theatre piece, a space that included the ‘real world’ of Hammersmith, London. By supplying his audience with surveillant media (earphones and binoculars), Rosenberg insisted that his audience become viscerally aware of their own habits of spectatorship and theatre going, as well as their embedded assumptions about popular representations of surveillance.

142 Dramatic Realism, though it came into common practice at the end of the 19th/ beginning of the 20th century under directors and writers such as Constantin Stanislavski, Anton Chekhov, and Henrik Ibsen, owes much of its theoretical foundations to the 18th century Encylopedist, Denis Diderot. Diderot was most influential in the theatre world for his advice to the actor to imagine the fourth wall and behave as if he or she was not ‘performing.’ In 1758, he wrote: “When you write or act, think no more of the audience than if it had never existed. Imagine a huge wall across the front of the stage, separating you from the audience, and behave exactly as if the curtain had never risen.” See Denis Diderot, “On Dramatic Poetry,” in Selected Writings. Edited by Lester G. Crocker, Translated by Derek Coltman. New York: MacMillan, 1966.

88 As in Contains Violence, audience members of Point Blank were cast within the narrative frame of the play, this time as impromptu analysts of the surreptitious photographs

Nada had compiled. However, in Point Blank, director Edit Kaldor strategically used a theatrical frame to interrogate popular understandings of surveillance and to challenge cultural assumptions about the evidentiary status of surveillance data. By asking the audience to read surreptitious photographs for universal truths, Kaldor pointed, as it were, to the blank, or gap in logic, that is often filled in with habitual assumptions regarding the truth-value of surveillance data. In the theatre piece, the difficulty, even impossibility, of determining ‘truth’ based on photographic surveillance became evident, as Nada’s endless pointing and debate only produced exhaustion and more doubt as to whether answers could ever emerge from such a process. By setting up an explicitly theatrical frame, in which audience members worked interactively with the performer to create the meaning of the performance, Kaldor highlighted the slippery process of theatrical representation in order to stage the failure of surveillance to produce stable evidence.

Contains Violence and Point Blank provide particularly innovative examples of the valuable interventions that surveillance theatre can stage. Together, these two surveillance theatre productions reveal the productive capacity of surveillance and theatre to mutate, reflect, and challenge fundamental practices of representation and reception in each other.

Through close readings of these productions, I argue that surveillance theatre can be a significant mode of artistic intervention because:

1. Surveillance theatre troubles habits of voyeuristic spectatorship induced by theatrical (as well as photographic and filmic) histories of Realism by engaging audiences as user-consumers of contemporary surveillance.

89 2. Surveillance theatre troubles the common claim that surveillance technology can provide evidentiary indices of the real (or in some way capture “what really happened”) by framing surveillance “evidence” within theatrical “fictions.”

This study of surveillance theatre, and of Contains Violence and Point Blank in particular, is driven by the following questions: What can conventions of surveillance bring to bear on conventions of theatre, specifically in regard to experiential and ideological aspects of watching (reception)? How can theatrical practices be used to reveal structures of discipline in contemporary surveillance society, especially as those structures have become increasingly commonplace, mundane, and user-friendly? What can placing surveillance technologies within the frame of theatre elucidate about a) contemporary understandings and experiences of surveillance technologies for users and subjects of surveillance, and b) habits of spectatorship in realist Western theatre (that continues to dominate contemporary theatre markets)? What do surveillance technologies – tools of information and evidence gathering in social, political, and economic spheres – evidence within a theatrical frame?

How do surveillance theatre artists stage surveillance technologies in order to perform, or paradoxically, disrupt a stable concept of evidence?

Remediating Evidence and Spectatorship in Surveillance Theatre

‘Remediation,’ a term coined by cultural theorists Jay David Bolter and Richard

Grusin (2000), serves as a particularly useful concept with which to elucidate these questions, as well as to analyze specific surveillance theatre productions and situate surveillance theatre practices within broader discourses of mixed media performance. Simply defined, remediation is “the representation of one medium in another,” the practice of which is a primary characteristic of new digital media, such as virtual reality, computer games, and the

Internet, as well as longer standing forms of visual representation, such as theatre, linear-

90 perspective painting, photography, film, and television.143 In their genealogical analysis of remediation from the Renaissance to the present, Bolter and Grusin sustain that representational media have always emerged through processes of remediation, arguing that photography remediated perspectival painting, film remediated stage production and photography, and television remediated film, vaudeville, and radio.144 Bolter and Grusin go on to use the concept of ‘remediation’ to articulate developmental narratives of new visual media, asserting that the Internet, virtual reality, and digital art are culturally significant less as technological novelties and more for the ways in which they refashion and remix existing forms of visual representation.145

Given the common social usage of the term ‘remediation’ to refer to the process or act of re-educating a deficient or misbehaving student, it is not altogether surprising that

Bolter and Grusin tend to align remediation with techno-social progress, improvement, and reform. As they put it, “new media [present] themselves as refashioned and improved versions of other media,”146 because “the assumption of reform is so strong that a new medium is now expected to justify itself by improving on a predecessor.” 147 They extend this cultural expectation for ‘reform’ beyond contemporary digital media, writing that

“photography was seen as the reform of illusionistic painting and the cinema as the reform of the theater.”148 However, by investing in developmental genealogies such as these, Bolter and Grusin overlook significant ways in which existing ‘older’ media, such as theatre, have

143 Bolter and Grusin, “Remediation,” 345. 144 Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 59-60. 145 Bolter and Grusin write, “what is new about new media comes from the particular ways in which they refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media” (Remediation, 15). 146 Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 14-15. 147 Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 59. 148 Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 60.

91 critically integrated new media and concomitant changes into ongoing practices of representation and reception.

In contrast, performance and media theorists such as Steve Dixon (2007), Greg

Geisekam (2007), Philip Auslander (1999), Sue Ellen Case (1996), and Rebecca Schneider

(2011) have persuasively argued that theatre has, throughout its rich and varied history, functioned as a malleable platform for artists and audiences to experiment with and reflect upon new technologies of representation, communication, and information exchange. In

Digital Performance, Dixon chronicles a genealogical history of ‘digital performance,’ citing early theatrical devices of the Greek Deus ex machina, and moving through Wagner’s concept of the total artwork (Gesamtkunstwerk) to early dance and technology experiments by Loïe

Fuller in the late nineteenth century and by the Bauhaus artist Oskar Schlemmer in the

1920s.149 Greg Geisekam’s Staging the Screen importantly counters formulations of remediation that posit new media as distinct from theatre or theatricality, as Geisekam argues that theatre has substantially shaped film, video, and television since the mid 19th century:

“…recent alarms over theatre remediating film, television, and video are ironic, given that these media themselves originally borrowed considerably from the theatre, before they developed more distinctive conventions and concerns. As the newer media evolved critics attempted to demarcate their specific qualities and conventions, often rejecting work that seemed too ‘theatrical’ for failing to acknowledge the distinctiveness of the particular medium…”150 Moreover, Geisekam points out that ‘border disputes’ over the relative ‘artifice’ or ‘reality’ of these media are essentially futile, as definitions of artifice, reality, theatricality, and mediatization vary widely among practitioners and critics of theatre, film, and digital media:

“For example, an influential tradition associated with Andre Bazin privileges film for its

149 See Dixon Digital Performance, Chapter 2: “The Genealogy of Digital Performance.” In chapter 3, Dixon goes on to examine the early 20th Century avant-garde as it developed through cultural and aesthetic movements of futurism, constructivism, surrealism, Dada, and expressionism. 150 Geisekam, Staging the Screen, 5-6.

92 supposed capacity to show reality, contrasting this with the ‘artificiality’ of theatre; others privilege film’s capacity to create illusion and fantasy, and theatre is seen as being limited by the spatial and temporal constraints of live performance.”151

Cutting to the heart of these debates in The Explicit Body in Performance, Rebecca

Schneider posits that supposedly ‘new’ ways of seeing heralded by various representational trends – perspectival painting, photography, and cinema, as well as realism, expressionism, and surrealism in theatre and visual art – were driven as much by a restless modernist desire for “immediacy of perception” as they were by technological innovations.152

Bolter and Grusin describe a similar desire in contemporary media producers, artists, and users with the terms immediacy and hypermediacy, or “the transparent presentation of the real and the enjoyment of the opacity of media themselves.”153 Importantly, Bolter and Grusin describe these dual desires for immediacy and hypermediacy to be mutually sustainable, positing that, within a modern context, remediation has the effect of making mediation and

‘reality’ inextricable from one other. 154 Hypermediacy and immediacy intertwine in

151 Geisekam, Staging the Screen, 6. See also special issue on “Theatricality” edited by Josette Feral, Substance 31: 2, 2002.

152 Schneider, Explicit Body, 128-130. 153 Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 21. For Bolter and Grusin, the common feature of immediacy across radically different eras, groups, and places is “the belief in some necessary contact point between the medium and what it represents” (30). They offer examples of this ‘contact point’ in photography and painting: for photography it is the light that is reflected from the objects on to the film; for linear-perspective painting, it is the mathematical relationship between the objects and their projection on the canvas. This ‘contact point’ seems to stand for a medium’s truth value, its proximity to the ‘reality’ it represents. In most cases, it seems to be dependent upon a co-present relationship between the medium (which includes the artist/producer of the medium) and the object that is being represented. 154 Phillip Auslander, in Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London: Routledge, 1999), takes a somewhat more controversial approach to the same issue, arguing that our contemporary perspective of ‘reality’ has become nearly synonymous with mediatized experience, such that we need media in order to make an experience feel immediate. Auslander cites examples such as the Jumbotrons at sporting events and concerts that provide the imperative televisual close-up (Liveness, 39).

93 surveillance theatre productions, as audience members interface with live and mediatized aspects of both surveillance and of theatre. In this context surveillant and theatrical media can mutually constitute, challenge, reify, and unsettle each other without necessarily privileging the mediatized image over the live body or vice versa.

As such, surveillance theatre practitioners explore the potential of remediation strategies to critically reflect upon regimes of visibility connected to the media being used.

By investing in the less ‘progress-based’ or ‘corrective’ understandings of remediation articulated by Dixon, Geisekam, and Schneider we can see that surveillance theatre pieces such as Contains Violence and Point Blank do not necessarily aim to improve upon historic or contemporary practices of watching and being watched, or reform social systems of surveillance or means of theatrical production, as Bolter and Grusin might suggest. Instead, such pieces provide valuable opportunities for audience members and practitioners alike to reflect upon and physically respond to prescient questions about discipline and performance within theatrical and surveillant media, as well as in contemporary culture and daily life.

Strategies of remediation have been used within and between surveillance and theatre for years, long before the advent of the contemporary technologies utilized in Contains

Violence and Point Blank. In “Performing Remediation: Minstrelsy, Photography, and the

Octoroon,” Adam Sonstegard uses Dion Boucicault’s 1859 play The Octoroon to look at the process by which “one medium, a stage performance… participated in constructing another medium, photography.”155 Sonstegard contextualizes the overlapping media of stage performance and photography in the particular historical moment of the production’s debut, claiming that the remediation of photography in theatre was a means by which Boucicault

155 Adam Sonstegard, “Performing Remediation: Minstrelsy, Photography, and the Octoroon,” Criticism (2006): 375.

94 instructed his 19th century audiences in the surveillant and evidentiary capabilities of photography:

The play represents an important historical moment, at which Americans first moved toward naturalizing photography’s role in surveillance; an analysis of the play today dramatizes, as it were, the extent to which Americans have accepted—indeed, have become saturated with—that very culture of photographic surveillance.156

For Sonstegard, theatre functioned as an instructive device that disciplined early audiences of The Octoroon in regard to the use and ideology of new technologies of vision; in a similar, though less overtly disciplinary fashion, contemporary surveillance theatre can facilitate critical reflections about contemporary surveillance. Whereas The Octoroon functioned as a cultural instruction manual that used theatrical representation to ‘coach’ mid-

19th century audiences in the evidentiary function of photography,157 Contains Violence and

Point Blank remediate familiar surveillance techniques and technologies in order to reflect – and allow audience members to critically reflect upon – current social and political uses of surveillance, the responsibilities of watching and witnessing in theatre and surveillance, and disciplined habits of theatrical spectatorship.

Witnessing Violence at the Lyric Hammersmith

The unique performance conditions of David Rosenberg’s Contains Violence caught my eye as I did one of my routine google searches on the terms ‘surveillance,’ ‘theatre,’ and

‘performance.’ When I came across information on the show (which was marketed with the image above) the performance had unfortunately already completed its run in London a few months earlier. However, I was immediately hooked by the show’s concept, and curious

156 Sonstegard, “Performing Remediation,” 376. See also Harley Erdman’s essay “Caught in the ‘Eye of the Eternal:’ Justice, Race, and the Camera, From The Octoroon to Rodney King” in Theatre Journal 45 (1993): 333-348. 157 Sonstegard uses the term ‘coach’ to describe the way in which “Boucicault and the theatrical players had to coach audiences in 1859 to accept photography’s role in resolving the conflict of this play” (“Performing Remediation,” 376).

95 about the form and target of the violence the surveillance theatre piece contained. I read all the online reviews and blog entries I could find about the piece,158 determined to find out what made Rosenberg’s concept so attractive to merit sold out houses. Moreover, I was intrigued by the mystery of where and for whom the promised violence was contained, and I strongly suspected that such an innovative theatre piece could not possibly leave its audience members unscathed.

While the dramatic narrative of Contains Violence received mixed reviews, as critics were unenthused with the rather mundane murder plot, audience members and critics-at- large blogged enthusiastically about Rosenberg’s bold integration of surveillance technologies into their theatre-going experience. Heralded with popular culture references such as “The

Office meets Rear Window”159 every online response and review that I read reflected indisputable fascination with the set up of the show: apparently all Rosenberg had to do was give adult audiences the chance to play spies on a rooftop, and they respond with the giddy excitement of children playing make believe. “There's something gratifyingly unusual about being marshaled out on to a London roof terrace by surly, burly men with walkie-talkies, collecting binoculars and headphones… on the way and settling down to watch a play unfold in the windows of an office block across the road. How bizarre! How artfully creepy!”160 Susannah Clap of The Guardian noted the rare and valuable opportunity the piece provided, writing that “the inside-outsideness sets you up to look quite differently at your

158 In writing about a performance I did not attend, I am taking up Amelia Jones’ argument about refusing to privilege “being there.” See, Amelia Jones, “Presence in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation,” Art Journal 56 (1997): 11-18. 159 Susannah Clap, “The Good, the Bad, and the Photocopier,” The Guardian, 6 April, 2008, accessed October 10, 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2008/apr/06/theatre2 160 Alice Jones, “Contains Violence, Lyric Hammersmith Roof Top Terrace,” The Independent, 9 April, 2008, accessed October 10, 2008, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts- entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/contains-violence-lyric-hammersmith-roof-terrace- london-806273.html.

96 surroundings - which is not something The Importance of Being Earnest will usually help you do.”161

The set up of Contains Violence was doubly thrilling in that it gave audiences the rare chance to play at a familiar cultural fantasy of rooftop spying, while simultaneously providing them with a new dramatic perspective. Giving audiences this rare opportunity was, in fact, part of Rosenberg’s foundational goal. Rosenberg created Contains Violence as part of a two- year fellowship he had been awarded “to research techniques that ‘facilitate participation and methods of empowering the audience.”162 In this piece, he fostered audience participation by giving theatre-goers the chance to play at classic, old-fashioned surveillance – a model of surveillance that satisfyingly echoed popular representations of surveillance in films, TV shows, and news events, but that everyday social subjects rarely have the opportunity to embody. As one audience member shared on a blog, the show’s concept alone was inspiration enough to attend: “I went along as I like anything Hitchcocky and it also seemed a good way to indulge my creepy habit of looking out of the window and spying on passers by on a more sophisticated level.”163 Likewise, Robin McKie of The Observer online could not help but compare the experience to “Hitchcock's film Rear Window, in which a helpless

James Stewart glimpses odd bits of action in the next apartment block and eventually concludes murder has been committed;” he concludes happily, “[Contains Violence] is a perfect mix of paranoia and voyeurism.”164

161 Clap, “The Good, the Bad.” 162 Donald Hutera, “Contains Violence at the Lyric, Hammersmith,” The Times Online, April 4, 2008, accessed October 10, 2008, http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/ theatre/article3672054.ece> 163 Azma Dar, “Peeping Toms: Monday 5 May, 2008,” smudgeyink, 5 May, 2008, accessed October 10, 2008, http://smudgeyink.blogspot.com/. 164 Robin McKie, “What the Punters saw…” The Observer, 16 March, 2008, accessed October 10, 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2008/mar/16/theatre1.

97 While the opportunity to ‘play’ Jimmy Stewart attracted and thrilled audiences of

Contains Violence, the surveillance theatre piece functioned as far more than a pleasurable indulgence of cultural fantasies. Rosenberg led his audiences to the limits of the game of paranoia and voyeurism that he had invited them to play, and in doing so, he coaxed them out of the comfortable position of traditional spectatorship. McKie’s statement (above) makes clear that, in spite of his active involvement as a spy, he also felt helpless as an audience member, just as James Stewart, with his broken leg, did. Voyeurism – the practice, some would say compulsion, of taking visual pleasure in a scene from a careful distance165– clearly adds to the mechanics of suspense, as the voyeuristic spectator cannot or does not intervene in the scene itself. At the same time, the helplessness of the voyeur, and the paranoia that can come accompany such helplessness, lays bare a foundational problem of spectatorship that, when reframed as surveillance, can offer a serious challenge to the ‘peace of mind’ of theatre goers.

The tension that emerged from balancing their new role as active surveillance agents and their habitual role of passive audience members struck some of the theatre goers as not only exciting, but somewhat disturbing: “Gradually, it becomes apparent that what you are watching is a thriller during which a woman will batter her victim to death, every sickening thud relayed through our ears, while we do nothing, as if the events unfolding in front of our eyes are nothing more than a play.”166 On one hand, of course, the events were ‘nothing more than a play.’ Audience members had purchased tickets, the actors would be paid, the event had a set start and finish time, and no one was ‘really’ harmed in the staged violence. Further,

165 See Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955). See also Victor Burgin, “Jenni's Room: Exhibitionism and Solitude,” in ctrl [space]: Rhetorics Of Surveillance From Bentham To Big Brother, ed. Thomas Levin, Ursula Frohne, Peter Weibel (Leipzig: ZKM, MedienKunstNetz, 2002). 166Italics added. Lyn Gardner, “Contains Violence,” The Guardian, 5 April, 2008, accessed October 10, 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2008/apr/05/theatre2.

98 ‘doing nothing’ seemed to be the only option, given the habitually passive behavior of theatrical audiences, and the distance between the spectators and the unfolding action. And yet, audience members were torn, because they held in their hands surveillance equipment that symbolizes the active duty to stop crime, enforce laws, and bring offenses to justice. As the audience was given the chance to play at watching, the seemingly simple question of what it means to watch a play became suddenly troubling, new, unfamiliar.

Indeed, the comment “as if these events were nothing more than a play,” serves as an especially telling clue as to the target of the actual violence that the production contained.

The tawdry stage violence and overwrought, under-written plot of the play that prompted complaints from critics were, in fact, a red herring. Critics wrote reviews such as: “the hard- to-follow plot, which has a vague Hitchcockian theme of voyeurism, culminates in an apparent murder, with a bit of blood smeared down glass, but for most of the time it staggers along from incident to incident with no sense of development.”167 In addition to being overly attached to Aristotelian forms of drama, these critiques, quite simply, missed the point of Contains Violence. The production masqueraded as ‘nothing more than a play,’ and the surveillance equipment as ‘nothing more than props,’ in order to perform a more subtle kind of violence: a dislocation of identity and perspective produced by blurred boundaries between the theatrical and the everyday, the symbolic and the material.

Indeed, the surveillance technologies used in Contains Violence serve as especially effective tools – weapons, we might say – to challenge habits of theatrical spectatorship.

Utilizing them as such, Rosenberg does deliver the violence his show promises to contain, but not where most audience members and critics expected to find it. By outfitting his theatre audience members with familiar symbols of surveillance, Rosenberg did violence to

167 Clap, “The Good, the Bad.”

99 ingrained habits of theatre spectatorship: he cast his audience in active roles within the fictional narrative of surveillance and violence he had staged, he destabilized their entry into a fictional realm of theatre by placing them on the blurry border between the theatrical and the everyday, and he disoriented their visual and aural intake of the theatrical event itself with powerful zoom lenses and specially calibrated earphones.

In essence, Rosenberg set two familiar modes of watching against each other, employing popular representations of surveillance in such a way as to defamilarize habitual processes of theatre spectatorship. On one hand, the individually issued surveillance equipment gestured to familiar cultural representations of surveillance that the audience eagerly re-enacted, as the rooftop setting, binoculars, and wiretapping invoked films such as

Hitchcock’s Rear Window or televised crime shows such as The Wire. On the other hand, the

Lyric Hammersmith’s status as an internationally renowned theatre invoked long-standing traditions and expectations of theatre-spectatorship – deeply ingrained behavioral habits such as quiet attention from a largely invisible and passive audience, a shared understanding of the imaginary 4th wall that sets the audience outside of the narrative frame, and the

‘suspension of disbelief’ that marks the borders between the everyday ‘real world’ and the fictional theatrical space.

Rosenberg rearranged the formal elements of traditional theatre, making small but impactful changes in traditional theatre practices with the help of some familiar symbols and practices of surveillance. He placed audience members and actors adjacent to rather that inside a traditional theatre space, separating them by a gulf that they could see, but not ‘act’ across. He outfitted his audience with individually issued tools of surveillance that allowed them not only to see and hear the distant action, but that also served as emblems of their limited roles within the dramatic action. And finally, once his audience sat on the rooftop of

100 the theatre, clutching the ‘props’ they were given to enact their roles, Rosenberg relied upon the surveillance equipment to disorient and reframe their sensory encounters within the theatre performance. In order to analyze the impact and effects of surveillance theatre on the paradigms of theatre and surveillance, these three main aspects of remediation at work in

Contains Violence merit closer examination: the spatial arrangement that put audience members on the limen between the theatrical and the everyday, the distorting effects of the surveillance equipment on the visual and aural senses of the audience, and the surveillance technologies that symbolically pulled audience members between passive voyeurism and active witnessing.

First of all, the spatial arrangement of Contains Violence placed audience members, quite literally, on the edge of a traditional theatre space, peering over the rail of the Lyric’s rooftop terrace. By spacing the audience and actors across the gulf of a real-life busy street,

Rosenberg pitted the fictional frame of theatre against the ‘real’ world of the everyday, and created a gulf across which the audience could see, but could not ‘act.’ The fiction of the murder that the audience watched for entertainment was powerfully framed and encroached upon by the bustling reality of the busy Hammersmith commercial district. As Susannah

Clap of the online Guardian observed, “Beneath the imaginary acts of violence, as in a dreamlike backdrop, buses pass by silently, pedestrians bustle, and ambulances speed to real emergencies.” The blurring of the two registers produced a unique and interwoven theatre of surveillance, as the ‘staged violence’ slipped between and around ‘real emergencies.’ From their rooftop vantage point audience members could freely move between ‘real’ and ‘staged’ events, a perspective that some audience members were not quick to leave. As an audience member noted, “the audience stayed in their seats, scanning the area with their binoculars

101 for several minutes after the play was over.”168 In effect, the spatial frames between reality and fiction were made permeable, lending productive confusion to the borders of theatrical spectatorship.

Secondly, the surveillance technologies themselves, placed in the hands of audience members, essentially functioned as theatrical props, casting spectators in ‘empowered’ roles as rooftop spies, while simultaneously challenging embodied habits and perceptions of theatre spectatorship. Andrew Sofer, who writes extensively about the complex relationships between stage objects and audience members, suggests that theatrical props can indeed serve as particularly radical tools with which to challenge theatrical convention. As Sofer argues in

The Stage Life of Props, “the prop [can] become a concrete vehicle for confronting dramatic convention and revitalizing theatrical practice.”169 Sofer ascribes this to an important dual capacity of stage props, arguing that props function as ‘visual emblems’ or ‘symbolic agents,’ as well as “vital participants in the stage action.”170 In other words, theatrical props function as symbols that reference cultural systems of meaning outside the frame of the play, while simultaneously facilitating particular, material interactions within the play world itself. Sofer suggests that props contain

two temporal processes that move in opposite directions simultaneously within a given performance. On the one hand, props are unidirectional: they are propelled through stage space and real time before historically specific audiences at a given performance event. At the same time, props are retrospective: … they are “ghosted” by their previous incarnations, and hence by a theatrical past they both embody and critique.171

168 Paul Arendt, “Another View: Private investigator Michael Colacicco on Contains Violence,” The Guardian, 8 April, 2008, accessed October 10, 2008, 169 Andrew Sofer, The Stage Life of Props (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), vii. 170 Sofer, Props, vi. 171 Sofer, Props, viii.

102 The surveillance technologies staged in Contains Violence can likewise be read according to these dual temporalities: in the first and more immediate temporality, they function materially within the frame of the play as tools that actively mediate processes of watching and being watched. Audience members had to interface with the surveillant media

(binoculars and earphones) in order to access and follow the dramatic action of the play. In the second, retrospective temporality articulated by Sofer, the surveillance technologies invoke the “ghosts” of their socio-political roles and contemporary cultural representations of reality TV and crime dramas. For the audiences of Contains Violence – historically specific in their familiarity with the technologies and gestures associated with rooftop surveillance – these ‘ghosts’ are familiar specters of police on a sting operation, or Jimmy Stewart playing at vigilante sleuthing. These recognizable ‘ghosts’ hailed audience members nostalgic for the mid-20th century to the theatre production and implicitly instructed them to behave in certain ways once there. Rosenberg thus effectively drew on the radical potential of the stage prop; he counted on his contemporary audiences’ willingness to play along with familiar tools of surveillance, to treat them lightly, like props in a play, in order to open up their senses – and their senses of themselves as spectators – to the disorienting effects that the binoculars and earpieces had on familiar modes of watching and listening to live performance.

Thirdly, Rosenberg furthered his sly attack on the habits of theatre spectatorship through a sensorially disorienting contrast between physical distance and mediated proximity. The significant distance between the audience and the performers – across a large, busy street in Hammersmith’s commercial district – contrasted with the visual close- ups and aural amplification provided by the binoculars and earpieces. While the audience was several hundred yards from the actors, a distance much greater than most contemporary

103 theatre spaces allow, the surveillance equipment allowed them to see and hear the action up close. Visually empowered with the binoculars, audience members could create their own films, as it were, getting up close and personal with the characters in a way that the medium of theatre does not typically allow. “You make up your own long-shots and close-ups, using their binoculars to zoom in and out at will,”172 described one observer, as another extrapolated, “the experience of being free to follow and zoom in on what interests you can give you a feeling of being closer to the action.”173

The aural experiences of many audience members were substantially more unfamiliar and disorienting: “You are, weirdly, much further away from the actors than usual but aurally much closer up,”174 wrote one observer, while another adds “the sound is extraordinarily disconcerting, as if someone else has taken up residence inside your head.”175 According to one interviewer, Rosenberg hoped that the use of headphones would do just that: “transport the audience into the rooms and into the heads of the protagonists,” as the audience hears not only what is audible to the characters, but also “what is happening in their bodies: [such as] an accelerated heartbeat.”176 In the another interview, Rosenberg shared that he was inspired to use this aggressive form of audio recording by a traumatic experience from his childhood in which his father, a neurologist, had him listen to a binaural recording of savage dogs howling.177 The childhood memory seems to have inspired Rosenberg to create his uniquely violent theatrical container, as the intrusion of the soundscape into the very skulls of the audience was, by several accounts, the most physically palpable mode of sensorial violence.

172 Clap, “The Good, the Bad” 173 Dar, “Peeping Toms.” 174Clap, “The Good, the Bad” 175 Gardner, “Contains Violence.” 176 Hutera, “Lyric, Hammersmith.” 177 McKie, “What the Punters saw…”

104 As these tactics show, Rosenberg attempted to counter traditions of Realist theatre in which audiences are given a passive role, positioned both literally and figuratively outside the frame of the play. Instead, Rosenberg forcibly cast his audience ‘against type,’ outfitting them with props that cast them as active agents within the frame of the play. By supplying his audience members with binoculars and earphones to spy off a rooftop in London,

Rosenberg made surveillance technologies perform as agents of a unique kind of theatrical violence that was directed not at carefully rehearsed actors, but at the traditional role of theatre spectatorship. While his use of theatre conventions to represent his violent murder mystery was nothing particularly new, the conventional surveillance technologies he employed performed a far more impactful act of violence to theatrical conventions of reception, defamiliarizing the audience’s sense of spectatorial identity and disorienting their perceptual senses. The cartoonish murder that seemed to disappoint many audience members and critics was, whether or not Rosenberg intended it, a dummy, a red herring.

The theatrical production did indeed contain violence, just not of the kind or in the place the audience expected.

However, as I have continued to puzzle over the range of violence contained within the theatre piece, I cannot help thinking that Rosenberg’s uses for the binoculars, earpieces, and theatrical violence did not amount to as radical a strategy of remediation as they might have. By positioning his audience within a frame of theatrical performance while simultaneously placing them precariously at its edge, Rosenberg constructed the production to overstep its own boundaries, and yet, in the end, he fell short of what could have been a more extreme inversion of Althusserian interpellation, and a more cutting lesson in the stakes of voyeurism. Rosenberg’s set up never fully hailed the audience of Contains Violence out of their position of disciplined social subjects. Although the surveillance technologies

105 they held seemed interpellate them into the position of policeman, surveillance guard, or vigilante neighborhood watcher, audience members continued to behave themselves according to traditions of obedient spectatorship.

This shortcoming of the production is shown most clearly in an interview with a particularly expert audience member. As fortune and good press would have it, a private investigator by the name of Michael Colacicco attended Contains Violence during its run at the

Lyric. In an online interview with The Guardian, Colacicco offered his perspective on the accuracy and effects of the representation, reception, and embodied experience of surveillance that the Contains Violence set up, as well as some interesting ideas for future remediations between practitioners of surveillance and theatre. While some theatre critics of the show were bored by the complicated, somewhat slow moving murder mystery plot,

Private Investigator Colacicco had quite a different response: “I wish my current surveillance jobs were half as much fun as this play… More happened in 70 minutes than I would normally see in weeks.”178 He went on to describe what the ‘real life’ performance of surveillance is actually like: “Surveillance is a waiting game. A conversation in a room could be the highlight of your day. In the 15 years I spent working for the police's anti-terrorism branch, I saw perhaps three or four acts of violence.”

If we take Colacicco at his word, Rosenberg could have pushed his emulation of surveillance practices much further and challenged theatre-goers at a deeper level. He could have staged something more mundane than a murder, or even staged ‘nothing’ at all, and, in doing so, used Contains Violence to put another set of habits under scrutiny. That is to say,

Contains Violence could have staged a more profound interrogation of what a ‘good citizen,’ like a ‘good audience member,’ should see. In fact, several of the audience comments shared

178 Arendt, “Another View.”

106 above show that there was an active desire to test the limits of the fields of vision that

Rosenberger set up at the border between the theatrical and the everyday. Some participants noted that the binoculars gave them freedom to watch things that interested them, regardless of whether those things were inside the frame of the theatrical narrative or not, while others stayed in their seats after the conclusion of the ‘play,’ scanning the street and other buildings for everyday dramas. What would have been the effect upon the audience’s spectatorial identities and positions as voyeurs if the production had urged its audiences to actually watch the everyday like they watch a piece of theatre? How much more or less or differently would they have watched? Would they have felt more or less responsible to what they were witnessing?

Given Ranciere’s theoretical opposition to ‘the police’ in his “Ten Theses On

Politics” discussed in Chapter One, it is ironic that Colacicco’s comments from the surveillance profession serve as a means of seeing the theatre piece in a new way. And yet, the PI’s perspective serves as a prompt to engage in what would have been Rancierian politics. That is, if Rosenberg had more explicitly raised the question of what paying audience members are conditioned to see within competing and overlapping frames of the theatrical and everyday, then Contains Violence could have become a sharper critique of the politics of vision in public social space. Rosenberg could have challenged his audiences to critically consider the power structures and figures of authority that condition the parameters of their visible worlds, both in theatre and in the everyday.

A particularly class-focused comment from one critic sticks out as a fruitful place to apply this line of thought. Describing the interplay of ‘real’ and ‘theatrical’ action, Susannah

Clap of The Guardian wrote, “Occasionally, a non-actor - a cleaner or late worker - gets

107 snarled up accidentally in the action.”179 Her dismissive tone clearly indicates that these figures are not ‘worth’ watching, and perhaps for reasons that go beyond their ‘non-actor’ status. As such, Rosenberg might have done well to use the permeable borders of Contains

Violence to ask his audience members to examine the contours of their own subjective vision, the snap judgements and cultural assumptions they were making as they viewed the play and the busy Hammersmith district below.

Another observation from Colacicco suggests that a more pointed use of the show’s overlapping frames of surveillance and theatre could have challenged unexamined subjective responses such as Clap’s. The P.I. reflected: “…the show invites you to get inside the minds of the characters, something my training forces me to resist. A well-trained surveillance officer never allows himself to become involved. You don't make judgments, you never pre-empt. Everything has to be viewed objectively.” This observation moved

Colacicco to suggest that viewing shows like Contains Violence could be a “useful training exercise” for inexperienced agents, as the challenge of watching the play without getting attached “would teach them to be more objective.” However, his observation also contains a prescient critique of the limits and possibilities of surveillance theatre. Colacicco points out contrasting levels of identification, judgement, and objectivity encouraged by theatre and by surveillance. Even while Contains Violence invited audience to ‘play detective,’ Rosenberg did not use the production to challenge his audience’s objectivity as viewers. In contrast, he encouraged his audience members to ‘get inside the heads’ of his characters, connecting actors and audience members through a recorded heartbeat.

Consider instead if Rosenberg had taken Colocaccio’s advice to surveillance professionals – “Everything has to be viewed objectively” – and applied it to his surveillance

179 Clap, “The Good, the Bad.”

108 theatre audience. If Rosenberg had presented his audience with characters and scenes that blended more easily with the everyday world, then he would have more profoundly remediated the way his audience looked at the ‘scenes’ and ‘characters’ constructed before them. If it would not constitute an illegal act of eavesdropping, I would even suggest that he could set his audience up to watch the ‘real world’ from the Hammersmith rooftop, telling them they were watching a play, even a murder mystery. Looking for possible clues and seeking to understand the motives in the people and actions they watched, his audience would have examined the everyday world and its range of inhabitants with a new, investigative-spectatorial gaze. Either way, Rosenberg could have gained more by doing less.

By employing a theatrical frame to interrupt – and in interrupting, hold up for inspection – his audiences’ habitual judgments and blind spots, Rosenberg could have enacted a deeper reaching form of violence, aimed at habitual patterns of over-looking in theatre and the everyday.

Evidence Fail: Pointing at the Blank

Like Contains Violence, Point Blank featured strategies of remediation that enacted several layers of violence, albeit with different targets in sight. Slipperiness, simulation, and uncertainty served as the cunning theatrical weapons with which writer/director Edit Kaldor destabilized cultural constructions of the evidentiary status of surveillance data. In a reversal of Rosenberg’s remediation of theatre spectatorship through technologies of surveillance, Kaldor strategically remediated surveillance data by framing Nada’s surreptitious photographs within an overtly theatrical set up. Kaldor capitalized on the slippery and unstable relationship between the real and the representational that has been historically associated with the concept of theatricality in order to re-frame and challenge cultural assumptions about the truth-value of surreptitious photography. In Point Blank,

109 ‘remediation’ thus comes to function not only as “the representation of one medium in another,” as Bolter and Grusin define it, but also as a means by which to ‘re-teach’ contemporary audiences about the power dynamics, histories, and habitual assumptions that construct contemporary understandings of and responses to socio-political surveillance. As such, Kaldor pit the slipperiness of theatricality as a signifiying system against the supposed stability of surveillance data, setting up surveillance photographs within a theatrical frame in order to shoot them down at point blank range.

The conditions Kaldor set up within Point Blank resonate with cultural histories that have produced theatricality and evidence as oppositional terms – historical discourses that set up theatricality as a measure of self-consciousness and falsity in order to construct surreptitious or candid photography as markers of stable evidence and ‘truth.’ Thus, interwoven with my analysis of Point Blank are a range of historical and contemporary debates regarding ‘truth,’ evidence, falsity and representation that have shaped theories and practices within theatre, photography, and surveillance. As in my comparison of the paradigms of theatre and surveillance in Chapter One, these contrasting suppositions are vital to understanding the techno-social context into which surveillance theatre pieces such as Point Blank intervene.

I attended Point Blank in New York City at PS122 in December 2008, catching the show at the end of a two-year tour to cities and theatre festivals around the world.180 As I described earlier, writer/director Edit Kaldor created a theatrical framework in which the nineteen-year old Nada plumbed her vast store of surreptitious photographs of strangers’ lives for some kind of universal secret that could guide her toward the ‘right’ choices to build a happy life. At the beginning of the show, Nada illustrated the powerful zoom capacity of

180 P.S. 122, “Point Blank.”

110 her camera for the audience, showing how she could easily capture the facial expressions of a couple arguing on a balcony of a high rise roughly a ¼ mile from the high rise balcony on which she stood. Armed with this powerful zoom lens, she could shoot her subjects at

‘point blank range,’ capturing detailed visual data that would surely yield some kind of secret about the behaviors and choices she observed.

Driven by a scientific belief that “everything in life was a possible clue,” Nada obsessively read the candid photographs for evidence of her subjects’ satisfaction with their life choices. The night I saw the show, Nada was searching the photographs for clues that would help her to decide whether it was better to live alone or with a partner. Her questions seemed at first to be nothing more or less than typical of anyone emerging into adulthood –

“How much time do I spend alone?” “Do couples get bored living together?” “What does it look like to wake up alone, sleep alone, clean the fridge and kitchen alone, cry alone, eat alone?” Her debates over how best to spend her days and nights were engaging, but relatively benign and mundane. Even philosophical questions such as “How old do you have to be to know this is or was my story?” were not particularly ground breaking or provocative. Aside from being drawn to an artsy garden in which to entertain creative friends, her aspirations were not particularly political or radical. In fact, they passed as quite normal.

However, this glaze of normalcy masked the more provocative and political drive of the piece. As Nada explained at the top of the show, the 200x zoom was central to her project because it allowed her to get as close as possible without the danger of discovery.

The technology thus secured some kind of special insight, providing truths about human nature and life choices that an unguarded glance or gesture could reveal. Moreover, it quickly became apparent that Nada was not alone in behaving as though the photographs

111 were containers of raw data that could yield some kind of answer. While some audiences hesitated before answering Nada’s question about which snapshot portrayed someone we

“should trust,” we all chuckled with uneasy recognition when we agreed as a group that we wouldn’t get in a car with the pale guy with tinted sunglasses and a moustache. In another instance, a palpable shudder went through the entire audience as a series of candid photographs showed a couple locked in a tear-ridden shouting match.

The ease and familiarity with which my fellow audience members and I joined Nada in analyzing her candid photographs raises important questions about where our cultural knowledge about surveillance photography, theatricality, discipline, and evidence comes from. If we had not been gathered together in a theatre, would we have been so willing to play along with Nada and take her project seriously? If the pictures had been staged, posed, faked – which they very well could have been – would we have thought that our examination of them could garner any ‘real’ information? Clearly I was not the only one pondering the second of these questions that night. An older man seated in front of me asked Nada at one point if she had set up a certain couple to pose in a particularly goofy way on a park bench.

The room went silent for a moment, until Nada smiled and shrugged, dodging his question with her characteristic non-chalance: “Hey, this zoom lens is not a fake.” We all erupted in the most nervous laughter of the night.

By shifting the focus back onto the technology of capture, Nada sidestepped the deeper question that was at the heart of Point Blank, the question that made us all titter and shift uncomfortably in our seats. Nada’s surreptitious photographs referenced socio-political models of knowledge, fact, and ‘truth,’ and yet their status as ‘props’ within the theatre production resonated with debates over ‘truth’ and ‘falsity’ that have long haunted practices of theatrical representation. In essence, Kaldor’s set up of Point Blank re-animated cultural

112 histories from the last century that have produced theatricality and evidence as oppositional terms – historical discourses that set up theatricality as a measure of self-consciousness and falsity in order to construct surreptitious or candid photography as markers of stable evidence and ‘truth.’

As flip as Nada’s attitude was, her logic and actions bore the weight of a century of cultural representations of photography, as well as ongoing discourses in performance and media studies surrounding theatricality, artifice, ‘reality,’ and evidence. A photograph in surveillance, like an actor or prop in theatre, is simultaneously indexical and material – a photograph is both the place/time represented in the image and the piece of photographic paper itself (or the digitally rendered image). However, in contrast to theatre, the relationship between the material photograph and the sight/site it indexes is produced as stable. This is to say that even while theatricality and indexicality are central to practices of representation and reception in both surveillance and in theatre, they have come to signify quite different things in each paradigm. Surveillance practices have been understood to point to and produce stable evidence, while theatrical productions have been characterized by slippages between reality and representation.

As discussed in Chapter One, objects and bodies in theatre and live performance, also functioning in material and indexical registers, are seen as unstable, shifting too easily between and beyond the materiality they appear to be and the sign to which they refer. The

‘slipperiness’ that is central to theatrical representation has fueled historical debates and disputes over the reliability of facts or evidence presented within a theatrical context, driving anti-theatrical polemics as well as staunch defenses of live performance. For some avant- garde theorists and practitioners, such as Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht, this distance from the ‘real’ is an integral part of the efficacy and artistry of theatre, allowing for critical

113 reflections on the ‘real’ through theatrical representation.181 Anti-theatrical perspectives, offered by theorists as diverse as Plato and Michael Fried, have criticized theatrical representation as a process of copying, or doubling that blurs and debases an object’s ideal, or ‘real’ status once it is incorporated in a theatrical frame.182 In contemporary performance theory, theatricality continues to be championed and dismissed as a process that blends truth and falsity, reality and representation.183 The conscious construction of theatrical events has led theorists such as Erika Fischer-Lichte to suggest that theatre is a process of representation and refraction that positions the ‘theatrical’ at a considerable distance from the ‘real.’ 184 Others, such as Richard Schechner, Peggy Phelan, Rebecca Schneider, Joseph

Roach, Janelle Reinelt, and Nicholas Ridout, whose work was discussed in Chapter One, have celebrated live performance and theatricality precisely for its capacity to problematize stable conceptions of the ‘real.’

In contrast to these understandings of theatre, contemporary and historic rhetorics of photography and surveillance posit candid or surreptitious photographs to be indexes of stable evidence and the ‘real.’ Elucidating a similar historical trajectory as Sonstegard’s in relation to photography, evidence, and The Octoroon, Jonathan Tagg has argued that the medium of photography was central to the construction of surveillance as productive of

181 Bertolt Brecht. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, translated by John Willet, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964); C. D. Innes. Erwin Piscator’s Political Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1977). 182 See Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” from The Republic, Book VII (360, BC), in The Republic of Plato, translated by Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1968); Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” (1967), in Art and Objecthood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 183 In a special issue of Substance focusing on “Theatricality,” guest editor Josette Feral and a wide range of theorists sought to define theatricality as an historical, practical, political, and aesthetic term that simultaneously constituted and described ‘live performance,’ as it functions within the frame of theatre and the everyday. See Josette Feral, “Introduction to Special Issue on Theatricality,” Substance 31: 2 (2002): 3-16.

184 Fischer-Lichte, “Theatricality,” 85-90.

114 stable and irrefutable evidence. According to Tagg, photography was introduced (and soon commonly understood) as a technology that, due to its ‘immediate’ method of capture, preserved and represented essential and irrefutable truths.185 Similarly, in Camera Lucida,

Roland Barthes called the “‘photographic referent’ not the optionally real thing to which an image or sign refers but the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens.”186

Barthes emphasized the facticity of photography, insisting that “in Photography I can never deny that the thing has been there. There is a superimposition there: of reality and of the past.”187

While Barthes and Tagg reflect dominant cultural constructions of photography as a medium of ‘true’ visual evidence, there is also a long history of doctored photographs that intentionally revise and manipulate the ‘truths’ that a photograph evidences. During Stalin’s reign, official photographs were regularly revised, with the figures and faces of people who had fallen out of Stalin’s favor erased from the visual record. In such cases, photographs become a stage upon which to visually enforce a certain version of history preferred by those in power at a certain time. In other words, photography, like live performance, has a

‘theatrical’ history as well, as photography has been used to consciously stage, or re-stage, events, relationships, and identities in order to preserve one version of history over another.

In light of this, attempts to disavow the capacity of photography to ‘fake’ or at least manipulate ‘what really happened’ become all the more interesting, as assumptions about photography’s ‘truth-value’ seem to be politically motivated as well. Such perspectives, which follow the convictions of 19th century Positivist thinkers, align photography with science, evidence, and the Law, as opposed to processes of artmaking in which the object (the

185 Tagg, Burden of Representation, 66. 186 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 76. 187 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 76.

115 photograph) becomes subject to a curatorial, editing eye. By reifying the facticity of photography, theorists such as Barthes cover over the fact that photography, with its historical relationship to propaganda and fakery, could be read as just as ‘theatrical’ as live performance.188

However, the political and cultural history of photography has followed overwhelmingly in Positivist footsteps, as the photograph has been most commonly read as an accurate, trustworthy representation of that which it portrays. Indeed, nowhere is the connection between photography and evidence clearer than in the rhetoric and history of surreptitious photography, a central tool of Point Blank. As cameras became smaller and more affordable, marketed to a wider pool of amateur user-consumers as convenient, hand- held devices, their capacity to capture candid moments rapidly became part of their cultural appeal.189 The simplicity and speed of operation in these new cameras was an important selling point, and hand-held cameras were almost immediately seen for their surreptitious potential and marketed as spy cameras concealable in a bowler hat, lapel button, or small suitcase.190 The marketing of hand-held and spy cameras, which had reached a fever pitch by the turn of the 20th century, created and fueled a powerful desire in consumers to capture

188 Rebecca Schneider, in her forthcoming book Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (London: Routledge, 2011), explores connections between histories of live performance and photography, looking at the ways in which ‘theatricality,’ and theatrical failures of representation are foundational to each medium. 189 Self-capping shutters, a mechanism that was always closed except when the shutter was triggered and which consequently gave rise to the term ‘snapshopt’ in photography, were introduced in the 1880s and quickly used to develop new amateur hand-held and 'detective' cameras. The most popular model was the Kodak ‘Brownie,’ which was released onto the consumer market in 1900; the Brownie sold for a dollar and was marketed as so easy to use that even the youngest family member could take a perfect picture. See Kodak, “Brownie Camera Features,” last accessed August 25, 2010, http://www.kodak.com/US/en/corp/features/brownieCam/; and Franklin Institute, “The Kodak Brownie,” last accessed August 25, 2010, http://www.fi.edu/learn/sci-tech/kodak- brownie/kodak-brownie.php?cts=photography-recreation. 190 Museum of the History of Science, “Cameras: the Technology of Photographic Imaging,” last accessed August 25, 2010, www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/cameras/index.htm?overview

116 candid moments in social life as they occurred outside of the prepared social pose.

Capturing a candid moment with a camera came to stand as a modernist conception of ‘the real;’ the more unconscious the moment captured, the more real it was. When the camera could be concealed or ignored, subjects caught on film were seen as all the more real or truthful for their lack of the attention to posterity.

The modernist fascination with candid photography was articulated most pointedly in a popular theory that emerged in the mid-1930’s, not long after hand held cameras were developed and came to be widely used among middle and upper classes. “New Objectivity,” or for its German originators, “Neue Sachlichkeit,” posited that brutal, universal reality could only be captured by candid, documentary photography. Further, its supporters believed that a candid photographic image could reveal universal truths that could be read by anyone, from anywhere, at any point in history.191 August Sander, a New Objectivist and co- founder of Britain’s Mass Observation movement, espoused the belief that the candid photograph “would ‘fix and hold fast history’ and ‘express the whole brutal inhuman spirit of the time in universally comprehensible form.’”192

191 Deborah Frizzell, Humphrey Spender's Humanist Landscapes : Photo-documents, 1932-1942 (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 1997), 11. 192 Frizzell, Humphrey Spender, 11. August Sander was a co-founder of the Mass Observation Movement in the mid-1930’s in Britain. Profoundly influenced by New Objectivity, the movement embodied a utopian, anti-disciplinary moment in the history of surveillance photography. The founders of the movement aimed to conduct an anthropology of their own society, believing that through the exact documentation of life as it was really lived in England at that time, they could counter balance the presentational, social veneer of late Victorian England. Humphrey Spender, a photographer in the Mass Observation Movement, wanted to use his camera to capture life outside the pose and to publish his findings in such a way as to reveal to the population truths about themselves. He spent time in working class neighborhoods, becoming not only trusted and familiar, but “invisible,” which was his self proclaimed key to success in capturing ‘real’ moments (Frizzell, Humphrey Spender, 18). In other words, it was through the concealment of the camera-eye that he felt he could be most successful in the project of Mass Observation.

117 In contrast to the candid photograph, the posed portrait came to be seen as contrived, self-conscious, and theatrical. Awareness of a camera’s gaze was thought to interpellate the subject of the photograph into artificial (read, false) social poses. This is to say that consciously constructed poses, a foundational aspect of theatricality, were set against surreptitious or candid photographs in the cultural imaginary of the early 20th century.

‘Posing’ on stage or camera was seen as disingenuous, fabricated, and un-objective, whereas the candid photograph came to stand as stable evidence. Surreptitious or candid photography supposedly avoided the self-consciousness of the pose, and the practice was thus understood to yield unmediated representations of reality that could evidence universal or contingent truths. Surreptitious photography (and its offshoot, spy photography and surveillance) was thus positively aligned with stable, irrefutable evidence through an explicit disavowal of the truth-value of consciously constructed (theatrical), posed photographs.

These historical processes, in which the stability of photographic evidence was constructed against the artificiality of theatricality, loom large within the theatrical frame of

Point Blank. Nada’s interactions with the photographs drew on long standing practices of linking ‘truth’ with candid photography. She aimed to find concrete answers to ineffable questions in life, turning to the culturally constructed ‘truth-value’ of surreptitious photographs in a theatricalized attempt to construct a secure taxonomy of life choices.

However, Nada’s reliance upon the truth-value of her surreptitious photographs was counter-balanced by the ever-incomplete nature of the photographic evidence , as well as by the theatrical frame in which she presented them.

The theatricality of the production – Nada’s direct address of the audience and

Kaldor, the director, sitting on stage to assist Nada by bringing up the photos she requested

– sat in tension with the presentation of the photographs as untheatrical, unstaged. Rather

118 than reifying the evidentiary status of surreptitious photography, the theatricality of Point

Blank radically unsettled the logic underpinning surveillance and evidence. While Nada pointed out various emotional expressions in the photos, Kaldor pointed to something much deeper that was under scrutiny: the suspicious status of surveillance photographs as containers of universal or even specific ‘truth.’

The result was unsettling, creating a tense undercurrent to the 90 minute show. As an audience member, I was caught in a curiously indistinct balance between belief and doubt, security and crisis of faith. I was unsure whether or not Nada’s vast store of photographs, seemingly candid and taken without the subject’s knowledge, were indeed ‘real’ surreptitious photos or if some or all of them had been ‘faked.’ They certainly read as spy photographs, shot from high angles, obscured by curtains and branches, and catching passersby in awkwardly intimate poses, but was this a rhetorical strategy of Kaldor’s? And how much did it matter, anyway? Did I really want to break the spell of the theatre, under which my fellow audience members were sharing an overarching sense of empathy with the questions that

Nada was asking, and a deep yearning to avoid the sadness or experience the joy that was palpably present in the photographs she showed?

In the end, I am glad that the question of the photographs’ ‘truth’ was left unanswered. Regardless of whether the scenes in the photographs had been staged as candid or really were ‘un-posed,’ the subtle indistinction between truth and falsity gave the piece its political edge. By engaging the murky intertwining of the ‘real’ and the representational, truth and falsity historically associated with theatricality, Kaldor cast the photographic surveillance data into similar shadows of doubt and indeterminancy. In effect,

Kaldor was firing blanks – fake theatrical bullets – at the construct of surreptitious photographic evidence and the stability of ‘truth’ itself. In partnership with the fictional

119 Nada, Kaldor remediated the conceit of surreptitious photography, submitting the evidentiary claim of candid snapshots to the slipperiness of theatrical representation. The

‘failure’ of theatre to guarantee or reveal fixed ‘truths’ was turned against the supposed truth- claims of Nada’s candid photographs.

And yet, even though the ‘failure’ of the project triumphed, there were still some

‘truths’ that could be learned. Notable theorists of visual culture and performance, such as

Kaja Silverman, Joseph Roach, Diana Taylor and Rebecca Schneider, have insisted that tropes of theatrical representation – such as the self-conscious pose – should not be dismissed as either purely ephemeral or essentially false. 193 In contrast, they argue that the pose, gesture, and performer’s body can function as a register of embodied history in which experience, memory, and tradition are passed along and re-membered through a process of body to body transmission. Rather than aligning historical accuracy with the archive and the production of a stable document, as in photography, these theorists suggest that theatricality can, in fact, index traceable, valid, and legible histories and ‘truths.’

Even while the labor of determining ‘truth’ and compiling a database of stable evidence out of Nada’s photographs was impossible, it was not fruitless. The answers for which Nada desperately searched in her huge collection of photographs pointedly showed themselves to be ever-evasive; they were paper tigers set up to frustrate rather than reveal.

The desire to reach out and understand, or even to become the strangers we were watching was tangible in the theatre, as the overwhelming majority of the audience emitted groans of recognition when viewing pictures of obviously unhappy couples or lonely people, and spontaneous laughter at photos of playful and joyful moments. Though Nada’s questions were mundane and impossible to answer by examining the candid photographs, they were

193 See Silverman (1988), Roach (1996), Taylor (2003), Schneider (2011).

120 far from trivial. My fellow audience members and I responded viscerally to the photographs

Nada showed, trying on different lifestyles and fates in our minds’ eyes, and pondering the questions that they inspired in Nada. Even while the ‘failure’ of theatrical representation kept the photographs from standing as stable ‘proofs,’ the time we spent in the theatre looking at pictures together evidenced deep ‘truths’ about our desires and fears, prejudices and hopes.

In staging Nada’s attempts to extract answers to her life questions from a sprawling database of surreptitious photographs, Kaldor sent performative fissures through several sets of cultural assumptions. Not only did she call into question the truth-value of surveillance data, she also zoomed in on our collective and individual reactions to the photographs and the theatrical context in which they were presented. Point Blank left us staring at the blank that our cultural conditioning had filled in for us. We laughed and groaned at the subjects of the photographs, and yet our reactions stemmed from a deeper set of realizations, perhaps not even consciously registered, pointing at the ease with which we applied blanket assumptions about other people even as we empathized with the twists and turns their lives had taken.

After 90 minutes of struggling to find trustworthy answers in the candid photographs, Nada closed down the performance with an exhausted gesture to the light operator. “That’s enough for today,” she said. “I’ll begin again here tomorrow.” Leaving the theatre, I saw the actress who had played Nada standing on the street, wielding her trusty camera. She pointed her powerful zoom lens at a couple whose backs were turned, walking briskly away in the winter night. I recognized the woman’s laugh and man’s bald head from the time they had spent sitting in front of me in the theatre moments before. I gasped in spite of myself, and turned to look at ‘Nada’: would these two be analyzed in tomorrow

121 night’s show? She smiled conspiratorially and gave a slight shrug, as if to say, “I can’t help it; wouldn’t you do the same?” I smiled back and turned to make the journey back into my own life, listening for a telltale camera ‘click’ that would secure my place in Nada’s archive of human lifestyles. What answers would I yield? What questions? Surveillance, theatre, and photography blurred in that moment, and despite my scholarly determination to trace the diverse cultural histories of each, I was, and often continue to be, caught by the common human desire that they all evidence: our enduring capacity for desire and identification that reach across the borders of any taxonomy, convention, discipline or database.

Bearing Witness to Productive Failures

Perceptual disorientation, contradicting frames, and uneasy tensions at play in

Contains Violence and Point Blank illustrate the potential of surveillance theatre to challenge habitual interactions of user-consumer-spectators with theatrical and surveillant interfaces.

Surveillance theatre productions such as these challenge paradigmatic constructions of theatre and surveillance precisely because they fail to be an exact science with fixed points of representation and reception that align neatly. As evidenced by Contains Violence and Point

Blank, failures in and mis-alignments between traditional processes of watching and being watched set up provocative conditions through which the paradigms of surveillance and theatre can re-imagine and challenge each other. In so doing, these pieces remediate audience understandings and experiences of both surveillance and theatre, doing violence to normalized habits of ‘user-consumership’ in both cultural paradigms. They fail to return their audience members to the habitual subject positions in which they entered the theatre, instead leaving us with a queasy, unsettled feeling of radical blankness – a new place from which we can all begin again tomorrow.

122 CHAPTER THREE

User-Unfriendly: Surveillance Art as Public Intervention

…Alice lifted up her head in some alarm. There was no one to be seen, and her first thought was that she must have been dreaming about the Lion and the Unicorn and those still lying at her feet… ‘So I wasn't dreaming, after all,’she said to herself, ‘unless -- unless we're all part of the same dream. Only I do hope it's my dream, and not the Red King's! I don't like belonging to another person's dream!’194

As part of the “One Hundred Person Performance Event” at Brown University, organized by student performance art collective EXP in the Fall of 2008, I sat on a street corner and read from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass to a group of assembled surveillance cameras for one hour. My captive audience consisted of small home surveillance cameras that I had brought with me and set up at my feet, Providence city police cameras watching from their more established posts on the surrounding street lights, and several Brown University security cameras peering down from the Watson Institute building exterior and the gated dormitory areas across the street. I dressed a la Alice, wearing a blue baby-doll dress, small white apron, and black mary-janes to complete the picture. Passersby stopped to listen, chuckled to themselves as they looked at the cameras (as if to see if the cameras were enjoying the story), and then moved on down the street to watch other participating performers. I continued reading to my beady-eyed students, pausing to show them pictures and give close ups to the security cameras situated at higher angles. When the hour was up, I packed up my book and my portable cameras and, waving goodbye to the publicly installed cameras, went on with my afternoon.

In addition to being part of an unannounced explosion of performance art on the streets surrounding Brown University, Story Time for Surveillance Cameras aimed to transform a corner of everyday public space into a space of playful intervention, staging a temporary

194 Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1994), 261.

123 picture of a familiar world made slippery, strange, and a little bit absurd. Albeit briefly, this performance created a crack in the edifice of the everyday city street through which passersby could take a quick tumble down the rabbit hole, falling away from routine and stepping out of the smooth flow of foot traffic on the shaded streets near the university. The piece asserted a new and somewhat absurd logic within the normalized techno-human interface of everyday surveillance, illustrating for the passing public that habitual modes of interacting with surveillance systems could be interrupted, reconsidered, and playfully inverted.195

Storytime for Surveillance Cameras, as well as my project Camera Letters: Through the

Looking Glass which I described in the Introduction, are illustrative of a larger body of work being made by interventionist artists working with surveillance technologies in public spaces.

The artists featured in this chapter – Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA), the Surveillance

Camera Players (SCP), and Steve Mann – have spent the last few decades creating critically and aesthetically potent works that strategically disrupt and expose dominant forms of information control and habitual uses of quotidian surveillance technologies. While their work can be grouped with a growing number of other noteworthy interventionist surveillance artist-engineers,196 the IAA, SCP, and Steve Mann have forged particularly

195 EXP organized the ‘100 person event’ with such aims in mind. They described the project’s mission in an email sent on October 2, 2008 to participating performers: “This event falls into that category of art that tries to show what's possible. It is about exploring and presenting the possibilities laden in our own streets. What if the streets were completely filled with performers one day? Not just one or two, but 50 or even 100 of them? What if, out of nowhere, the streets around campus transformed into a giant theater? A giant theater that was totally accessible, totally inclusive, and totally free of charge? Who's to say these things can't happen?” 196 Other notable surveillance artist-engineers and projects include: Josh On’s They Rule (2004), which plays upon transparency of information and alternative mapping by exposing networks of powerful elites (see http://www.theyrule.net/2004/tr2.php); Andrew Schneider’s “Experimental Devices for Performance” that use surveillance technologies to playfully distort and displace physical aspects of human communication and movement (see

124 groundbreaking tactical models for interacting with and understanding state and corporate apparatuses of surveillance in public space.

The IAA, SCP, and Steve Mann do, to some degree, work to challenge habits of representation and reception that have conditioned cultural paradigms of theatre and surveillance (as seen in the surveillance theatre pieces discussed in the previous chapter).

However, their work as surveillance artists is aimed most directly at political implications, assumptions, and practices that condition the contemporary landscape of surveillance in public space. As accomplished engineers, IAA and Steve Mann build technologies for political performance and protest, bringing the field of engineering into the purview of performance studies and the political aspects of surveillance. The SCP perform directly for publicly installed surveillance cameras in urban centers around the world, engaging discourses in performance and cultural studies surrounding activist performance and street theatre.

In their work as interventionist surveillance artists, the IAA, SCP, and Steve Mann critique and interrupt contemporary surveillance society in four central ways: 1) they physically intervene in habitual patterns of movement that have been conditioned by state, military, and corporate uses of surveillance technologies and the built environments of urban

http://experimentaldevicesforperformance.com); Doria Fan, who works with RFID tags to make her “Medical Alert (RF)ID bracelet” (see http://doriafan.com/medbracelet.html); Joshua Klein, who used RFID technology to design a site that enabled he and his wife to track everything they own (see http://www.wireless.is/projects/ownyourstuff/); and David Kausemaker and Blendid, who designed “iTea,” an uncanny tea table that will read your id and then search the internet for information about you (which it then displays on its surface) (see http://www.mediamatic.net/page/22745/en). While I primarily explore interventionist surveillance art that engages textuality and visuality, important artistic work is also being created with and about audio surveillance technologies. However,the London-based media artist Paula Roush is probably the first to have explored the sonic properties of RFID. Her project arphieldRecordings documents impromptu arphid sound performances produced by people scanning their oysters cards in the daily routine of access control to the London tube stations (see http://odeo.com/channels/85358).

125 public spaces; 2) they create material alternatives to habitual, user-friendly models of behavior within the techno-human interface of surveillance; 3) they strategically highlight blind spots in surveillance societies, drawing attention to the ubiquitous yet often ignored presence of surveillance cameras in urban centers, and continued military involvement in designing and producing civilian-consumer surveillance technologies; and 4) they engage theories and processes of discipline and interpellation discussed in Chapter One, offering discursive and practical reconfigurations of panoptic discipline and Ideological Stage

Apparatus-based interpellation theorized by Foucault and Althusser, and strategically confronting contemporary models of discipline and interpellation such as late capitalist policing and the anti-spectacle described by Jacques Ranciere.

Interventionist Surveillance Artists in Public Space

My first example of interventionist surveillance art, which I elaborate upon later in the chapter, comes from the prolific laboratory of Dr. Steve Mann, a professor in the

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Toronto. Working as an artist-engineer, Mann has spent the last three decades developing and distributing a multitude of material inventions and theoretical publications. Mann engineers high tech devices, which he patents and then shares freely with willing participants, to express his critiques of surveillance and the invasion of privacy. In his discursive works, Mann argues for a dispersal of hierarchy in surveillance culture, stating his ideal as a society in which everyone would watch everyone else through instruments of surveillance that would be distributed at all levels of society. To describe this social architecture, Mann has coined the term ‘sousveillance,’ substituting the French “sur” (above) with “sous” (below). With

‘sousveillance’ Mann creates semantic space within dominant conceptions of contemporary

126 surveillance, suggesting that individuals can watch from a perspective other than the infamous guard tower at the center of the Panopticon. Mann defines the term as follows:

Sousveillance: the recording of an activity from the perspective of a participant in the activity; the recording or monitoring of real or apparent authority figures by others, particularly those who are generally the subject of surveillance; watchful vigilance from underneath; a situationist critique of surveillance.197

The technologies that he builds and shares with volunteers help to enact his goal of subjecting authorities to the gaze of the public and of empowering everyday user-consumers with visual authority in public and semi-public spaces. In order to further his ‘sousveillance’ tactics Mann has developed a line of functional dome-style surveillance cameras, which he calls ‘wearcams,’ that can be worn by users to ‘sousveil’ state and corporate surveillance systems. He has affixed these dome-cameras to backpacks, pendants, and shirts. In this project, which he has titled Shooting Back, he encourages users to wear these mobile surveillance cameras to school, work, shopping, and walking down the street. Through the theory and practice of ‘sousveillance’ Mann seeks to visually police state and corporate entities to the same degree that those authorities visually police him and all other social subjects of surveillance.

My second example is the Institute for Applied Autonomy, whose project “iSee” I introduced in Chapter One. The IAA is a group of affiliated artist-engineers that has re- engineered surveillance technologies for the last two decades. IAA appropriates and redesigns military robotic systems – building what they call ‘Trojan Horses’ – in order to actively combat state and corporate control of privatized space, and to give tools of expression to subjects who are typically marginalized, criminalized, and silenced (or unheard) in dominant society. Projects such as “LittleBrother” and “GraffitiWriter” harness military

197 Steve Mann, “Sousveillance,” last accessed August 25, 2010, http://wearcam.org/sousveillance.htm.

127 combat strategy for civilian political protest situations. In building their robotic invention

“LittleBrother” – which rhetorically copies the Orwellian propoganda machine of “Big

Brother” – the IAA use military design of a robot that could go where soldiers could not, re- deploying the design to civilian battlegrounds. ““LittleBrother”” is designed to infiltrate areas of “denied access,” such as malls, and public spaces controlled by corporate or state entitites. The “LittleBrother” robot functions as a propaganda machine, capitalizing on its

“robotic cuteness” to distribute subversive pamphlets.198

“GraffitiWriter” features a jacked-up Mars Pathfinder mounted with five orange

Krayon spray paint cans and a 16K brain, used for tagging the street, park, or indoor carpet alike. Graffiti, like subversive pamphlets, can involve a risky process of infiltrating spaces that have become increasingly privatized and surveilled. The robot is designed to go where it is not safe for graffiti activists to go, shielding their identities and keeping them from physical harm.199 With these and other technological in(ter)ventions discussed below, the

IAA aims to facilitate critical discourse about surveillance and public space among a wide range of people. They actively circulate in a variety of arenas, working to engage engineers, journalists, activists, and street artists in debates over the political and ethical implications and potentials of surveillance technologies.

My final example is the well-known Surveillance Camera Players. The SCP first started to perform for public surveillance cameras out of ironic sympathy for the unseen labor of those paid to watch the streets and inhabitants of New York City. Their early performances – versions of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi in 1996 and George Orwell's Nineteen-

198 IAA, “Engaging Ambivalence,” 97. 199 In a 2002 interview with Erich W. Schienke, one of the IAA members described the logic of “GraffitiWriter.” “Due to surveillance a person can't really go in and tag a bank or a shopping mall, so we intended to make a disposable robot that an activist could use instead” (“On the Outside Looking Out: an Interview with the Institute for Applied Autonomy” Surveillance & Society 1.1, 2002: 107).

128 Eighty-Four in 1998 – were ostensibly performed for surveillance guards who, the SCP worried, might be getting bored by watching surveillance cameras on which nothing threatening or out of the ordinary ever happened. Tongues partially in cheeks since then, the group has performed regularly in front of publicly installed surveillance cameras in New

York City and many other American and European cities,200 entertaining the odd surveillance guard that catches a performance, and, more frequently, groups of passersby walking in the busy urban centers where they stage their performances. For these varied audiences the SCP has adapted nine works for performance (including an adaptation of Wilhelm Reich's The

Mass Psychology of Fascism and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot), and written seven original plays (including It's OK, Officer, which has been translated to several other languages).201

In addition to targeting surveillance cameras (and the guards who monitor them) for performances, the SCP regularly lead tours around urban neighborhoods, pointing out the abundance of state, corporate, and private cameras in a given area. In their 10-year report, the group wrote,

Virtually every Sunday since Thanksgiving, 2000, and using its own maps for guidance, the group has given free walking tours of heavily surveilled neighborhoods in New York City. These tours have concentrated on what the things look like, how they work, and how they will work if they are improved ("smart cameras"). Over the years, approximately 3,000 people in total have attended.202

While the tours sometimes attract tourists passing through a city, the audiences are most often comprised of residents of the city. The tours re-vision the urban landscape for people

200 American performances include: Peekskill, NY; Baltimore, MD; Jersey City, NJ; San Francisco, CA; and Boston, MA. In Europe, the group has performed in Amsterdam, Holland; Bologna, Italy; London, Bristol, Manchester and Leeds, Great Britain; Mannheim, Munich, Nuremburg and Leipzig, Germany; Graz, Austria; and Barcelona, Spain, among others. 201 Surveillance Camera Players, “Ten Year Report,” last accessed August 25, 2010, http://www.notbored.org/10-year-report.html. 202 SCP, “Ten Year Report.” The group has also given similar walking tours in Portland, Chicago, Boston, Providence, Cincinnati, Graz, Mannheim, Leipzig and Leeds.

129 who may have ceased to see or never looked for the surveillance cameras with which they tacitly interact everyday.203 Their street performances and tours also create new communities of passersby, as audience-participants stop and gather together on strange, new common ground, peering up at the surveillance cameras on the sidewalks of their neighborhoods or urban centers.

Interventionism, Situationism, and Rancierian Interpellation

The term ‘interventionist’ that I use to describe these surveillance artists has a rich history that has informed many of the tactical and aesthetic aspects of the surveillance art works I discuss in this chapter.204 Within the history of art-activism, ‘interventionism’ is rooted in the theories and practices of Situationism – the historical movement of the 1950’s and 60’s that was characterized by radical approaches to and treatments of public space and capitalist culture.205 The Situationists developed two key tactics to critique and counteract

203 The group has also made maps of heavily surveilled neighborhoods in New York City and other American and European cities, all of which are available to download by residents, tourists, and other interested parties on their website. I depended upon the SCP maps of several neighborhoods of Manhattan for the performance of “Camera Letters” in 2006. 204 As the peer-reviewed Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines it, “the theory of interventionism examines the nature and justifications of interfering with another polity (that is, political organization) or with choices made by individuals. Interventionism is characterized by the use or threat of force or coercion to alter a political or cultural situation nominally outside the intervenor’s moral or political jurisdiction. It commonly deals with a government’s interventions in other governments’ affairs–and is thus an aspect of political philosophy, but it can also be extended to interventions in others’ cultures, religions, lifestyles, and economic activities–and thus can fit into applied ethics, covering such issues as paternalism, imperialism, and topics in business, medical, and environmental ethics.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Interventionism,” last accessed August 25, 2010, http://www.iep.utm.edu/interven/) 205 The Situationist International (SI) group, led by Guy Debord among others, articulated a more extreme version of popular Marxist critiques of the time (which were concerned with debating the alienating effects of rising consumerism), arguing that culture itself was becoming the ultimate commodity. The Situationists and Debord pointed to the growth of intellectual copyright and the shrinking, policing, and control of public space (or the masquerading of private commercial space as public – mallification, as IAA calls it) as signs of the increasing commodification and privatization of culture. They aimed to revolt against such trends by intervening in dominant visual, discursive, and psychological constructions of

130 trends of privatization and commodification of public life, both of which are foundational to the work of the surveillance artists in this chapter. The first tactic, known as the detourne, involves the creation of new, often critical meanings through the strategic rearrangement of popular sign systems. To detourne elements of visual culture, the Situationists would rescript popular comic strips, inserting their own captions or thought bubbles into widely circulated sketches.206 The second Situationist tactic, known as the derive, was influenced by the

Situationist theory of ‘psychogeography’ and involved a meandering walk through urban space in which the walker chose a path according to his or her interest, distraction, and desire rather than the commerce and control-oriented design of most urban centers.207 With the derive, the Situationists proposed the revolutionary idea that ways of physically and psychically engaging with public space were in fact political acts that could either maintain or challenge the capitalist status quo.208

These tactics and theories of Situationism find expression in the contemporary work of Interventionist artists, as seen in the 2004 exhibit at MASS MoCA titled “The

Interventionists” introduced in Chapter One. The exhibit included the IAA and the SCP, as public (privatized) space. Key publications of the SI include: Guy Debord’s “Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency Conditions of Organization and Action,” Internationale Situationniste 1 (1957); Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, (New York: Zone Books, 1994); Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life (London: Rebel Press, 1983). 206 Culture jammers in the 1990’s, such as AdBusters took on this tactic, rescripting popular advertising logos with critical text – such as McDeath logo that played on the McDonald’s internationally recognizable font, layout, and coloring. Thompson, The Interventionists, 16-17. 207 Psychogeography refers to “the study of the precise effects of geographical setting, consciously managed or not, acting directly on the mood and behavior of the individual” (Thompson, The Interventionists, 16). 208 A contemporary example of derive-inspired interventionism is Alex Villar’s 2001 project Temporary Occupations. This work features the artist physically resisting the structuring of public spaces. Villar hops over, crawls through, slips past walls, fences, railings, and gates that are designed to manage and control pedestrian movement in urban centers. He uses trespassing as a means to highlight and challenge aspects of built environments and the ways in which boundaries between public and private are maintained. (See http://www.de- tour.org/series/temp_occupations/index.html.)

131 well as Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) and the Yes Men, the latter two of which are also notable for their situationist-inspired interventions in surveillance culture.209 The surveillance art projects of the IAA, SCP, and Steve Mann discussed in this chapter share several key tactics of Interventionism and Situationism. Specifically, the works: a) happen in the public thoroughfares of the street or the Internet, and/or privatized spaces that masquerade as public (such as the mall, train stations, shopping plazas); b) are created and performed by dispersed, autonomous groups or individuals that extend beyond any exclusive group to include everyday user-consumers and civilian activist groups; c) involve material technologies and interactions, often accompanied by some kind of theory or dialectical practice; d) employ humor, absurdity, and play as tactics to attract attention, widen perimeters of discourse, and imaginatively construct alternative worlds; and e) engage

Situationist tactics of the detourne and derive.

The success of the projects performed and distributed by the IAA, SCP, and Steve

Mann depend largely upon Situationist tactics of the detourne and the derive – as well as other tactics shaped by contemporary “hacker ethics” and “open source culture” discussed in the

Introduction – to build alternatives to familiar surveillance technologies in the everyday world. The IAA and Steve Mann flip the notion of ‘user-friendly’ digital technologies on its head by creating “user-unfriendly” surveillance technologies. In their projects, which I turn

209 In addition to publishing theoretical and practical guidelines for what they call Digital Resistance (2001) and Electronic Civil Disobedience (1996), CAE has tackled the subject of surveillance and privacy in their interventionist art works. “Our work has been quite focused on how surveillance will act as a means of body invasion – that every strand of DNA in our bodies, every molecule will be visualized, mapped, and ordered to better serve capitalist interests” (Thompson,The Interventionists, 117). In their interactive piece Free Range Grain (2004), the CAE set up an on-site laboratory that tested foods brought in by visitors for GMO’s. Originally performed in Frankfurt, the process called into question the claims by the EU that border control policies were effectively keeping out all GMO’s. CAE later performed Free Range Grain in North Adams, MA as part of the MASS MoCA exhibit, shifting the focus onto testing for ‘organic’ organisms. Thompson, The Interventionists, 116.

132 to in the following sections, IAA, SCP, and Steve Mann take pains to intervene in the smooth flow of pedestrian traffic in public space, and create situations and technologies that encourage alternative, politically subversive way of seeing (and practicing) surveillance in public space.

In so doing, these artists take up the call of Ranciere’s ‘politics’ of vision discussed in

Chapter One; they labor to make visible and apparent that which we are socially and politically disciplined to overlook or not see. Steve Mann produces tools of “sousveillance” that model and encourage surveilled citizens to participate in the practice of what he calls

“vigiliance from beneath.”210 The IAA is intent upon making visible the blind spot of military involvement in the development and manufacturing of civilian digital technologies, as well as activating the revolutionary potential in digital technologies that typically lull users into capitalist-friendly usership. In a lower-tech mode, the SCP use theatrical models to point out surveillance cameras that have become invisible due to their sheer ubiquity, and address the human, affective relationships that are possible through the lenses of surveillance.

Steve Mann: Recuperation, Reflectionism, and Sousveillance

The counter-surveillance technologies developed and used by artist-engineer Steve

Mann are focused, quite literally, on seeing differently. As an artist, theorist, and activist

Steve Mann’s sousveillant tactics involve applying technologies of heightened visibility to many aspects of his personal life. Instead of making his life sustainable outside of and unreachable by the grid of surveillance society, he has chosen instead to become the grid, literally grafting surveillance technologies onto his body. In his ongoing “glogging” project, his name for his cyborg-log, he lives with an ‘eye-tap’ device secured to one of his eyes that

210 Mann, “Sousveillance.”

133 broadcasts everything he sees onto a website. His ‘WearComp’ (wearable computer), which has been under development since the 1980’s, also super-imposes emails and a live web browser onto his field of vision.211 Mann also mobilizes his amateur ‘wearcam’ technology to enact ‘sousveillance’ rather than surveillance in public commercial spaces, encouraging users, accustomed to being watched from above, to actively watch from below.

To illustrate the alternative dispersal of power made possible by ‘wearcam’ technologies, Mann describes a particularly provocative scenario involving the deployment of a ‘wearcam’ when interacting with commercial employees. In order to combat what he sees as a common excuse that service industry employees give when faced with anything out of the ordinary – “Let me check with my supervisor” – Mann uses the ‘wearcam’ to create his own subservient place in a larger (fictional) heirarchy of sousveillance.212 When a clerk or manager in a commercial space confronts Mann about his sousveillant recording equipment, usually with some reference to ‘store policy’ handed down from on high or a statement such as, “My supervisor says you can’t wear that in here,” Mann responds with his own appeal to a higher authority. He explains that he is wearing the sousveillance camera in accordance with the orders of his supervisor from the local SMO (Safety Management Organization).

Recalling Ranciere’s terms of the ‘police’ and the ‘politics’ from Chapter One, Mann’s

‘wearcam’ challenge effectively pits two hierarchical structures of vision and power against each other. In bringing his own ‘user-unfriendly’ logic into the dominant hierarchy of corporate-owned ‘public’ space, he shows the normalized hierarchy of the shopping mall to be as ‘unfriendly’ as his own. He explains,

…if an INDIVIDUAL complains about video surveillance systems in use by a CLERK, then the CLERK will simply refer the INDIVIDUAL to management, and

211 Steve Mann, “Wear Comp,” last accessed August 25, 2010, http://wearcam.org/wearcompdef.html 212 Steve Mann, “Existential Technology,” LEONARDO. 36: 1, (2003): 23-24.

134 management will likely be available only during certain limited hours and only after extensive delay….However, if the INDIVDUAL takes out his or her own personal handheld camera and photographs the CLERK, indicating that the SMO requires it, … quite often the MANAGER will immediately become available, and the INDIVIDUAL will no longer have to wait in line or come back on a certain special day to talk to the manager.213

Mann calls this tactic “empowerment through self-demotion,” writing, “in the same way that clerks facilitate empowerment of large organizations, I was able to facilitate personal empowerment by being a clerk. My self-demotion provided a deliberate self- inflicted dehumanization of the individual that forced clerks to become human.”214 His own

(re)structured heirarchy of power – with an imagined ‘supervisor’ requiring him to wear the camera around his neck when shopping – was clearly invented, and yet he used it to performatively challenge the equally abstract and de-humanizing hierarchy of corporate public space.215 Mann’s appropriation of dome surveillance cameras for his ‘wearcam’ line and reconfiguration of corporate structures of power to invoke his sousveillance supervisors, re-visioned and re-arranged familiar symbols of surveillance culture within the shared corporate space of the mall.

As promising and radical as these tactics may be, as they invoke the Situationist tactics of derive and detourne, Mann’s sousveillance theories and practices have prompted spirited debates among surveillance theorists. His in(ter)ventions prompt questions over the efficacy of trespassing and appropriation – questions that likewise occupied the Situationists and those who follow their example. Despite the implied ideological opposition to dominant systems of surveillance, sousveillance has been critiqued as a reproduction and even

213 Mann, “Existential Technology,” 24. 214 Mann, “Existential Technology,” 24. Mann terms this structure: “humans being clerks can make clerks be human.” 215 Similarly, in another ongoing project that challenges socio-political heirarchy through sousveillance, Mann requires identification scans of police officers in order to access his own information (his ID wallet will literally not open unless another ID is scanned). Mann, “Existential Technology,” 21-22.

135 expansion of the disciplinary aims of state sponsored surveillance. Theorists such as Gary T.

Marx have argued that counter-surveillance tactics of arming everyday citizens with surveillance technologies with which to ‘look back’ merely expands a panoptic system (the few watching the many) into a synoptic system (the many watching the many), a process, he asserts, that does not in fact counter the foundational disciplinary operations of surveillance.

Rather, Marx argues, a synoptic ‘sousveillance’ system only expands the panoptic principle and its disciplinary operations, recreating and multiplying the problem in dispersed, miniature structures.216

Marx’s concerns echo another theoretical principle of the Situationists: in addition to defining detourne and derive as tactics to counteract capitalist control of space and social reproduction, the Situationist International used the term ‘recuperation’ to describe an insidious capitalist strategy of cultural reproduction and control.217 In particular, the

Situationists used the term ‘recuperation’ to describe a process by which dominant culture and capitalist entities take up subversive ideas or images and repackage them to be marketed on a mass consumer level. In the process of recuperation, a politically subversive idea or image is turned into a corporate brand or commodity that can be purchased rather than enacted, thus becoming depoliticized. In Rancierian terms, these subversive images become the property of ‘the police’ – a term Ranciere uses broadly to stand for corporate control as well as state discipline – as ‘recuperated’ images of revolution and critique are made visible within carefully controlled corporate frames, such as shop windows. The commercial recuperation of potentially subversive ideas or images literally shifts subversive symbols or

216 Gary T. Marx, “Ethics for the New Surveillance” The Information Society 14.3 (1998): 171- 185; Gary T. Marx, “Electric Eye in the Sky: Some Reflections on the New Surveillance and Popular Culture,” in Computers, Surveillance and Privacy, ed. David Lyon and Elia Zureik (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 217 See Debord, “Report on the Construction of Situations,” the founding manifesto of the Situationists, wherein he discusses the risks of recuperation.

136 practices into store fronts, presenting them in a corporately controlled space that is given to be seen, but only so that it can be purchased by the subject in public space.218 The

Situationists found this process particularly threatening to their own political aims, in that dominant bourgeois culture could recuperate revolutionary aims and tactics of the

Situationist movement itself and use them in pro-capitalist projects. 219

Mann’s work has been criticized, as well as lauded, as a recuperation of the panoptic principle and mass systems of surveillance. His tactic of arming himself with the same tools of surveillance granted to state and corporate entities echoes a strategy that has already been taken on by the corporate world in marketing surveillance technologies to everyday social subjects in the form of ‘nanny cams,’ personal surveillance kits, RFID organization systems, cell phones, Facebook and so on. The logic of sousveillance likewise mirrors central justifications used for state-sponsored surveillance; in fact, Mann has argued that

‘sousveillance’ is a potential antidote to current threats of terrorism, claiming that the more people watching the better.220 Mann also uses politically conservative language in his definition of ‘sousveillance,’ describing it as “watchful vigilance from underneath.”221

218 For example, the commodification of the ‘revolutionary’ culture of the 1960’s is illustrated through the Gap’s use of the ‘1969’ label to sell wide leg, ripped jeans. 219 In the document “Now, the SI,” Debord wrote that “it is quite natural that our enemies manage to partially use us… just like the proletariat, we cannot claim to be unexploitable within the given circumstances” (Tom McDonough, Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, Cambridge: MIT, 2004: xiii). See Guy Debord, “Now, the SI,” in Situationist International Anthology, edited and translated by Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981). 220 Steve Mann, Jason Nollman, and Barry Wellman, “Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices for Data Collection in Surveillance Environments,” Surveillance and Society 1.3 (2003): 331-355. Mann, Nollman, and Wellman’s argument is that antidemocratic and secretive underpinnings of contemporary surveillance society give rise to terrorism and totalitarianism, practices that must be counterbalanced by effective undersight, or sousveillance. 221 In a controversial example of conservative ‘vigiliance from beneath,’ Texas sheriffs recently erected a series of surveillance cameras along the Rio Grande and connected them to the Internet. Through this virtual border patrol, accessible at www.blueservo.net,

137 Said another way, controversy over Mann’s sousveillance – and counter-surveillance techniques in general – re-engages a question posed by feminist scholar-activist Audre Lorde in her famous 1979 essay: “Can the Master’s Tools Dismantle the Master’s House?” Lorde, writing from the perspective of a black, lesbian feminist, answers her own question with the statement, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” arguing that language and its disciplinary operations have been constructed by patriarchal logic and social heirarchy to such a great degree that they cannot be used to attack white, male, heterosexual systems of power and knowledge production.222 Mann, while not taking on an explicitly feminist agenda in his work, attempts to answer Lorde’s question positively, seeking to use tools of surveillance to critique and restructure the imbalanced power structures in contemporary surveillance society. His work walks the fine line between reproducing dominant cultural ideologies and structures on one hand, and, echoing feminist scholar Judith Butler, successfully performing ‘a different sort of repeating’ on the other.

Balanced between reinforcing or deconstructing the ‘master’s house’ of surveillance culture, Mann has defended his position by claiming that sousveillance is a form of

‘reflectionism,’ referring to a combative use of technology to mirror and confront bureaucracies and authoritative organizations such as police agencies. Mann writes,

“Reflectionism seeks to increase the equality between surveiller and the person being surveilled (surveillee), including enabling the surveillee to surveil the surveiller.”223 With his redoubled use of ‘surveil,’ Mann argues that reflecting tools of authoritative organizations in a deliberately disorienting manner is an effective way of critiquing and undermining

everyday users can logon and participate in ‘guarding’ the US-Mexico border. See http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101050132. 222 Audre Lorde. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Sister Outsider (Berkley: The Crossing Press, 1984), 110-114. 223 Mann, “Inventing and Using,” 333.

138 dominant systems of surveillance, or of using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house.

And yet, Mann’s thickly refracted language sounds like it could be an overburdened balancing act, sitting somewhere between detournement and ‘recuperation,’ and brandishing a flashy metal distraction against which the question of the efficacy of sousveillance continues to echo. This is not altogether surprising in that the concept of ‘recuperation’ has occupied a fraught, ambivalent space for the Situationists and their critics and supporters alike.

Situationist scholar Tom McDonough notes that recuperation is tactically and theoretically very close to detournement, possibly even identical were it not for Debord’s insistence in aligning recuperation with dominating practices of bourgeois capitalist culture. While

Debord termed recuperation as a tactic that threatened the revolutionary aims of the

Situationists by mining them for potential capitalist profits, McDonough notes that “there is irony in the use of the idea of recuperation to bolster the alleged purity of the situationist avant-garde, for what is recuperation other than a strategy of mixing, blending…?”224 He goes on to posit that “detournement, the situationist strategy of diverting elements of affirmative bourgeois culture to revolutionary ends… [is] the exact corollary of recuperation,” suggesting that “we can only assume that the bourgeoisie was as adept at detournement as the situationists themselves, that, in fact, recuperation and detournement were one and the same, a shared cultural strategy.”225

Understanding recuperation, as well as detournement, as value neutral tactics that can be used by state or revolutionary entitites alike, can give rise to a productive ambivalence, an uncertain space in which to question the logic of any governing strategy, be it status quo or revolutionary. The blurred boundaries between dominant culture and revolutionary tactics

224 McDonough, Guy Debord, xiii. 225 McDonough, Guy Debord, xiv.

139 that McDonough describes undermine Situationist claims to a position of absolute contestation and opposition. At the same time, such blurred boundaries also position privatized public and semi-public spaces as equal opportunity battlegrounds in which tools and symbols of visual culture can be utilized to culturally dominant or transgressive ends.

Indeed, as Debord argues in Society of Spectacle, socio-political systems of late capitalism may have permeated private and public life to such a degree that there is no

‘outside’ from which to view and critique the system. In this construction, the master’s are the only tools that can be used, as we are always already within the master’s house of digital- age Troy. Detournement thus functions as a tactical tool to reframe and distort received meanings of dominant cultural symbols and systems (the master’s tools of expressing and reinforcing dominant ideologies). Surveillance artist-engineers who critically engage detournement as a strategy aim to show up the logic of dominant power structures as established in percepticide, and composed in the construction and maintenance of cultural and political blindspots.

If, as critics claim, sousveillance is a doomed manifestation of ever-increasing surveillance, Mann offers an effective critique of the contemporary surveillance system by tirelessly detourning its elements in a spectacular performance of its absurdity. A quick glance at Mann’s website reveals a sense of playfulness infusing his inventive attacks on surveillance culture. The earnestness of his theories and the vigor with which he has embraced a life of cyborgian ‘sousveillance,’ are paired with witty wordplay and photographs of him participating in as many performance arts festivals as engineering conventions. Fueled by a relentless hope that absurd inventions can be used for serious interventions and that the master’s tools can have some use beyond supporting the master’s ideological fortress, I look deeper, stare longer, and chase after that queasy feeling in my stomach that comes when I

140 look at Mann’s cyborgian eye-tap and his sousveillance manifestos. I peer into the fun-house mirrors of contemporary surveillance society that Mann has built and look closely at the disorienting, ridiculous, and slightly terrifying images peering back. In this absurd, distorted place, I find the subversive power of his practice – not in Mann’s didactic theorization of

‘sousveillance,’ but rather in the extreme, cyborgian art-as-life choices he has made.

Intentionally or not, Mann performs the absurdity of surveillance society. By grafting an entire surveillance system onto his own, singular body, he brings us face to face with the monstrous underbelly of surveillance that lurks beneath the work of watching and being watched.

Institute for Applied Autonomy: Technologies of Sight for Contested Sites

With their street-ready inventions such as the “GraffitiRobot,” “LittleBrother,” and

“iSEE,” the IAA has turned ‘user-friendly’ technologies such as cell phones, remote control cars, and Mapquest into ‘Trojan Horses,’ creating subversive equipment with which users can get unfriendly with state and corporate systems of control. The IAA pointedly re-deploys military and consumer surveillance technologies to actively support defensive and offensive strategies of political protesters, as well as to directly confront political passivity and neutrality in military-funded engineering culture. In doing so, the IAA tactically occupies the ambivalent razor’s edge between ‘recuperation’ and detournement: they co-opt and refashion military surveillance technologies for consumer use, but rather than demilitarizing the surveillance technologies (as corporate entities have done with RFID tags, cell phones, and consumer GPS technologies), they apply the combative strategies and military tactics associated with surveillance technologies to civilian arenas and actions. The IAA also uses their technological savvy to their advantage by engineering sophisticated, functional products that gain them entry to military engineering circles. Thus engaging multiple aspects of

141 Rancierian ‘politics,’ they simultaneously make their politically engaged critiques legible and audible to academic and military engineers.

The IAA achieves their stated goals of assisting civilian political resistance and furthering discourse about surveillance culture through two main avenues: 1) they re- engineer surveillance technologies for the explicit needs of political protesters and everyday users, building material technologies such as “GraffitiRobot” and “LittleBrother” and developing software such as “iSEE” and “TXTmob” (discussed below); and 2) they share accounts of their work and political critiques in academic and engineering trade journals and conferences. The IAA engages in symbolic as well as material intervention, circulating their subversive products and their discursive critiques in diverse arenas that range from street corners to engineering conventions to academic journals.

They describe their work as “applied critical theory,” as they strategically perform their projects in shared public space in order to discuss them in more theoretical arenas.

“Our projects are functional artifacts intended for use in political resistance, and at the same time, they function as reference points for discourses about relationships between technology, democracy, and culture.”226 In a 2002 interview, a member of the IAA described the various arenas their work circulates in (and is inspired by):

I think our projects generally play a dual role. On the one hand, they are pedagogical devices that provoke public discussion of critical issues. This conception of work fits neatly within the confines of ‘art practice.’ At the same time, our projects are functional tools that dissidents can actually use. In this regard, our work has more to do with engineering (or at least hacker) practice.227

As engaged practitioners, the IAA co-opts military technologies designed for combat situations and redesigns them for counter-state political protesters, participating in local and global resistance movements as artists, engineers, and activists. In “Defensive Surveillance:

226 Thompson, The Interventionists, 104. 227 Schienke, “On the Outside,” 104.

142 Lessons from the Republican National Convention,” the IAA describes their projects as supporting existing activist strategies: “Activists counter police tactics with increasingly sophisticated tools and strategies…. These tactics rely on intelligence gathering and information sharing to coordinate actions and react quickly to changing conditions.”228 For example, the protest tactic of ‘swarming,’ is a tactical model described by military theorists as

“the dispersion of command among many small, autonomous units that are able to collectively attack an enemy from all directions.”229 Street protesters have adopted this model on the ground in order to avoid police breaking up the protest before protesters have had the chance to converge on a central location. The IAA supports and further advances these strategies by helping political activist organizers appropriate military surveillance tactics and practices.

In contrast to museum or laboratory settings, where interactions with art or engineering objects tend to be scripted by convention or rules, the IAA believes that the streets allow for more unscripted, open, and productive interactions between everyday users and their re-engineered surveillance technologies.230 Thus, the IAA strategically tests and displays their inventions in public thoroughfares:

Shortly after completing GraffitiWriter, we brought it to New York for a ‘reclaim the streets’ demo…. later that night we were using it in Washington Square Park and all

228 IAA, “Defensive Surveillance: Lessons from the Republican National Convention,” in Surveillance and Security, ed. Torin Monahan (London: Routledge, 2006), 167. 229 IAA, “Defensive Surveillance,” 172. ‘Swarming’ is a protest tactic developed in recent decades, emerging out of “No Business as Usual” and “Stop the City” movements of the 1980’s, and was notably employed in the large scale protests of J18 (June 18) that effectively shut down central London in 1999, and the WTO in Seattle later that same year (IAA, “Defensive Surveillance,” 169). 230 “This is again, why it is so much more interesting to do things outside of the art context. Once you're out in the street doing stuff people have reactions that aren't scripted….This is the "applied" part of IAA. We've all watched so many robotics research projects that were developed in a lab, go out to the field they were intended for, and fail miserably. In fact, that's the norm…. I think the art context is like too. Where people have these very scripted interactions with art objects” (Schienke, “On the Outside,” 107-8).

143 of a sudden we were approached by a group of graffiti kids and they were really excited - like, ‘Dude! Let me see that thing! Wow! I've got to use it’ and so forth. We realized that this was the project - to give the robot to total strangers to deface their own neighborhoods.231

Given practical experiences such as this, IAA has come to believe that developing and testing their inventions in the urban environments in which they aim to intervene is integral to the success of their pieces: “… we're interested in public space, so we engage these issues in public, and not only in protected environments - like museums and galleries - where the work never gets seen by the people who most need to see it.”232

Using a similar process, the IAA worked with several activist groups during the summer of 2004 to develop communication strategies for protesters of the Republican

National Convention scheduled for the end of August. The collaboration led the IAA to design “TXTmob,” which re-cast familiar text-messaging software as a tool of communication and surveillance in protest situations. The IAA describes the product as it functioned on the ground:

Significant [TXTmob] traffic was dedicated to identifying undercover officers, reporting on police activity, ad monitoring delegate movements. This enabled activists to coordinate a variety of actions across the city. Warned of police blockades and impending mass arrests, spontaneous demonstrations dispersed at a moment’s notice, only to regroup minutes later several blocks away. Responding to reports of police violence, independent journalists were dispatched to videotaped arrests all over the city, providing documentary evidence of police misconduct. Text message reports of delegates sitting down to brunch in quiet East Side restaurants resulted in groups of more than fifty demonstrators waiting to greet them by the time the check arrived.233 After the J18 and Seattle protests, when state and national police adopted more aggressive approaches to crowd control,234 protest organizers shifted from the strategy of

231 Schienke, “On the Outside,” 107. 232 Schienke, “On the Outside,” 105. 233 IAA, “Defensive Surveillance,” 170. 234 These have come to be known as the “Miami Model,” due to particularly harsh police response during protests against the 2003 Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) summit in Miami. In Miami, large areas of the city were barricaded, activist leaders were pre-

144 ‘swarming’ (which eventually culminates in a centralized protest area) to a strategy of radical decentralization.235 In this model, which was successfully employed at the 2004 RNC in

New York City, activists organized a series of protest locations (such as delegate hotels, government and corporate office buildings, and RNC event locations), aiming not simply to disrupt the convention site with a large scale blockade, but rather to “transform the streets…into stages of resistance and forums of debate.”236 According to the IAA, the success of the RNC protests depended to a large degree on cell phone text messaging employed by ‘comms affinity groups,’ or technically savvy activists who perform intelligence gathering and information dissemination during protests situations.237 The IAA’s “TXTmob” helped protesters to communicate quickly and effectively the location and movements of riot squads and police, in order to keep protesters out of direct confrontations and arrests.

Utilizing alternative modes of communication and visual recording is, of course, not new in political activism. As has been widely documented in analyses of recent political protests, it has become standard practice for protesters to use video and still cameras to record police activity during demonstrations. With the Rodney King beatings serving as the emptively arrested, and police used tear gas, pepper spray, tazers, and rubber bullets as they performed mass arrests and held protesters for long hours and in harmful conditions. My brother was among the protesters arrested in Miami in 2003. He and his girlfriend were part of a class action suit against the Miami Police Department for physical damages sustained as a result of the arrest and custody. They recently (January of 2009) settled for $60K per person, and have now used their settlement to buy a house in Missoula (where they are still actively involved in social and political protest). 235 IAA, “Defensive Surveillance,” 169. 236 IAA, “Defensive Surveillance,” 169. 237 IAA, “Defensive Surveillance,” 169. They write, “Comms groups use a variety of techniques, often relying on a network of activists distributed across the protest zone who maintain constant contact with each other and other activists by using two-way radios, cell phones, the Internet, radio, and word of mouth. During the RNC, comms groups relied on cell phone text messaging to an extent previously unrealized during highly anticipated mass mobilizations” (169). They note that while text messaging has played a part in other large scale protests, particularly in popular uprisings in Spain and the Philippines, the RNC protests in New York were the first to strategically use text messaging in a widespread and premeditated way.

145 most widely circulated example, this tactic of inverse or counter surveillance has been theorized as a valuable and compelling form of civilian oversight of police action. Activists wielding cameras have indeed provided crucial evidence of police brutality, documenting state sponsored violence against citizens that has led to successful lawsuits against local and national police departments. Organizations such as Cop Watch function according to this logic, as volunteers in cities across North America serve as witnesses of police interaction on the streets.238

However, while IAA does not undercut the necessity of such documentary practices, they suggest that more immediate and pre-emptive measures should also be taken in protest situations, protecting protesters from violent interactions with police squads by tactically avoiding them. In(ter)ventions such as “TXTmob” provide immediate, operational support that can assist protesters in safely and effectively navigating the terrain of a large and dispersed demonstration. 239 Indeed, one of the most significant and unique contributions of the IAA within the context of surveillance art and culture is their commitment to performing what the IAA has called “militarized appropriation of consumer technology by civilian actors.”240 Activists using ‘TXTmob’ at the RNC utilized ‘command and control’ techniques that are similar to Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA)

238 Cop Watch emerged in the last decade as a volunteer-run program organized for the purposes of ‘policing the police.’ Cop Watch has been described as ‘sousveillance,’ as the program embodies “the use of surveillance technologies and tactics by the lower classes for the purposes of increasing equality through making public the hidden workings of powerful institutions and groups” (Huey, “Cop Watch,” 150). 239 IAA argues that inverse or counter surveillance has a limited impact on police behavior. It can provide crucial evidence at a later date – which is also very important – but it does not necessarily have an immediate impact on interactions within a protest setting. “Video documentation of police conduct was mostly useful after the fact – in court cases and in the establishment of historical record. Cell phone text messaging, on the other hand, had immediate operational value. By using text messaging to monitor police and delegate movements, activists were able to collectively share and act on an accurate representation of dynamic events unfolding across the city” (IAA, “Defensive Surveillance,” 171). 240 IAA, “Defensive Surveillance,” 172.

146 vision for small, highly mobile groups of soldiers to use communication technologies to

“identify and engage moving targets at moments of heightened vulnerability.”241 By using text messaging to track delegate movements, activists exercised offensive strategies that physically challenged and engaged delegates, as groups of protesters physically blocked channels of mobility and subjected delegates to sign waving and shouting. TXTmob also empowered protesters to act defensively, as monitoring police action helped protesters avoid arrest and find unobstructed routes through the city. Moreover, just as military units project operational influence and power through advanced communications and weapons technologies, the rapid communications technologies utilized by protesters enabled the activist groups to appear powerfully efficient and effectively organized.

This model, which the IAA calls “defensive surveillance,” constitutes a novel use of surveillance techniques predicated on avoiding rather than engaging combatants. In contrast to traditional surveillance regimes, which tend to focus on strategies of visual control that aim to modify and discipline the behavior of those under its gaze (or threaten to discipline those who do not obey when the tapes are later viewed), defensive surveillance focuses on non-engagement and aims to help subjects step outside of the territory of control altogether.242 Tools of defensive surveillance thus help protesters step outside of spheres of state control while simultaneously re-territorializing the city streets and making their messages, bodies, and actions visible.

241 See IAA, “Defensive Surveillance,” 172. 242 The IAA links defensive surveillance directly to operational models of power and action. “Traditional surveillance regimes operate according to logics of force – of the watcher’s ability to exercise his or her will on the body of the observed. Defensive surveillance undermines these regimes in that it reflects neither the exercise of official power nor the inversion of power hierarchies. Instead, defensive surveillance prepares an actor to leave the field of engagement entirely” (IAA, “Defensive Surveillance,” 172).

147 As evidenced by the previous examples, the IAA has re-engineered an impressive number of military surveillance technologies to strategically shift models of visibility and counter blind spots in several arenas of civilian life.243 Their technological in(ter)ventions literally help users see space in new ways. Their devices also facilitate critical discourses about surveillance and public space among diverse groups, from engineers and journalists to activists and passersby. Playful software programs such as “iSEE” (discussed in Chapter

One) have successfully opened up discussions with a wider range of people, engaging engineering circles and facilitating discourse in journalism, classrooms, and on street corners.

While the IAA recognizes that “iSEE” will not solve the ‘problem’ of thickly surveilled urban spaces, they see it as a functional tool with which to prompt discussions about surveillance in public space. In describing “iSEE,” a member of IAA said,

…for me it was more of a discursive tool to provoke a conversation. So, the tool had to work if people are going to take it seriously and really talk about these matters…. It was interesting to see that, as a point-of-reference, it allowed journalists to talk critically about surveillance. The way journalism works is that there has to be some sort of news angle, and by creating iSEE, we provided an opportunity for journalists to address the subject.244

243 For example, their current project called “Terminal Air” explores interconnections between government agencies and private contractors involved with the United States Central Intelligence Agency's extraordinary rendition program. They describe Terminal Air: “Since the mid-90’s, the CIA has operated the extraordinary rendition program, in which suspected terrorists captured in Western nations are transported to secret locations for torture and interrogation. A thoroughly modern enterprise, the extraordinary rendition program is largely carried out using leased equipment and private contractors. These private charter planes often use civilian airports for refueling, making their movements subject to public record and visible to anyone who knows which tail numbers to look for. However, while these missions are carried out under the guise of protecting the American people, the nature of the program has thus far remained out of reach to both American and International law. With only the knowledge of what these planes have been used for in the past, human rights activists are left to view their movements as a vast “black box” and can only speculate whether any specific plane is currently carrying human cargo en-route to being tortured in a so-called CIA “dark prison.” IAA, “Terminal Air,” last accessed August 25, 2010, http://www.appliedautonomy.com/terminalair/index.html. 244 Schienke, “On the Outside,” 106.

148 Members of IAA likewise labor to make their work and ideas visible within the space of engineering culture in order to critically engage ethical issues involved in engineering and theorizing surveillance technologies. While they are not alone in critiquing engineering culture, or the military influence exerted on the design and marketing of civilian surveillance technologies,245 the IAA is unique in its dedication to critiquing engineering culture on its own terms – that is, by designing and building experimental products and systems. By actually building their own surveillance technologies, most of which use sophisticated engineering software and hardware, they gain entry into engineering circles and establish practical common ground on which to approach the theoretical and ethical discourses they wish to critique. “It's one thing to critique engineering culture, but it's another thing entirely to engage it directly. To do that, there are things you have to do. For example, it's really important to build stuff…. [The engineers] have to respect you enough to listen to you.”246

One of the most vital aspects of the IAA’s interventionist works is that they target the implicit but rarely explicit partnership between martial goals and academic training in engineering culture. As they write, “open declarations of martial efficacy are rare within academia;” instead, military goals are represented in academic discourse in abstract terms such as “optimization algorithms” and “enabling technologies.” 247 Technologies being engineered for military use are often discussed in such a way as to de-politicize their intended uses. IAA has argued that such technologies tend to be seen by engineers as ethically neutral if they will have ‘dual use’ applications in civilian markets:

emphasising civilian applications for a DARPA-funded research project downplays the particular application for which it has been designed and frees the engineer from responsibility for the uses to which it will most likely be put. The culture that

245 See David Lyon (2001), Gary T. Marx (1985), Manuel De Landa (1991), Kevin Haggerty and Richard Erikson (2006). 246 Schienke, “On the Outside,” 104-5. 247 IAA, “Engaging Ambivalence,” 97-98.

149 celebrates technology’s neutrality thus mobilizes ambivalence as a mechanism that enables thoughtful, well-intentioned individuals to work on projects they would otherwise find morally repugnant.248

By circulating their designs and theories within the military engineering field, the IAA articulates a unique perspective within an industry that tends to be governed by morally neutral scientific language on one hand, and a state-sponsored military agenda on the other.

By making explicit the political aims of their inventions, the IAA challenges the traditional ambivalence in engineering culture that has normalized the apolitical position of engineers in state or military fields of development. They confront the ‘service industry’ mentality of engineers who develop products regardless of the political aims of their employers, as well as the related assumption that technology is “value neutral” and technological development is

“an ethically indifferent activity.” 249 In engineering functional and sophisticated versions of surveillance technologies for subversive use, the IAA creates material products around which ethically engaged discourses can open up.

As “TXTmob,” “iSEE,” “LittleBrother,” and “GraffitiWriter” illustrate, there are a number of ways that the IAA practices Rancierian political action. By embodying strategies of Rancierian ‘politics’ the IAA readily directs their tactical interventions at modes of perception control (strategies of invisibility) exercised by the ‘police’ in late capitalist public space. First, they build material technologies that demonstrate the possibility of an alternative logic of surveillance and a re-distribution of power within systems of surveillance and discipline. Their technologies physically interface with real, everyday spaces, altering the material landscape and enhancing the technical capabilities of the often politically marginalized (or under-represented) social subjects that inhabit them. Using “TXTmob”

248 IAA, “Engaging Ambivalence,” 99. 249 IAA, “Engaging Ambivalence,” 98.

150 assisted protesters in keeping sight of their strategies of non-engagement and maintaining the integrity of their own operational strategies within the combative space of a mass demonstration.

Secondly, their technologies make public space visible in ways that run counter to corporate and state dominated organizations of space and strategies of visibility, which are largely focused on marketing and control. Software programs such as “iSEE” become tools with which social subjects can literally see space in a different way, as charting ‘paths of least surveillance’ brings alternative, ‘anti-police’ maps of urban space into visibility. Thirdly, their work helps to bring new or previously suppressed perspectives and discourses to amplification. Graffiti and pamphlet-distributing robots, which can be pre-programmed or controlled remotely, can help artist-activists express their perspectives by facilitating the dissemination of their messages within carefully guarded public spaces. Finally, the IAA makes their designs and ideas legible within the space of engineering culture, opening discourse on the ethics and political responsibility of working as an engineer in contemporary surveillance society.

The IAA’s use of Rancierian tactics – facilitating politically engaged dialogue and prompting new ways of seeing and engaging practices of surveillance in public space – move beyond an expansion of panopticism and even Mann’s model of ‘reflectionism.’ Rather than simply inverting processes of surveillance, turning them around in order to watch and police authorities (as in Mann’s sousveillance), the IAA reconfigures surveillance technologies into useful tools for existing practices of anti-state protest, discourse, and disruption. In other words, they put the ‘master’s tools’ of surveillance in the hands of activists who are already defacing and hacking away at the walls and doors of the ‘masters house,’ effectively re-

151 territorializing the combative situations for which surveillance technologies were originally designed.

Surveillance Camera Players: Humanizing the Watchers and the Watched

The Surveillance Camera Players offer a third example of interventionist art that disrupts normalized habits of ‘passing by’ surveillance cameras that line city streets. In their work, the SCP infuse the ‘house’ of dominant surveillance culture with a sense of mischievous play and palpable affective responses, staging theatrical productions on city streets that bring attention not only to publicly installed surveillance cameras, but also to the human relationships and experiences that happen behind, in front, and through them. The

SCP do not work at the technologically complex level of the IAA or Steve Mann, and yet their works show that even simple acts that disrupt the anticipated, normal visual field of the everyday can politicize a space and the techno-social relationships therein.

By performing Waiting for Godot, a play that depicts two men waiting for a savior that may or may not actually exist, the SCP ask passersby to consider cultural beliefs in entities and powers that cannot be seen. In their production of Orwell’s 1984, in which every person’s mundane action is monitored and controlled by a watchful ‘Big Brother,’ the SCP use familiar theatrical models to comment upon and critically highlight what they call the

‘theatre of surveillance.’ In other pieces, such as God is Watching, the SCP address cameras on the exteriors of churches with text such as: “I want God to See Me,” “Who is

Watching?” In It’s OK, Officer, their placards share more mundane announcements, such as:

“Just Getting Lunch,” “We’ll Be Right Back,” and “KEEP WATCHING, IT WILL BE

WORTH THE WAIT, ANY MINUTE NOW I'M SURE, PLEASE BE PATIENT.”250 In

250 SCP, “God’s Eyes,” last accessed August 25, 2010, http://www.notbored.org/god%27s- eyes.html; SCP, “Being Watched,” last accessed August 25, 2010,

152 these pieces, which have come to be favorites of sidewalk audiences around the world, the

SCP play upon ideologies of discipline, control, and subjecthood embedded in quotidian surveillance and religion.

In each of these examples, as in all of their ‘surveillance camera plays,’ the SCP perform for several distinct, yet related, audiences. At first glance, their performances are aimed most directly at publicly installed surveillance cameras and the guards behind them.

Driven by the Situationist dictum that “boredom is counter-revolutionary,” the SCP have spent the last two decades taking it upon themselves to entertain potentially bored surveillance guards, performing skits in order to keep the guards alert and on point at their jobs. 251 While important to their mission, this audience is, at least to some degree, ‘for show,’ as there is no guarantee that the surveillance cameras to which the group plays are

‘manned’ by a live guard, or that anyone would ever watch the recorded tapes at a later time.

Instead, the ‘actual,’ real time audiences of the SCP are comprised by and large of passersby who, in the course of their daily perambulations, happen to come across a performance in progress. Fans of the group can also find out about performances in advance, gathering on a given street corner at an appointed time.

In order to catch the eye of both of their target audience groups, the SCP engages overtly theatrical tactics: they use classic Brechtian sign boards to announce, with distilled clarity, the actions of their characters, and restage famous play scripts within the context of contemporary everyday surveillance. SCP performances typically feature themes of surveillance, discipline, and control, using theatrical devices to highlight processes of

http://www.notbored.org/being-watched.html; SCP, “Something Interesting,” last accessed August 25, 2010, http://www.notbored.org/something-interesting.html 251 Their online (and paper) publication is called “Not Bored!” which they describe as “an autonomous, situationist-inspired,low-budget, irregularly published, photocopied journal.” See http://www.notbored.org/index1.html.

153 watching and being watched, and bringing paradigms of theatre and surveillance into dialogue. Whereas the IAA and Steve Mann make their interventions in surveillance culture as artist-engineers who technologically manipulate tools of surveillance, the SCP intervene as theatrical engineers, using rhetorical and narrative devices of theatre to critically comment upon, re-imagine, and remediate surveillance culture.

Engaging a strategy of remediation, the SCP intervenes most radically in the techno- human interface of surveillance by pointedly foregrounding empathy within the supposedly clinical and unemotional ‘real world’ theatre of surveillance. The theatrical models they use humanize experiences of surveillance for people on either side of the surveillance camera interface. By implying that there is a viewing audience on the other side of the surveillance camera, the SCP makes the human viewer on the other side of the camera more material. At the same time, they labor to make visible the unseen aspects of being human on the street- side of surveillance; the group uses sign boards to articulate philosophical questions and internal affective states that arise for themselves, or their characters, as subjects under every- day surveillance. In doing so, the group astutely utilizes the capacity of theatre to represent affective human experience and foster identification across spatial, temporal, demographic, and power differences that structure public surveillance.

SCP performances employ a low-tech mode of theatrical detournement to remediate the feeling and function of public surveillance. Taking a Situationist-inspired approach, the group states, “We detourn the pre-existing ‘theatre’ created by the placement of surveillance cameras in public places to create a theatre of rebellion and trust, rather than a theatre of conformity and fear.”252 With this psychogeographical strategy, the SCP insists upon representing psychological and emotional aspects of surveillance that counter de-humanizing

252 Thompson, The Interventionists, 86.

154 disciplinary ideologies. As such, they reach far beyond their stated goal of ‘not-boring’ their surveillant audiences to offer qualitative descriptions of human experience that seek to empower individual subjects of surveillance rather than subject people to objectifying processes information gathering and analysis.

In re-directing the ‘theatre’ of surveillance, the SCP bring affect into the visual field and techno-human interface of surveillance; they challenge contemporary formulations of the human within digital surveillance by employing theatrical uses of empathy and affect in theatre and performance. Even while the status and viability of empathy and affect have been debated in discourses of theatre and performance – as these terms have been alternately maligned and celebrated for their lack of objectivity, their contingent and changeable nature, and for their tendency to cloud rational judgment253 – the concept of empathy is central to understanding cultural responses to theatrical performance, especially in relation to a seemingly more ‘objective’ cultural practices such as surveillance. In his essay

“Empathy and Theatre,” David Krasner takes up the cause of empathy as a valuable tool of

253 One of the most long standing theoretical diatribes against the use of empathy in theatrical productions is Bertolt Brecht’s writing on epic theatre. In his several essays on the Epic Theatre (collected in Brecht on Theatre), Brecht eschewed empathy as a device in theatrical production, arguing that it would lead spectators astray by clouding their ability to assess social conditions objectively. Theorists such as David Krasner have claimed that Brecht did not take into great enough account that empathy could co-exist with reason and judgment, and even lead to greater understanding of and political investment in another’s experience far from our own. At the same time, Brecht was not necessarily consistent in his use of or views on empathy, as he often staged images and events that called for deeply empathetic responses from his audience. Brecht’s own conflicting views on the uses of empathy in his own theatre-making are reflected most clearly in a letter he wrote in response to a young admirer, who suggested that Brecht’s productions with the Berliner Ensemble were not as “Brechtian” as his production notes seemed to mandate. In “From a Letter to an Actor,” published in Brecht On Theatre, Brecht admits to the curious actor that “deep understanding” and “passionate support” may occur naturally in both the actor and the audience, and even suggests that Berliner Ensemble actors must not practice “forced objectivity,” but instead must purposefully “adopt an attitude” towards their characters as part of the rehearsal process (235).

155 theatrical practice. He posits that empathy is an important means of eliciting emotional identification with subject positions that are radically different from our own, as well as a productive form of cognition for audiences. Krasner writes, “Empathy, I contend, allows us to transcend the limits of our own world…. This is empathy’s potential: it allows us to cross boundaries between us, boundaries that are especially evident in this moment in history.”254

At the same time, he argues, judgment and rational thinking can be maintained even within empathetic relationships: “Empathy entails… grasping the values inherent in the other’s experience without blindly endorsing that experience or action.”255

In staging affective responses to surveillance in order to utilize the potential of empathy described by Krasner, the SCP radically critiques dominant models of contemporary surveillance theory and practice. Empathetic connections and affective experiences of surveillance challenge techno-social narratives of surveillance in which contemporary ‘subjects’ have become increasingly de-humanized by networks of data and expanded structures of surveillance. Surveillance theorists such as David Lyon, Oscar

Gandy, David Brin, Gilles Deleuze, Kevin Haggerty and Richard Eriksen do not describe the individual human body as an affective entity within surveillance systems, although some, such as Lyon and Brin, mourn its loss as such. Instead, as Deleuze puts it, ‘dividuals’ replace

‘individuals’ and, as such, are translated into abstracted fragments of personal data that are sorted into a series of discrete informational flows within a massive system of networked surveillance.256 These flows of personal data – referred to as ‘data doubles’ – correlate to

254 David Krasner, “Empathy and Theater,” in Staging Philosophy: Intersections of Theater, Performance, and Philosophy, edited by Krasner and David Saltz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 256. 255 Krasner, “Empathy and Theater,” 256. 256 Deleuze, “Societies of Control,” 2.

156 individual subjects, but only insofar as they allow individuals to be digitally tracked and targeted by state and corporate entities.

By performing human dramas for what they performatively insist are human surveillance guards, the SCP humanizes and rescales the imagined disciplinary figure in the contemporary panoptic guard tower. To work against the sprawling, we could even say fascist, scale of contemporary surveillance systems, the SCP bring invisible, networked processes of surveillance back onto a human scale of empathy and experience. In effect, the

SCP halt not only passersby, but also the rapid, digitized flow of personal data through surveillance networks. Their performances remediate everyday surveillance as a series of events that, like specific theatrical performances, are made up of distinct times, places, and relationships that have the capacity to facilitate empathetic connections between human subjects.

In addition to using theatrical methods to address and connect other human subjects of surveillance, the SCP readily share their methods and techniques to amateur ‘surveillance camera players’ around the world. Their commitment to providing a usable model of interventionist art is perhaps the biggest and furthest reaching impact of the SCP. The low- budget aesthetic of the SCP illustrates to audiences that critical interventions can be made using only cardboard, markers, and existing publicly installed surveillance cameras. In contrast to more sophisticated digital technologies that tend to be the property of economically empowered classes, publicly installed surveillance cameras are encountered by and accessible to nearly everyone in contemporary urban and even sub-urban areas around the world.257 The Do-It-Yourself aesthetic and readily available performance spaces utilized

257 Anthropologist-activist Faye Ginsberg has cited access to digital technologies as one of the biggest challenges to wider participation in information-age activism. In her chapter “Rethinking the Digital Age,” she describes a ‘digital divide’ created through unequal access

157 by the SCP encourage amateur participation in networks of surveillance and information exchange. Visitors to their website are urged to download and copy their projects and ideas freely, and the groups has even published an online handbook titled “How to Stage Your

Own ‘Surveillance Camera Theater’ In 10 Easy-to-Follow Steps!”258

Becoming a Radical ‘Anyone’ in the Trojan Panopticon

The interventionist works of surveillance artist-engineers discussed in this chapter – the IAA, SCP, and Steve Mann – take up the call of Ranciere’s ‘politics’ by intervening in

‘police’ control of public perception and the smooth flow of pedestrian traffic in public space. Said another way, these artists capitalize on a loophole in the updated Panopticon, finding a chink in the armor of contemporary user-friendly interfaces of digital surveillance.

As Foucault noted in his famous analysis of Bentham’s Panopticon, “anyone” must be able to occupy the overseer position in the prison’s central guard tower. This foundational principle was intended by Bentham to be a means by which the panoptic schema could be amplified and spread throughout the social body, suggesting that surveillance systems depend upon the informed participation of a wide portion of social subjects.

In contemporary surveillance society nearly all of us have taken up the invitation to become ‘anyone’s in the panoptic guard tower, becoming facile user-consumers of digital surveillance technologies. In our weekly, daily, or hourly visits to the panoptic guard tower we use the software-ideology interface of digital surveillance in ways that are complicit with the smooth operation of capitalist and nationalist systems of power. In contrast, surveillance

to digital technologies that is reflexively involved in reproducing divides and inequalities in global power. She raises an important problem, however, cautioning that providing access to internet and digital technologies, technologies that are programmed to be used in culturally specific ways, may function as a re-inscription of Western practices and ideologies onto indigenous and politically/economically marginalized groups. 258 SCP, “How to Stage Your Own ‘Surveillance Camera Theater’ In 10 Easy-to-Follow Steps!” Last accessed August 25, 2010, http://www.notbored.org/scp-how-to.html.

158 artists such as the IAA, SCP, and Steve Mann enter the panoptic guard tower, like the

Greeks returning under the cover of night. They crouch inside and wait to take the Trojan enterprise by surprise. From within the sleek exteriors of familiar, everyday surveillance technologies, they re-configure the user interfaces to create ‘unfriendly’ tools with which to combat and critique dominant systems of surveillance and the carefully controlled ‘anti- spectacle’ of public space.

Measuring the success of the projects, interventions, and inventions described in this chapter is difficult. While I am not convinced that the ‘answer’ to intervening in normalized, fragmented, and larger than life systems of surveillance lies in creatively, and often absurdly, addressing surveillance cameras around the world, I have found it to be effective and, at the very least, entertaining, in my own experience as an interventionist surveillance artist. In

Story Time for Surveillance Cameras I took up the SCP’s invitation to re-imagine the spaces between the surveillance cameras lining the streets of my city, the surveillance guards I imagined to be peering through them, and myself, the passerby. My goals in Story Time for

Surveillance Cameras extended those of Camera Letters: “to re-imagine the productive power of the surveillance apparatus, to challenge the received notion that surveillance cameras can only function in one direction, and to point out the possibility of rescripting the interface between the human and machine involved in the operations of surveillance.”259 Did I accomplish those goals? I like to think I did: the people who gathered around me joined me however briefly in re-imagining the function and space of surveillance on city streets.

Perhaps attempts such as these begin to add up. The seemingly totalizing and connected surveillance system is, after all, made up of a sprawling series of particular instances of surveillance, times and places in which people interact with tools of

259 Elise Morrison, “Camera Letters: Through the Looking Glass,” last modified January 7, 1997, https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/display/MarkTribe/camera+letters

159 communication, commerce, and security. Each instance that shows that another world is possible is a step out of current models of discipline and control, and towards a world in which other ways of being are possible.

160 CHAPTER FOUR

Through the Looking Glass: Performing Gender in Surveillance Art

A critical feminist reading of … all the texts of culture… changes the representations into a performance which exceeds the text. For women to enact the contradictions is to demonstrate the non-coincidence of Woman and women. To perform the terms of the production of woman as text, as image, is to resist identification with that image. It is to have stepped through the looking glass.260

“Just wait until someone decides they don't want to be on camera and tries to cover those up!”261

Sousveillance practitioner Steve Mann, whose work as a self-proclaimed cyborg and counter-surveillance activist was featured in the previous chapter, recently developed his wearable mobile surveillance technologies, or ‘wearcams,’ into a sousveillance device for Her.

Retailing for nearly $1500, the “HeartCam” runs on a 12V battery, with an infrared surveillance camera in one breast cup, and a color surveillance camera in the other.262

Featuring breasts implanted with surveillance cameras instead of silicone, Mann’s device pairs voluptuous markers of femininity – perhaps the most fetishized site of the classic male

‘look’ – with the equalizing ‘look back’ of sousveillance, a movement through which Mann aims to equalize the balance between purveyors and subjects of state and corporate surveillance systems. The enthusiastic response of one blogger – “Just wait until someone decides they don't want to be on camera and tries to cover those up!” – suggests that the conflation of gender and surveillance in Mann’s wearcam bra offers a unique opportunity to heighten the visibility and raise the stakes of Mann’s combative campaign against

260 Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 36. 261 “Steve Mann” by firepile, on Hyper-textual Ontology Blog, posted August 10, 2004, accessed on Dec. 30, 2009, http://wearcam.org/tv04/hyper-textual_ontology.htm. 262 Steve Mann, “HeartCam,” accessed December 30, 2009, http://wearcam.org/domewear/heartcam.htm. Mann designed the camera bra so that the signal from one cup is suitable for low light conditions, while the signal from the other cup may be used in bright lighting. He designed this incarnation of his ‘wearcam’ devices in 2004.

161 surveillance society. Each product in Mann’s wearcam line – which includes dome surveillance cameras affixed to backpacks, t-shirts, and pendants – highlights the capability of everyday citizens to reverse the gaze of surveillance and surveil the surveillers. However, only the “HeartCam” simultaneously lays bare the processes by which the gazes of surveillance – and sousveillance – construct, and are constructed by, gender and desire.

The practical and semiotic construction of Mann’s wearcam bra combines the politically combative aims of sousveillance with a rich history of feminist challenges to an objectifying male gaze. Feminist performance theorist Rebecca Schneider has employed the term ‘look back’ to describe feminist tactics used by artists such as Cindy Sherman, who

‘looks back’ through the classic poses of femininity she strikes, provocatively destabilizing her own role(s) as subject/object, viewer/viewed within the photographic frame.263 This tactic allows women to simultaneously inhabit (experience from inside) and represent (view from outside) their own bodies which, as feminist theorists such as Laura Mulvey have argued are culturally constructed as ‘given to be seen.’264 In other words, even as female artists such as Sherman perform and experience themselves as female subjects with desires that exceed reductive visual representations of femininity, they need not disavow the powerful conditioning of cultural representations of the female form as classic visual fetish.

Mann himself has called his “HeartCam” a reversal of the ‘male gaze,’ writing

“HeartCam turned the tables on the ‘male gaze’ by allowing the female wearer of the apparatus to capture images.”265 However, the degree to which he intends to critique the classic fetishization of the female form is questionable. Even while Mann’s device expresses

263 Schneider, Explicit Body, 122. 264 As Mulvey puts it, “In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness” (Visual and Other Pleasures, 19). 265 Mann, “Existential Technology,” 21.

162 a critique of the imbalance of power in surveillance society through markers of an explicitly gendered body, Mann noticeably avoids gendered terminology. In dubbing his sousveillance bra the “HeartCam” he seems to retreat from what could be a bolder critique of sexual and disciplinary signifiers. If the device’s name included a reference to its most prominent features – namely the pair of voluptuous breasts it wields – then Mann would seem to be

‘owning up’ to his engagement with particularly fetishized aspects of the female form. He could even be staging a clever commentary on the growing numbers of silicone breast implants, surgical ‘enhancements’ motivated by the ‘desirous’ rather than disciplinary gaze of social surveillance. Instead, Mann emphasizes cultural associations of Woman’s emotionality

(as opposed to criticality of logic), substituting the sign of the ‘heart’ for more explicitly gendered physical terms such as breasts, boobs, or bra. Rather than naming that which is traditionally gazed upon, Mann’s title names the soft emotional core of Woman, implying instead a female gaze that is characterized, as his following rationale suggests, by desire and fear.

In a 2003 article on his sousveillance inventions, Mann explains that the “HeartCam” is so called for the way in which the embedded cameras are triggered to capture images:

“[HeartCam] used heart rate as a natural index to frame rate (ie. Frame rate was proportional to the wearer’s degree of arousal).” 266 Mann goes on to posit that because the device was not voluntarily controlled by the wearer – heart rate being not directly under intentioned control

– the “HeartCam” measured the degree of threat an incident or person posed to the wearer.

“Thus, a potential perpetrator … would cause her heart to beat faster, which would cause her to take more pictures of him.”267 In other words, Mann intended the “HeartCam” to be less of a tool of feminist empowerment, with which a female wearer could ‘look back’ at the

266 Mann, “Existential Technology,” 21. 267 Mann, “Existential Technology,” 22.

163 ‘male gaze’ of surveillance, and more of a defensive devise that would record any assault or threat from a male perpetrator who was provoked, we could intuit, by the exaggerated breasts she sported.

The final sentence in Mann’s analysis is particularly troubling, as it takes the female wearer out of the equation altogether: “Since this feedback loop [heart rate as index of frame rate] was beyond her control, it could be said that the assailant was taking pictures of himself by agitating her.”268 That the wearcam bra is made and marketed not only “for Her” but for

Her protection, seems to suggest that women are only able to participate in sousveillance if they appear as defenseless, feminine bodies. It would seem that Mann’s “HeartCam” relegates Woman to the sign of her breasts and the fear in her heart, limiting her ability to

‘shoot back’ or critique systems of vision and violence by hobbling the (anti)-disciplinary gaze of sousveillance to a male-centered desirous gaze.

As such, Mann’s “HeartCam” could easily be criticized for what feminist theorist

Theresa de Lauretis has called an over-reliance on the concept and representation of ‘sexual difference’ in visual culture.269 She argues that an overemphasis on ‘sexual difference’ limits feminist thought to looking at the foundational difference between men and women, rather than between women and ‘Woman’ – de Lauretis’ term for idealized representations of femininity. At the same time, Mann’s device raises questions similar to those of surveillance

268 Mann, “Existential Technology,” 22. 269 De Lauretis, Technologies, 2. In Technologies of Gender, de Lauretis points out the limitations that the concept of sexual difference has placed upon feminist critical thought, especially in relation to cinematic theory and practice. De Lauretis’ distinction between women/ Woman posits ‘women’ as material, contingent historical subjects (multiple in relation to each other), and ‘Woman’ as a monolithic fictional construct that describes a feminine essence derived from Western historical cultural discourses. She initially developed the women/Woman distinction in Alice Doesn’t (5). In Technologies of Gender, De Lauretis goes on to argue that an over-reliance on markers of sexual difference kept feminists from recognizing important differences between women, such as those between women who wear the mask (masquerade) and women who wear the veil (2).

164 and feminist theorist Hille Koskela. In her 2002 article “Video surveillance, gender and the safety of public urban space: ‘Peeping Tom’ goes high tech?,” Koskela theorizes the ways in which gender differences play out within urban surveillance systems. In particular, she points out that surveillance technologies are simultaneously imagined as protecting women against sexual assault and promoting their sexual fetishization through the gaze of the hidden camera. While her arguments could be more nuanced, Koskela critically compares gendered violence and fear with voyeuristic uses of surveillance, questioning the gaps and overlaps between cultural models of the ‘peeping tom’ and the protective eye of ‘big brother.’ 270

And yet, in spite or even because of these complexities and contradictions, Mann’s

“HeartCam” powerfully foregrounds what most other sousveillance or counter-surveillance artworks have avoided or overlooked: that subjects of surveillance society may be constructed and treated differently according to their gender. Indeed, the repressive gender norms replicated in Mann’s wearcam bra beg to be re-read from a feminist perspective.

Regardless of the lengths to which Mann intended or did not intend to take his critique, his device effectively pairs the ‘male gaze’ of visual culture with the disciplinary gaze of surveillance, powerfully illustrating the way in which both gazes are played out across the sexualized female form.

In contrast, artistic and socio-political interventions such as sousveillance and counter-surveillance – practiced by artists such the Institute for Applied Autonomy and the

Surveillance Camera Players – have tended to assume that all subjects of surveillance can and want to ‘look back’ at surveillance in a similar way and from a similar viewpoint. The surveillance theatre works that I covered in Chapter Two similarly under-privilege gender as a determining factor in practices and experiences of seeing and being seen. Even while

270 Koskela, “Video Surveillance,” 257–278.

165 surveillance theatre pieces such as the Shunt Collective’s Contains Violence and Edit Kaldor’s

Point Blank utilize Brechtian tactics of defamiliarization and apparatus based alienation – tactics that have been used by materialist feminists to highlight processes of watching and being watched – both pieces tend towards uncritical replications of gender norms through the representational mediums of theatre and surveillance, and inattention to the gendered gaze of the viewing audience. In short, these surveillance theatre and inverventionist art pieces have failed to take into consideration the ways in which practices of representation and reception in surveillance society operate as “technologies of gender.”

In these final two chapters, I turn my attention to surveillance artworks that highlight explicit and implicit markers of gender and sexual desire in surveillance culture. In this chapter, surveillance art works by Jill Magid, Mona Hatoum, Giles Walker, Steve Mann, and

Julia Scher feature significant returns to the concept of the fetish as a marker of sexual difference – a central concept in feminist critiques, definitions, and deployments of the

‘patriarchal gaze’ in film and performance theory from the last four decades. As I described in Chapter One, feminist and psychoanalytic theory has posited the fetish as a stand-in for the phallus, often a female body part that invokes and indicates the phallus. In feminist surveillance art, surveillance equipment itself is used to indicate and embody the desiring gaze of disciplinary culture, a gaze that is explicitly coded as male. As in Mann’s

‘“HeartCam,” works by Magid, Hatoum, Walker, and Scher use various kinds of surveillance cameras to stand as physical markers of sexual difference and desire. In their works, the form and function of the fetish becomes doubly complicated, as these artists represent a surveillant gaze through a sexualized prosthetic that functions as a fetish, even as that object fetishizes other forms with its gaze.

166 While not all of these surveillance artists self-identify as feminist, they each critically approach surveillance as a ‘technology of gender’ in order to re-examine and rewrite the code of gendered bodies and gazes of and under surveillance. The surveillance artists in this chapter employ feminist strategies that implicitly and explicitly align the disciplinary gaze of surveillance with the ‘male gaze’ of visual media, such as film, television, photography, and theatre. As in Steve Mann’s “HeartCam,” innovative technologies and installations such as

Jill Magid’s Surveillance Shoe, Mona Hatoum’s Deep Throat, and Gilles Walker’s Pole Dancing

Robots, make visible the gender coding of CCTV cameras, private detectives, and the more generalized ‘surveillant gaze.’ Their projects reveal surveillance technologies to be habitually marked as male, and the gaze of surveillance to be conditioned by dominant representations of classically heteronormative, male desire. In addition to highlighting the male-coded gender of surveillance technologies, these art pieces reveal habits of representation in surveillance practices in which female-gendered bodies under surveillance tend to mirror classic representations of femininity in dominant visual culture. Following Judith Butler’s formulations of performativity, described in Chapter One, these works simultaneously produce unique representations of gender – of and under surveillance – that are rewritten through tactical processes of repetition and revision.

In the following sections I examine these gender-focused surveillance art projects within the context of second and third wave feminist critiques of the ‘male gaze,’ fetishism, and representations of gender. Magid, Hatoum, Walker, Scher, and Mann mobilize a number of theoretical critiques of and practical alternatives to dominant, ‘patriarchal’ habits of representation and reception in visual culture established by feminist film and performance theorists such as Laura Mulvey, Theresa de Lauretis, Mary Ann Doane, Kaja

Silverman, Jill Dolan, Rebecca Schneider, and Elin Diamond. These theorists assert that

167 feminist critiques of gender representation in film, theatre, and photography are crucial to building a critical feminist viewpoint within visual culture. The installations and performances that I read in this chapter reveal surveillance systems to be sites/sights of gender representation, in which surveillance systems function as technologies of gender as well as distinctly gendered technologies. The artists use a broad range of representational practices to show the gaze of surveillance – embodied by surveillance cameras, private detectives, and security guards – as both gendered and gendering. Recalling my exploration of fetishism and the ‘male gaze’ in Chapter One, I consider some of the challenges that representations of fetishism can pose to feminist surveillance art.

Read as a technology of gender, Mann’s “HeartCam” functions as a tool with which feminist theorists and practitioners concerned with the systemic erasure of gender as a category of analysis in surveillance studies and art can critically problematize the relationship between fetishes of sexual difference (between men and women, as well as between women and ‘Woman’), and the gendered and gendering disciplinary gaze of surveillance. Regardless of Mann’s reduction of the “HeartCam” to a recording device that will witness sexual assaults, his device provides a stage upon which the disciplinary gaze of surveillance and the

‘male gaze’ of classic cinema are provocatively intertwined. This overtly gendered weapon in

Mann’s sousveillance arsenal becomes a tool with which the wearer can draw attention to the processes by which her (or his) body is always already disciplined and desired as gendered by the gaze of surveillance.

Mann’s device foregrounds the constructedness of ‘Woman’ by showing what Mary

Ann Doane, and Joan Riviere before her, have called the mask/masquerade of femininity. 271

271 Doane’s notion of a feminist spectator identifying with her on-screen likeness as a masquerade drew on Joan Riviere’s 1929 essay “Womanliness as Masquerade,” (in Formations of Fantasy, edited by Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan, London and New York:

168 In “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator” (1982), Doane argued that the problem for the female spectator lay in the lack of a critical distance between the female audience member and the Woman-as-image on-screen.272 As a solution, Doane recommended an alternative mode of identification in which the female spectator would read and identify with the on-screen Woman-as-image as a masquerade of femininity, as opposed to a fully realized representation of being a woman. In other words, Doane suggests that feminist spectators should view representations of Woman (as icon) in classic

Hollywood cinema as a product of ‘cross-dressing,’ an exaggerated representation that

“produce[s] an excess of femininity” and “foreground[s] the masquerade.” “The masquerade,” Doane goes on, “in flaunting femininity, holds it at a distance. Womanliness is a mask which can be worn or removed.”273

Viewed along these exaggerated lines, the “HeartCam” has the potential to create what Doane and de Lauretis have envisioned: a feminist subject who is able to clearly see the constructedness of her own gender, and therefore, actively critique it. This mode of ‘seeing’ is a kind of “doubled vision” critical to feminist intervention in habits of gender representation and reception in visual culture.274 The semiotic layers of the “HeartCam” provide ‘doubled vision,’ as a feminist user can simultaneously attract, witness, and record evidence of both disciplinary and desirous gazes of patriarchal visual culture and surveillance.

On one level of signification, the dome-cameras-cum-breasts function as a fetish – a hyper-

Methuen, 1986: 35-44). Riviere, who had worked for several years with Freud and his daughter Anna, theorized an area of sexual development, wherein women – intellectual, career-minded women in particular – developed an exterior representation of ‘femininity’ that they ‘put on’ as a defensive mask to hide their masculinity. However, unlike Riviere, Doane employed the concept of masquerade as a feminist strategy to create critical distance between the woman as spectator and Woman as image. 272 Mary Ann Doane, “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator,” Screen 23.3 (1982): 80. 273 Doane, “Film and the Masquerade,” 81. 274 De Lauretis, Technologies, 10.

169 visible object of desire – constructed for the male gaze. On another level, the “HeartCam” supplies the wearer with the capability to ‘look back’ through her breasts. As a wearable technology of gender, the device thus doubles back ‘the look’ of a patriarchal and disciplinary society, creating a multi-layered and multi-directional embodiment of a Woman given-to-be-seen as well as given-to-see.

Moreover, the wearcam bra, functioning as a wearable mask or ‘masquerade’ of femininity, constitutes a tool with which wearers of any gender can potentially play with gender signifiers under and of surveillance. This is to say that, despite marketing efforts to pitch the “HeartCam” at ‘Her,’ Mann’s explicitly gendered sousveillance device could be donned by any body, regardless of that body’s previously established biological or social gender. As the cameras can be affixed to any shirt front, the “HeartCam” could be worn as a set of breasts by a body of any gender. As a wearable prosthetic of gender, Mann’s wearcam bra thus offers an even greater arena of gender-play, laying the ground for what could be called a kind of ‘surveillance drag.’

In her essay “Towards a Butch-Femme Aesthetic” (1989), Sue Ellen Case articulates the potential for lesbian feminist performers to recuperate Riviere’s 1929 description of

‘masquerade’ and expand it into a radical commentary and act of appropriation through

‘drag’ performances.275 Case argues that by interpreting and embodying the concept of masquerade through ‘camp’ and ‘drag,’ “the fiction of the penis and castration become ironized.” 276 Butch-femme roles, rather than those assigned through classic binaries of

‘sexual difference,’ create a much more active position for performers and audience

275 In her 1989 essay, “Towards a Butch-Femme Aesthetic,” Sue-Ellen Case describes drag performances in which “the butch is the lesbian woman who proudly displays the possession of the penis, while the femme takes on the compensatory masquerade of womanliness” (in The Lesbian and gay studies reader, edited by Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, David M. Halperin, New York: Routledge, 1993: 291). 276 Case, “Towards a Butch-Femme Aesthetic,” 291.

170 members, thus “lend[ing] agency and self-determination to the historically passive subject.”277

By disengaging classic visual markers of female gender from a biologically gendered body, Mann offers the ability for wearers to dress up in a doubled set of fetishes, pairing classic markers of a disciplinary gaze with exaggerated signifiers of femininity. In the wearcam bra, anyone can cross-dress as a purveyor of a disciplinary gaze while simultaneously masquerading as femmed-up models of classic ‘Womanliness.’ While I am not convinced that Mann intended to play so radically with what Butler termed the

‘performativity of gender,’ his wearcam bra effectively renders external markers of gender and of surveillance as physical signifiers that can literally be over-laid on any body, provided they can afford the high – $1500 – ticket price.

Gender-focused artworks by Jill Magid, Mona Hatoum, Giles Walker, and Julia Scher similarly stage surveillance systems as technologies that can replicate and critique normative gender roles in watching/being watched. Jill Magid’s Surveillance Shoe and System Azure, Mona

Hatoum’s Deep Throat, Julia Scher’s Security Bed, and Giles Walker’s Pole Dancing Robots are particularly evocative engagements with Marxist and Freudian constructions of the fetish within the visual culture of surveillance. These works represent surveillance both as a fetishizing technology that, like classic cinema, fetishizes forms of sexual difference, and as a fetishized commodity that stands-in for patriarchal power and control. As such, surveillance technologies function as markers and makers of sexual difference within the visual field of surveillance.

277 Case, “Towards a Butch-Femme Aesthetic,” 291-92. See also Jill Dolan “Desire Dressed in a Trenchcoat” in Presence and Desire: Essays on Gender, Sexuality, Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993).

171 Magid, Hatoum, Scher, and Walker reveal fetishism in and of surveillance to be a mode of distraction, in which spectators are distracted from seeing the ‘real’ underneath by a glittering spectacle of high technology and fabled security. As Mulvey puts it, “the fetish very often attracts the gaze… It has to hold the fetishist’s eyes fixed on the seduction of belief to guard against the encroachment of knowledge…”278 As the following pages show, Magid,

Scher, Hatoum, and Walker provocatively draw attention to surveillance systems as fetishized commodities that distract from inherent ideologies of male hetero-normative desire and underlying anxieties of state security.

Jill Magid: Peeping Toms, Street Walkers, and Cameras in Drag

Prolific surveillance artist Jill Magid has created a number of pieces that foreground fetishism as a process and product of surveillance, creating projects in which she places her own body under (or above) a gendering and gendered surveillant gaze. Her Surveillance Shoe

(2000), built as part of her master’s thesis at MIT, offers one of the most pointed explorations of fetishism, gender representation, and desire through a surveillance system.

As I explored in Chapter One, Magid’s Surveillance Shoe mobilizes classic visual markers of sexual difference in order to stage the layers of fetishism in surveillance. With a mobile surveillance cameras strapped to her ankle, she represented her own body parts – her stiletto-clad foot, bare legs, and scantily clad crotch in particular – as classic objects of male desire in order to make visible the desirous gaze of surveillance. Magid first performed

Surveillance Shoe in the lobby and second floor of the Harvard Science Center, projecting the images from her surveillance shoe via publicly installed surveillance monitors in the Harvard-

MIT building.

278 Mulvey, Fetishism, 6.

172 The images streaming live from Magid’s surveillance camera position viewers in perhaps the most iconic, fetishized point of view of a cultural surveillance imaginary. In effect, Magid interpellates her audience into the visual perspective of classic Peeping Toms, positioning them as voyeurs driven to use surveillance technologies not for their security function, but rather to peek up a young woman’s skirt and catch a glimpse of her underwear.

In doing so, she asks her viewers to consider themselves as agents and subjects of the desired and desiring gaze of surveillance. Her piece confronts audience members with classic assumptions and constructions of the desiring male gaze, in which, as Laura Mulvey puts it, “...the spectator's desire to see inside the closed space is inevitably aroused… and according to the logic of the masculine/feminine distributions of the voyeuristic drive, our expectation is that the man is peeping at a scene in which a woman is the spectacle.”279

Magid replicates familiar constructions of the feminine as the given-to-be-seen and the disciplinary male gaze as the given-to-see within the purview of institutional surveillance.

In doing so, she explicitly aligns the disciplinary gaze of surveillance – and of her MIT thesis committee – with the male gaze of classic cinema and of the ‘peep show,’ in which the female form is fragmented and fetishized for a male-coded gaze. She provocatively sutures the surveillance camera and the elite educational institution – fetishized markers of a socially positive desire for security and status – with the less socially acceptable fetishism of a voyeuristic sexual gaze.280 In her accompanying thesis, Magid wrote that Surveillance Shoe

“displac[ed] the surveillance eye from its cool, fixed position… and bestow[ed] an intimacy onto the role of the camera that was previously absent, …transform[ing] a system of security

279 Laura Mulvey, “Pandora: Topologies of the Mask and Curiosity,” in Sexuality and Space, ed. Beatriz Colomina (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), 57. 280 As classic fetishes of sado-masochistic fetishism, her stiletto heels further emphasized the fetish of the surveillance camera as purveyor of visual access to intimate arenas of desire.

173 and disciplinary maintenance into a situation of pleasure and empowerment.”281 Just as her feminist forebearers made visible the male-coded gaze embedded in classic cinema, Magid aimed to foreground visual rhetorics of gendered desire and desirability within the supposedly gender-neutral, protective gaze of institutional surveillance.

However, by positioning her audience of academic advisors as Peeping Toms and her own body as the fetishized object of desire, Magid’s Surveillance Shoe simultaneously brings into question the limits of her own term of ‘empowerment.’ Magid describes her project as a guerrilla act, a “subversive insertion of an autonomous system of surveillance into an already existing informational and electronic system,”282 implying that her project allowed her to explore her own power as a student artist to control, however briefly, the surveillance system of a powerful institution. And yet, the particular context of her performance suggests that, despite the radical steps her “surveillance shoe” took towards showing up and critiquing the desiring male gaze of surveillance, Magid could not fully escape or critique her position of ‘art student’ at an elite institution. Her position as a student at MIT was both highly privileged and under extreme scrutiny, bringing a different power structure to amplification. Did interjecting the transmission of video images of her underwear into an open channel of the Harvard-MIT surveillance system constitute an empowering experience for her or for her thesis advisors? What other historical power dynamics and gender relations within educational institutions – models that may not automatically empower Magid as a young female student – were invoked by her performance? This is to suggest that while Magid gained temporary power over the MIT-

Harvard surveillance system, she may have stopped short of an even more radical

281 Jill Magid, “Monitoring Desire” (Master’s thesis, MIT, 2000), accessed December 16, 2009, http://jillmagid.net/MIT-Thesis.php. 282 Magid, “Monitoring Desire.”

174 interrogation of institutional gender politics and models of dis-empowerment, in which her performance could have implicated the power structures at Harvard and MIT as elite, patriarchal, degree-granting institutions.283

In another provocative engagement with Marxist and Freudian fetishism in surveillance society, Magid’s System Azure project featured ‘glammed up’ – which is to say thickly bejeweled – publicly installed surveillance cameras throughout the red light district of

Amsterdam. 284 Working for her own, invented company, “System Azure Security

Ornamentation,” Magid gained permission from the Amsterdam Headquarters of Police to hand-glue rhinestones to newly installed security cameras around the city’s red light district.285 By making sparkling altars of the widely disseminated symbol of advanced security and technological prowess, Magid’s work brought the already fetishized image of the surveillance camera – and the increased surveillance of Amsterdam’s sex workers – to greater visibility.286

Aside from employing the world’s first security ornamentation professional, System

Azure features a multi-layered critique of gender representation and sexual commerce of and

283 After her initial exploration of the ‘surveillance shoe’ at MIT, Magid’s Surveillance Shoe has been staged in Museums around the world. The exhibit now features footage of her legs and crotch as she walked around the public thoroughfares of Boston and New York. 284 Jill Magid, “System Azure,” last modified October 8, 2008, http://www.jillmagid.net/SystemAzure.php 285 After the Amsterdam police department’s initial refusal to allow Magid to bedazzle surveillance cameras in the name of ‘art,’ Magid reframed her project as a commercial venture that utilized untapped aesthetic potential within contemporary cityscapes. Magid shares her story on her website: “When I presented myself as an artist, no one would speak to me…So I invented a company, System Azure Security Ornamentation. I called them up and said, ‘I'm a security ornamentation professional.’ The title made all the difference, and soon I was meeting with police administrators to discuss the public's relationship with surveillance.” Magid, “System Azure.” 286 Following Russian Formalist Viktor Schklovsky, a forerunner of Brecht’s theatrical tactics of defamiliarization who advocated for art that ‘makes the stones stony’ for viewers, Magid made the spectacle of surveillance all the more spectacular (or the shiny new sophisticated systems of surveillance, all the more shiny).

175 under surveillance. First of all, as noted above, her timely installation drew attention to the growing presence of surveillance cameras in particular neighborhoods in Amsterdam.

Magid’s project targeted the 237 new surveillance cameras that the city had recently decided to install in the red light district, bringing attention, and perhaps a sense of rebelliousness, to the implications of the city’s decision. Magid’s “Bring Back the Glam” campaign poignantly argued for the value of the desirous gaze of the red light district over and beyond the encroaching disciplinary gaze of the civic surveillance cameras.

Secondly, Magid’s System Azure project indicates that, previous to her bedazzling efforts that dressed “Big Brother in Drag,” the surveillance cameras embodied ‘straight’ heterosexual masculinity. Represented by the fetish of the surveillance camera – again a stand-in for the patriarchal phallus – and frequently referred to as embodiments of Orwell’s

‘Big Brother,’ surveillance systems have been commonly figured as masculine prosthetics of a patriarchal surveillant gaze. As such, surveillance systems function as representational sites of gender difference, working in excess of their more commonly recognized role as emblems and agents of security. As evidenced by Mann’s ‘“HeartCam”,’ surveillance cameras are traditionally assigned a social function shaped by heteronormative gender roles: surveillance cameras are built to ‘protect’ defenseless social subjects, which, if Hollywood is to be believed, parallels the responsibilities conferred upon the powerful male hero and the weaknesses exemplified by the damsel in distress.

In light of these classic gender roles, the transgressive desires and sexualities played out in Amsterdam’s red light district pose a threat to the regulation and maintenance of hetero-normative social structures. As a borderland of abject desires and transgressive sexual practices, Amsterdam’s red light district stands as especially potent ground on which to stage a critique of the disciplinary gaze of surveillance, and the hetero-normative desires it

176 mandates. By dressing surveillance cameras in the red light district ‘in drag,’ Magid attempts to show the gender identity of surveillance to be a performative set of gestures, movements, and signs that, as gender theorist Judith Butler argued, can be ‘repeated with a difference.’

Magid applies Butler’s theory of the performativity of gender to systems of surveillance, revising the appearance of gendered symbols (and fetishes) of surveillance in an attempt to unsettle habitual representations of the gendered gaze of surveillance – a gaze that simultaneously polices the gender identities and sexual behaviors of social subjects. As

Magid puts it, the performativity of surveillance systems allows her to experiment with “how the body is reconfigured, how representation is altered and effected, [and] how architecture is activated and warped.”287

Expanding on the potential for a kind of ‘surveillance drag’ offered by Mann’s

“HeartCam,” Magid’s project System Azure aims to performatively bend the gender of publicly installed surveillance cameras in Amsterdam’s red light district by, in Magid’s words, putting “cameras in drag.” In contrast to the ways in which surveillance cameras have been broadly coded as masculine and ‘straight’ in the popular imaginary, Magid’s campaign posters illustrate alternative gender identities that the cameras can represent: her silk screened posters read “Big Brother in Drag,” “Bring Back the Glam,” and “Why be a silent witness when you can be a glamorous ornament?” Echoing theories of the power of ‘drag’ performance offered by Sue Ellen Case, Mary Anne Doane, and Jill Dolan,288 System Azure

287 Magid, “Monitoring Desire.” In System Azure, as in Surveillance Shoe, Magid explores what she calls the “potential of performative surveillance system[s].” 288 As part of her critique of gender in and of surveillance, Magid draws upon the rich history of ‘drag’ as a tactic in feminist performance. See Dolan (1993), Case (1989), and Doane (1982). To balance the politically positive readings of drag offered by Case and Dolan, Doane offered an important caveat regarding differences in reception of female drag versus male drag: “Male transvestism is an occasion for laughter; female transvestism only another occasion for desire” (“Film and the Masquerade,” 81). Male cross dressing appears in farces, while female cross-dressing has long been a part of traditional dramatic narratives,

177 enacts playful yet visually effective tactics by which surveillance systems can, with the help of some sparkle and glue, be performatively re-gendered.

Julia Scher: Spanking the Surveillant Body

Julia Scher’s Security Bed similarly occurs within the slippery space between serious social intervention and tongue-in-cheek dress up game. Scher is well known in the art world for creating wittily mischievous, as well as technologically advanced installations exploring control and seduction in surveillance society. Since 1988, she has produced a number of installations under the title Security By Julia, the majority of which feature a person wearing a security guard’s uniform (often Scher herself), and an open invitation to viewers to actively participate in a scene of surveillance.289 Her installation piece Security Bed, sometimes called

Surveillance Bed, exemplifies her playful forays into the complex layers of agency and subjection, discipline and desire, technology and flesh that arise in the relationship between surveillance, gender, and sexuality.

Playfully staging fetishized objects of sexuality within spaces demarcated as

‘disciplinary,’ Julia Scher’s Security Bed features what surveillance and performance theorist

John McGrath calls the ‘performative space’ of surveillance art – space in which audience members can feel their “own bodily and psychic relation to the distortions of normative

heightening the desirability of the female. Doane continues, “sexual mobility would seem to be a distinguishing feature of femininity in its cultural construction,” as it makes (cultural) sense that women would want to be men, to be anything other than trapped in the feminine position (“Film and the Masquerade,” 81).

289 Julia Scher, Tell Me When You're Ready: Works 1990-1995, introduction by Anna Indych, (PFM publishers, 2002). See also Thomas Levin, Ursula Frohne, and Peter Weibel, ed. ctrl [space]: Rhetorics Of Surveillance From Bentham To Big Brother (Leipzig: ZKM, MedienKunstNetz, 2002).

178 space enacted by surveillance technologies.”290 Security Bed pictured above, consists of a four- poster bed with security cameras pointing at the bed from all four corners; in some versions of the exhibit, screens around the bed display the command “Don’t Worry!” Scher’s installation piece encourages participant-observers to explore non-normative interactions with surveillance by invoking transgressive, sado-masochistic sexual practices. Scher, dressed in a jaunty pink security uniform, invites audience members to perform with her on the bed where, surrounded by surveillance cameras and screens, they interact through a simulated sado-masochistic matrix of desire and sexuality.

Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space,291 McGrath argues that performances or installations that create a surveillance space in which audience experience rather than simply perceive or conceive can provoke radical openings within habitual understandings of surveillance.292 Surveillance art pieces that create performative space, McGrath writes,

disallow a closure to the experience – a descriptive gesture or summation that would allow us to ‘see’ this space in our minds. The dilemmas of dimensions and doubling, the temporal disruptions of the spatial field, enacted in these pieces make a mental

290 McGrath, Loving Big Brother, 141. John McGrath argues that surveillance, as a two-way visual process in which the watcher and the watched are constituted through a mutual awareness of the processes of surveillance) produces a unique kind of performative space (141-149). 291 McGrath draws on Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space, which Lefebvre describes according to three strands: spatial practice, representations of space, and representational space, or as “the perceived, the conceived, and the lived.” See Henri Lefebvre The Production of Space, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Blackwell Publishing, 1991), 39. McGrath takes Lefebvre’s analysis of this triad to mean that “action in the ‘lived’ field can impact upon the conceived and the perceived” (Loving Big Brother, 141). 292 Surveillance art pieces that create performative space, McGrath goes on, “disallow a closure to the experience – a descriptive gesture or summation that would allow us to ‘see’ this space in our minds. The dilemmas of dimensions and doubling, the temporal disruptions of the spatial field, enacted in these pieces make a mental view of the spaces we are inhabiting impossible. These works describe our spatial surveillance experience by inviting us to live for a moment in a state removed from ideological orientation. Disallowing the conceptualizing position, they encourage us to feel, to live surveillance” (McGrath, Loving Big Brother, 141).

179 view of the spaces we are inhabiting impossible. These works describe our spatial surveillance experience by inviting us to live for a moment in a state removed from ideological orientation. Disallowing the conceptualizing position, they encourage us to feel, to live surveillance.293 With her interactive Security Bed exhibit, Scher effectively constructs ‘performative spaces’ in which audience members can sensually experience feelings of discipline and transgressive desire while they are under surveillance. Scher overlays matrices of surveillance and sado-masochism, both of which can be understood as a blend of discipline and desire, pain and pleasure, agency and subjection. Scher’s pairing of a sado-masochistic scene with a system of surveillance effectively aligns the disciplinary relationships involved in each, making them manifest in the docile bodies of the surveilled/masochistic subject. Thick black camera cords and S&M bondage straps are wrapped and coiled in plain view around the bed, emphasizing a reliance upon material technologies to discipline the body common to both surveillance systems and sado-masochistic sex.

Moreover, by grafting one space of discipline on another, Scher roguishly suggests that normalized responses to surveillance – in which everyday citizens willingly submit to being watched, searched, and tracked in the name of security – may in fact be fed by a more transgressive desire to be disciplined. Scher collapses conservative rhetorics of national security and hetero-normative sexual relationships onto the libidinal space of a bed outfitted for sado-masochistic play, pairing the desire for state discipline with fetishized images of a sexual desire to punish or be punished. In so doing, she challenges the seeming normalness of the desire for security by pairing it with the transgressive sexual desire of sado-masochistic relationships.294

293 McGrath, Loving Big Brother, 141. 294 For a history of feminist uses of and relation to sado-masochism, see Marie France “Sadomasochism and Feminism,” Feminist Review 16 (1984): 35-42. See also Patrick D. Hopkins “Rethinking Sadomasochism: Feminism, Interpretation, and Simulation,” Hypatia 9.1 (1994): 116-141.

180 By drawing back the covers of her security bed, Scher effectively broadens the field of signification within surveillance society, constructing a performative space in which normalized hierarchies of desire and discipline in surveillance are tied up, tangled together, and radically undone. She sets her scene of seduction and security in museums, themselves public spaces structured by codified habits of display and consumption. In doing so, she rhetorically pairs sado-masochism with exhibitionism, a drive which surveillance theorists and psychoanalysts alike have deemed unhealthy, abnormal, and cause for concern.295

However, Scher refuses to echo the cautionary, even accusatory tone with which contemporary surveillance theorists such as Victor Burgin have applied the psychoanalytic diagnosis of exhibitionism to recent trends in social software and web cam ‘vlogging.’296 In contrast, her Security Bed is constructed as a radically open space of play in which to explore the connections between transgressive sexual desire, and the desire to see and be seen – exhibitionism and voyeurism – as played out in surveillance society.

Importantly, Scher does all this with a humorous and ironic touch. Dressed in her jaunty security guard costume, Scher winks through the clever trap she has laid, naughtily enticing her participant-observers to join her between the slippery semiotic satin of the twin sheets of desire and discipline, reality and representation. This invasion of privacy promises to be fun, freeing, painful only in order to increase pleasure. By staging an open scene of transgressive, libidinal discipline and desire in which the public can participate, she opens a space in which suppressed fears and desires associated with surveillance and sexuality can enter public discourse. Expanding on the semiotic valences of the title ‘security bed,’ Scher offers a ‘safe space’ in which participants can be playfully ‘spanked’ for their transgressive

295 See Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 32-35, 58. 296 See Burgin “Jenni's Room.”

181 desires for discipline within a sexualized surveillance society. The installation thus becomes a site of active meaning making, a place where individual subjects can play fast and loose with the semiotics of desire and security, surveillance and sexuality, playfully creating new meanings in a performative space of surveillance.

Mona Hatoum: Deep Throating Medical Surveillance

Mona Hatoum’s provocative installations similarly invite viewers to share a highly intimate space of surveillance and fetishism. In many of her architectural installations,

Hatoum stages the interior of her own body through videos made by endoscopic medical surveillance technologies, swallowing micro-optic tubes that transmit images from inside her body.297 For Deep Throat, one of her best known pieces, Hatoum underwent medical surveillance procedures that probed and recorded the interior of her own body with tiny cameras, producing footage of her esophagus and internal organs as she performed daily activities such as swallowing, chewing, eating, and digesting.298 Utilizing a frontier of visual representation that is at once alienating and highly intimate, Hatoum explicitly stages her own gendered body under the gaze of medical surveillance.

In Deep Throat Hatoum stages a particularly provocative deconstruction of traditional representations of the sexualized female form through the visual field of medical surveillance. Invoking the 1972 soft porn film of the same name, Hatoum effectively reinscribes gender and desire onto a scene of medical surveillance and everyday practices of

297 The field of endoscopic medical surveillance continues to see rapid developments in non- invasive imaging technologies. Over the last five years, engineers have developed tiny, remote controlled cameras that patients can swallow as a pill. See Frank Volke, “Tiny Magnet-Controlled Camera That Can Be Swallowed,” Medical News Today, June 5, 2008, last accessed August 25, 2010, http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/109882.php. 298 Hatoum explored similar medical surveillance technologies and internal imaging in Corps Estranger (1994). See Lisa Cartwright Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995) for a history of science and medicine and the use of visual technologies (xrays, etc.) to view the body’s “interior.”

182 consumption. In Deep Throat Hatoum projects a video taken of her esophagus while she was eating onto a clean white dinner plate on a clean white dinner table set for one. Usually displayed as the single exhibit in a large white room, the table and projection stand starkly alone, stripped of any ‘body,’ save the absent one suggested by the empty chair. At the same time, the open chair invites the viewer to partake in the literal consumption of her image projected onto the empty dinner plate, indexing cultural fetishes of self-starvation and the consumption of images.

Hatoum’s piece foregrounds several striking representations of femininity, desire, and the male gaze. By juxtaposing images of her digestive track with a single empty plate,

Hatoum subtly indexes medical disorders such as anorexia and bulimia that have most prominently been analyzed as an effect of women trying to attain an impossibly thin ideal of femininity. 299 The images she projects onto the dinner plate of her own body chewing and swallowing conjure disturbing dieting tactics recommended to girls and women trying to lose weight. Transfixed and horrified by the images of Hatoum’s esophagus and digestive track, I recall a magazine article from my own teenage years that gave the advice to sit naked in front of a mirror while eating in order to disgust yourself with the appearance of your own body.

Hatoum’s body represented via endoscope and projected onto a dinner plate is indeed alienating and radically unappetizing, producing an unsettling queasiness in the viewer. In effect, Hatoum revisits the ‘potential trauma’ of anorexia that lurks behind the fetish of ideal femininity upon the viewer.300 As such, any queasiness her work produces in the viewer is in

299 See Helen Malson, The Thin Woman: Feminism, Post-Structuralism and the Social Psychology of Anorexia Nervosa (New York: Routledge, 1997); Gianna Williams, Internal Landscapes and Foreign Bodies: Eating Disorders and Other Pathologies (New York: Routledge, 1998). 300 De Lauretis has likened feminist deconstructions of gender representation to a “potential trauma” that can effectively rupture or destabilize habits of representation (Technologies, 3). To effect and critique the construction of representations of gender, de Lauretis argues, feminist practitioners can stage the ‘potential traumas’ that stand behind a wide range of

183 fact productive, as it performs a visceral critique of the visual ideals of femininity that so many women painfully attempt to attain.

Hatoum performs an even more pointed critique of gender representation and fetishization of the female body under medical surveillance by her title’s reference to the

1972 cult film Deep Throat, in which gender, pleasure, desire, and medical surveillance intertwine. Like most pornographic films, Deep Throat relies heavily upon familiar visual representational strategies in which women’s bodies are displayed explicitly for the male gaze. In this film in particular, the inside of the female throat – the odd location of Linda’s clitoris – becomes the site of sexual satisfaction and desire for both Linda and her male sexual partners. The narrative of the film medically constructs the inside of Linda’s throat as an erogenous zone, not only for her male partners, but also for her. Clearly farcical, with tongue-in-cheek dialogue, a humorous soundtrack, and fireworks and bells going off at orgasm, the film as been both lauded and critiqued as an ironic representation of the ultimate male fantasy – that blowjobs are the most longed for sexual act by both parties.

Relying on cultural memory to supply these images from the soft porn industry, Hatoum’s

Deep Throat erases the external spectacle of ‘Woman.’ Using footage of endoscopic surveillance projected on the white dinner plate, Hatoum replaces the familiar fetish of a porn star with a medical representation of the literal site/sight of sexual pleasure. Thus faced with a radically demystified erogenous zone, Hatoum’s audience is left alone to consume her as an alienated, medically revisioned fetish.

Implicitly in dialogue with feminist critique of the male gaze and gender representation in medical analysis, pornography, and visual culture, the narrative of both versions of Deep Throat invoke several, more somber histories of femininity, fetishism, and concrete-ideological practices, in cinema, advertising, historical Western art, as well as in the contemporary academy, avant-garde artistic practices, and even in feminism.

184 surveillance. In Jean-Martin Charcot’s infamous ‘theatre of hysterics,’ staged as part of weekly lectures that were attended by eager young men studying medical psychology (among them, Sigmund Freud), female patients suffering from symptoms of hysteria were probed and stimulated into dramatically frenzied spasms that mirrored sexual pleasure even as they indexed psycho-neurological pain. Charcot conducted these medical orgies as his male pupils watched, transfixed by pedagogical and scopophilic drives that, as Elin Diamond writes in Unmaking Mimesis, allowed them to “identify both with ‘the great Charcot’ and with a hero who can maintain the arousal of a screaming heaving woman, aided by a few carefully chosen props.”301 In addition to destabalizing cultural assumptions of the dispassionate gaze of medical research, Diamond’s analysis points out the historical production of medical knowledge through sexualized scientific exploration of women’s bodies at the hands of male researchers. Drawing on Foucault’s theories of sex as a cultural (and medical) figuration of truth and fiction, Diamond notes that the figure of the fallen (hysterical) woman, signified by her over-expressive, uncontrolled sexuality, becomes the explicitly gendered site/sight in which truth can emerge from falsity: “the fallen woman…, by allowing [male] figures of cultural authority to strip her of falsehood, creates a theater of knowledge, makes possible the production of truth.”302

Historically, as Diamond points out, the burden (and ‘problem’) of overt sexuality falls on the woman’s body, not on the gaze and gesture of the intrepid male doctor. In

301 Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis, 13. Diamond cannily studies Charcot’s ‘theatre of hysteria’ and Freud’s consequent treatments of female hysterics in order to build a theory of what she calls ‘realism’s hysteria.’ Finding an uncanny mirror in Freud’s emphasis on ‘confession’ as a means of converting hysterics, Diamond traces the archetypical transformation of a hysterical, sexually over-expressive woman in melodrama and realist theatre into a socially acceptable, docile picture of femininity (or a forever pathologized fallen woman) through the process of confession. 302 Diamond goes on: “It is on the basis of the hysteric’s confession that Freud discovers the traumatic event that triggers the somatic conversion of hysteria” (Unmaking Mimesis, 14).

185 explicating the ‘male gaze’ of medical visual culture, feminists have thus taken pains to demystify cultural assumptions regarding a gender-neutral scientific gaze. In Speculum of the

Other Woman, foundational feminist theorist Luce Irigaray notably aligned instruments of anatomical exploration with the penetration of a male gaze and phallus into the mysterious interior of Woman. Irigaray argued that in dominant practices of representation, the “man’s eye is understood as substitute for the penis [that] will be able to prospect woman’s sexual parts…”303 Subjected to the ‘speculum’ of her title (which she also relates to the cinematic camera), ‘Woman’ thus becomes the exemplary object of masculine investigation, while the male gaze becomes an extension of the phallus; together, these gendered visions become the arbiters of ‘truth’ within the production of medical knowledge.

In Hatoum’s Deep Throat the endoscopic camera, which extends the gaze of medical surveillance into Hatoum’s interior, literally stands in for the male penis that gives Linda pleasure when she is giving a blowjob. Hatoum makes this connection explicit through her title, and in doing so, pointedly conflates the gaze of the medical surveillance industry with the fetishizing male gaze, and even more literally, the male phallus of the soft-porn film industry. By mixing these cultural signifiers, Hatoum’s Deep Throat provocatively penetrates the ‘high art’ frame of a gallery exhibition with the ‘low art’ of pornography and the ‘science’ of medical imaging. She complicates the position of the spectator of Deep Throat, as she aligns the gallery viewer with the historically male-coded gazes of the medical examination and pornographic film.

In doing so, Hatoum follows in the intrepid footsteps of feminist performance artists that have labored to defy and explore the boundaries between terms that have been set up as oppositional: pornography and high art, personal and political, knowledge and pleasure,

303 Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 144-5.

186 cultural norms and individual desires.304 Like performance artists Carolee Schneemann,

Linda Montano, Cindy Sherman, and Annie Sprinkle, Hatoum uses her body – and, in particular, the interior of her body305 – as a stage on which to complicate traditions of constructing the female body as a signifier of medical knowledge. As Schneider suggests in her analysis of the work of these earlier “explicit body” artists, Hatoum showcases “the sedimented layers of signification themselves,” and in doing so, “interrogates habits of deception and secrecy in viewing, the presumed passivity and ignorance of the given to be seen: She is ‘doing it to herself’ – so she must ‘know.’”306 Within her re-visioned Deep

Throat, Hatoum unfolds oppositional models of knowledge and power, art and porn, real and fake, science and seduction in order to, knowingly, lay them across her own body.

Gilles Walker: Pole Dancing Surveillance Robots

British visual artist Giles Walker recently engineered a series of “pole dancing robots” that likewise embody several “sedimented layers of signification.” As I explored in

Chapter One, Walker’s robots pass through literal embodiment of fetishized feminity, and gyrate their way towards de Lauretis’ doubled vision of feminist representational practices.

As part of Walker’s ongoing Suspectart series, in which he re-engineers surveillance

304 Rebecca Schneider argues that “many explicit body performance artists make the private so explicitly public (as underground porn is dragged into the frame of art, or as the ‘personal’ is hailed as flagrantly ‘political’) that a binary terror is evoked as the two terms, public and private, collide across her body” (Explicit Body, 72). Artists such as Carolee Schneemann, Linda Montano, Annie Sprinkle, and Cindy Sherman have used their own bodies as stages or screens, overtly constructing an ‘explicit body’ of feminist critique that effectively challenges “habitual modalities of viewing” the female body in various forms of visual representation (2-4). 305 In using the interior of her own body, Hatoum is in particularly resonant conversation with Annie Sprinkle, the porn star turned performance artist whose 1988 performance at the Kitchen in NYC included a segment in which she invited audience members to come up, one at a time, and view her cervix through a speculum. Sprinkle’s work (and career) graphically challenged cultural and spatial separations between high art and pornography, science and art. See Elinor Fuchs, The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theater After Modernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 108, 116-119. 306 Schneider, Explicit Body, 2, 72.

187 technologies to perform as autonomous robots in interactive art installations, his Pole Dancing

Robots garnered international attention in 2008-9 when they appeared in exhibits in the UK,

Spain, and Australia.307 Walker constructed the robots to appear unmistakably feminine, with hard white plastic bikinis (a la storm trooper fem bots) connected by long metallic limbs.

Titillating and awkward in equal parts, the robots gyrate their molded hips against strip club poles, all the while scanning the viewing audience with their over-sized CCTV surveillance camera heads.

While I am not necessarily convinced that Walker was aiming for more than a provocative, hot-button art piece, his Pole Dancing Robots provide fertile ground for a feminist critique of representations of sexuality and surveillance. Viewed from a feminist perspective,

Walker’s installation features three key interventions. The first stems from Walker’s construction of a hybridized figure of surveillance and seduction, as his robots combine the figures of practiced erotic dancer and criminalizing eye of the law in one hard plastic body.

Mechanically simulating a well-known scene of female bodies displayed for male visual pleasure, Walker grafts the head of state surveillance – that which is most given-to-see in contemporary society – onto the classic figure of the given-to-be-seen. The conflation of fetishized symbols, one signifying desire and the other discipline, gestures towards a body of feminine seduction empowered with a doubled vision that polices even as it is policed.

307 The reactions to Walker’s fem-bot pole dancers have been quite varied, ranging from wildly cheering crowds, egging the robots on to blog posts and editorials expressing a mixture of dismay and anxiety over the threat these robots pose to the unique eroticism of human strip teases and the safe, clinical asexuality of other robots. These reactions reveal the sensitive cultural turf that Walker invades with his project. See posts such as “Pole Dancing Robots make CCTV surveillance sexy,” by Adario Strange, DVICE, December 5, 2008, last accessed August 25, 2010, http://dvice.com/archives/2008/12/pole_dancing_ro.php; and Adam Frucci’s “Pole Dancing Robots ruin both robots and strippers simultaneously,” gizmodo, December 4, 2008, last accessed August 25, 2010, http://gizmodo.com/5101838/pole-dancing-robots-ruin-both-robots-and-strippers- simultaneously.

188 Secondly, Walker’s installation suggests a double standard for the ‘male gaze’ of discipline and desire. In his staging, familiar signifiers of surveillance culture intertwine and overlap with classic gestures of the sex club industry, creating a disorienting mixture of desire and discipline that distorts familiar scenes of male fantasy. The surveillance fem-bots play to the attentions of a classic, desirous male gaze, while at the same time employing the surveillant gaze of discipline to police the desiring gaze, implicitly labeling that desire as potentially incriminating. In other words, Walker sets up the male gaze as policing itself, as his robots combine the body of ideal femininity that men go to a strip club to see with the private detective hired by a suspicious wife to see if her husband is cheating.

Thirdly, Walker’s pole dancing robots, programmed to simulate archetypical gyrations of human pole-dancers, eerily mirror constructions of femininity as all surface, pure representation. Intentionally or not, Walker references Woman’s capacity to ‘fake’ sexual orgasm that performance theorist Craig Owens, among others, have identified as the central threat to visual ‘truth’ in representations of female sexuality. Owens writes of the potential for, and even expectation of, this kind of feminine ‘faking’ as a form of mimicry which “entails a certain splitting of the subject, the entire body detaches itself from itself, becomes a picture, a semblance.” 308 Functioning as a ‘semblance’ of female pleasure,

Walker’s robots also embody Doane’s notion of the mask or masquerade of femininity that is performed in excess of, and thereby separately from, the corporeal female body. In doing so, Walker’s exhibit wages a disconcerting form of ‘binary terror’ on ontological distinctions between artificial intelligence and human sexuality and desire, re-framing surveillance technologies as overtly sexual and female strippers as distinctly mechanical. His robots

308 Owens, “Posing,” 212. This notion was proposed by Joan Riviere and seconded by Lacan, though for both of them it was tied up in compensation for women’s desire for or lack of masculinity.

189 provocatively interpellate the ‘mask’ of Womanliness described by Doane into the ever- growing “surveillant assemblage” described by surveillance theorists Haggerty and Erikson.

However, Walker’s piece stops here, just short of an even more profound engagement with the intertwined histories of sexual display, faked pleasure, and surveillant models of ‘truth.’ Specifically, his presentation fails to address the question of whether or not the robots’ heads, scanning the audience in uncanny seduction, are also ‘faking it.’

Audiences, eyes full of mechanic seduction and sexualized surveillance, are left to wonder, probably hours after they leave the exhibit, if the pole dancing robots were actually recording and storing surveillance footage. If Walker were to reveal that the robots do in fact record surveillance footage, the stakes of the exhibit as an artist-audience contract would change.

Visitors would become subjects of faux-strip-club surveillance, interpellated into a system of sexual politics in which ‘the look,’ if caught on tape, is subject to moral scandal and ethical judgment. The question of who is watching whom would suddenly have ‘real’ teeth again, as there would be a record of personal reactions to the transgressive mix of discipline and desire.

Or, conversely and perhaps more provocatively, Walker could have revealed that the robots were unable to function as surveillance cameras, and were instead faking the act of surveillance. The piece would then have remapped the untrustworthiness of female bodies, which can so easily ‘fake’ sexual pleasure, across the supposedly trustworthy and ‘truth- telling’ bodies of the surveillance cameras, suggesting that surveillance technologies possess the same proclivity for mimicry and fakery as women are purported to enjoy. The surveillance camera heads of the robots would be shown up as fetishes of ‘truth’ that may, in fact, cover over deep insecurities at the heart of surveillance society.

The Problem of the Glittering Distraction, or Fighting Fetish with Fetish

190 Within these surveillance artworks that redeploy the fetish in order to critique habitual models of fetishism in and of surveillance, there remains the risk that the fetish, again, distracts. As I suggested above, viewers of Magid’s Surveillance Shoe may not read the piece as a feminist critique of the Peeping Tom’s fetishizing gaze, and instead get off on catching glimpses of her underwear. Similarly, the sophisticated blend of gender, sexuality, and security in Scher’s Security Bed, Hatoum’s Deep Throat, and Walker’s Pole Dancing Robots may not be read as critical reconfigurations of gender within the purview of surveillance.

Each of these pieces could instead appear to reinforce habitual representations of femininity as given-to-be-seen under an all-seeing patriarchal gaze of surveillance.

Viewing the female form as cultural fetish has been important in articulating a feminist trajectory within film theory and psychoanalysis, and yet such a focus has had to be treated carefully as a representational tactic in feminist film, photography, theatre and performance art. In practice, the challenge becomes: how to deploy the fetish AND point to the ‘real’ – the anxiety, habit, blind spot – that is “underneath”? A common response to this challenge has emerged among feminist theorists who subscribe to a materialist approach to critiquing the fetish, be it Marxist or Freudian in construction. De Lauretis, Diamond,

Dolan, Mulvey, Schneider, and Silverman among many others, have each championed feminist tactics that explicitly show or reveal the fetish as a fetish.

For Diamond, whose work has critically analyzed feminist tactics that unsettle the naturalized representation of truth in theatrical realism (realism’s hysteria), Brecht’s theatrical techniques offer an invaluable mode of challenging historically ‘blinding’ uses of mimesis.

Brechtian practices of ‘alienation’ and ‘gestus’ critique realism’s truth-claims by making the

191 layers of representation in theatre more visible rather than less.309 Brecht’s epic theatre

“provides ways to expose illusionism, to pry actor/signifier from character/signified,” presenting feminist artists with tactical tools to reveal cultural fetishes of femininity as fetishes.310 In particular, the Brechtian ‘gestus’, like the fetish, encapsulates complex and often contradictory cultural habits of representation and reception, which, when made explicitly visible, posit the actor’s body as a site of historical resistance through which the present audience can critically consider historical material constraints and underlying patriarchal ideologies.311 Moreover, in “Mimesis, Mimicry and the ‘True Real,’” Diamond suggests that mimesis (in a traditional, patriarchal sense – what Irigaray has called “mimesis imposed”) can, in feminist performance, become mimicry, a kind of critical representation that has the potential to disrupt and undermine: “as praxis, the sign-referent model of mimesis can become excessive to itself, spilling into a mimicry that undermines the referent’s authority; it

309 Similarly, in The Feminist Spectator as Critic, Jill Dolan promoted a materialist approach to theatre making and spectatorship, employing materialist feminist criticism “to denaturalize the psychological identification processes implicit in representation,” arguing, “when the representational apparatus is foregrounded, its once mystified ideology becomes clear” (Dolan, Feminist Spectator, 14-15). In this way, Dolan described ‘materialist feminism’ as an “apparatus-based theory and practice,” thus emphasizing the need to focus on the traditional architecture of representation and reception in theatre in order to show its repressive and exclusionary production of gender. 310 In short, Diamond states, “Brecht insisted on more mimesis not less” (Unmaking Mimesis, 38- 9). See also Diamond’s introduction to Unmaking Mimesis, viii. While his theatre did not aim to deny referentiality, Brecht aimed “to expunge the ahistorical referent,” a notion similar to De Lauretis’ ‘Woman’ as an ahistorical, fictional construct in Technologies of Gender. 311 For Diamond, this kind of “gestic feminist criticism would ‘alienate’ or foreground those moments in a playtext when social attitudes about gender and sexuality conceal or disrupt patriarchal ideology…focus[ing] on historical material constraints in the production of images” as well as in their reception (Unmaking Mimesis, 54). “The explosive (and elusive) synthesis of alienation, historicization and the ‘not…but’ is the Brechtian gestus, a gesture, a word, an action, a tableau, by which…the social attitudes encoded in the playtext become visible to the spectator” (Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis, 52). For feminism, Diamond argued, “the gestus signifies a moment of theoretical insight into sex-gender complexities, not only in the play’s ‘fable’, but in the culture which the play, at the moment of reception, is dialogically reflecting and shaping” (Unmaking Mimesis, 53).

192 also suggests that the interposition of the performer’s body signals an interruption of signification itself.” 312

In other words, feminist performance can tactically fight gendered fetishism with hyper-visible fetishes of femininity, redeploying explicit representations of gender dictated by patriarchal models in order to critique and interrupt familiar stagings of the female body as primary markers of sexual difference and male fantasy. Rebecca Schneider has termed this kind of excessive mimesis as “showing the show,” identifying it as a characteristic tactic of feminist explicit body performance artists.313 In using their bodies to ‘show the show’ of fetishism, feminist explicit body performers wage binary terrorism on a range of dialectical terms involved in maintaining female bodies as markers of sexual difference and male fantasy. In particular, Schneider writes, such performances show the gendered body as a complex site in which cultural fantasy and the ‘real’ of lived experience are reflexively imbricated:

postmodern criticism has strengthened the foundations, laid by psychoanalysis and materialism, for interrogating cultural distinctions between fantasy and objective reality, buttressing assertions that fantasy is the vehicle for our construction of the real. But much current feminism insists on remembering the flipside of this equation: that the impact of those social fantasies is, nevertheless, inexorably real.314

Following a similar critical vein, Kaja Silverman has analyzed a mode of feminist representation that overtly mimics culturally fetishized poses of feminity, through an in depth reading of Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills.315 Silverman posits that the critical power of

Sherman’s self-framed poses lies in showing the gap between the ideal for which the pose

312 Diamond, “Mimesis,” 368. 313 Theorizing a feminist performance of gender and hysteria, Schneider writes, “The trick is that in so speaking her symptomatology within the explicit frame of performance (that is, explicitly showing the show), the performer would simultaneously have to escape the very signification her body speaks – the performer would have to comment on that hysteria at the same time that she exhibits it” (Explicit Body, 116). 314 Schneider, Explicit Body, 104. 315 See Silverman, Visible World, 205-227.

193 reaches and the ‘reality’ of the bodily conditions that the camera captures. For Film Stills,

Sherman photographed her own body in various culturally familiar poses, gesturing to equally familiar narratives of feminine desire, desirability, and victim-hood. In Silverman’s reading, Sherman effectively captures the gap between the ideal for which she shows herself reaching (or, said another way, the cultural narrative she shows herself quoting) and the ‘real’ that is captured by the camera, providing an evocative image of productive failure, as she becomes a subject who simultaneously inhabits her own, historically contingent body and structures it according to a cultural gaze from outside. By framing the fraught space of simultaneous seeing/being seen (a feminist perspective both inside and outside the frame of representation), Sherman’s photographs challenge habits of representation, urging the viewer to identify not with the impossible vision of a cultural ideal, but rather with the active, vibrant attempts of a historically contingent woman to meet that ideal. For Silverman then, photographs or films that purposely frame the gap – the distance between the body that poses and the cultural ideal (or fetish) – constitute a distinctly transgressive mode of feminist identification and idealization.

Out of these feminist interventions in film, photography, and performance come invaluable guidelines for feminist surveillance artists and critics. Importantly, the fetish that fails as a perfect fetish succeeds as a marker of the cultural anxiety of not measuring up.

That is to say that fetishes of surveillance and of femininity can be most productive when they are shown up as failures, imperfect copies that unsettle habits and normative ideologies rather than reinscribe them. Thus, in order to more radically critique the glittering distraction of the gendered fetish within the visual field of surveillance, feminist surveillance art must embrace failure within the playful and excessive reduplications of markers of discipline and desire, sex and security. Engaging Diamond’s figuration of feminist ‘mimicry,’

194 Schneider’s ‘showing the show,’ and Silverman’s idealization of the gap between ideal and

‘real,’ feminist surveillance art works must continue to exaggerate and distort representations of gender in and of surveillance.

Magid, Hatoum, Scher, Mann, and Walker have taken the first steps in what must be a greater commitment within surveillance art and society to interrogate surveillance as a technology of gender. Their pieces foreground productively muddled visual markers of sex and security that disrupt rather than reinforce the comforting façade of gendered fetishes of surveillance. They begin to challenge habitual processes of fetishism in surveillance society, summoning up previously blocked or obscured aspects of surveillance for public scrutiny and consideration, causing spectators to pause in habitual processes of image consumption, and to look twice at defamiliarized and rearranged signifiers of surveillance and sexuality.316

Their gender-focused surveillance art works challenge assumptions about state, corporate, and institutional surveillance systems as gender-neutral systems of visual representation and reception, and powerfully reassert gender as an important lens through which to analyze – and critique – any scene of surveillance.

316 As Schneider suggests, “dialectical images provoke a viewer/reader to thing again – to take a second look…” (Explicit Body, 52). Artists who employ such visual tactics “ask the viewer to ‘think again’ – to take a second look, like second sight, into the deeper complexities at work in their parodies…” (Explicit Body, 173).

195 CHAPTER FIVE

Shattering Glass: Women’s Voices in Surveillance Art

She long'd her hidden passion to reveal, And tell her pains, but had not words to tell: She can't begin, but waits for the rebound, To catch his voice, and to return the sound. Ovid, “Echo and Narcissus”317

In the Greek myth “Echo and Narcissus,” Echo, a talkative young female nymph, has her loquacity curtailed by a strange linguistic condition cast upon her by the jealous goddess Hera. Once able to use clever word play to distract Hera from catching Zeus in consort with her fellow nymphs, Echo can now only speak when spoken to, limited in her responses to the words another person uses to address her: “[Hera] a curse did on her tongue impose/ to sport with ev’ry sentence in the close/…Hence ‘tis she prattles in a fainter tone,/with mimick sounds, and accents not her own.”318 This impediment proves particularly poetic when Echo spies the beautiful teenage male Narcissus, gazing obsessively at his own lovely reflection in a pool. Armed only with her “mimick sounds,” she speaks back to him the last few words that he, cruel and careless in his own self-obsession, speaks to her.

Yet, even with her limited verbal palette, Echo manages to express her desperate love for Narcissus. As he rejects her amorous advances, he cries, “Take your hands off me… How dare you touch me!” Echo responds with her passionate request, “Touch me!”

Later, when Narcissus spurns Echo with the phrase “May I die before I give you power o’er

317 Ovid, “Echo and Narcissus,” in Metamorphoses, trans. John Dryden (1717), lines 55-166 of Book IV, last accessed August 25, 2010, http://personal.centenary.edu/~dhavird/Echo.html. 318 Ovid, “Echo.”

196 me,” she turns it into a declaration of her eternal love, “I give you power o’er me.”319

Narcissus, with all his beauty, arrogance, and freedom, has little use for speech except to reject and dissuade Echo’s dedication to him. In contrast, Echo’s voice, restricted as it is, becomes her most enduring weapon. Trapped within a lyrical death match of repetition and revision, Echo is eventually ossified by her unrequited love: “Her bones are petrify'd, her voice is found / In vaults, where still it doubles ev'ry sound.” Whereas Narcissus ends his days watching his own perfect form waste away in front of his image-hungry eyes, Echo’s desiring body is transformed into pure aural representation. She becomes a stone canyon of echoing reverberations, destined for all eternity to recall her own desire through the desires of others.

“Echo and Narcissus” succinctly, albeit tragically, describes the problem of Woman’s

(in)ability to speak her own embodied desires within male-centered visual and linguistic culture, a problem that has been central to feminist discourse – and feminist surveillance art

– throughout the last half century. Feminist artists and scholars concerned with gendered limitations and expectations placed upon the female voice have labored to answer a myriad of questions about how, where, what, and for whom women can speak within patriarchal linguistic, imagistic, and disciplinary society: Is it possible for women to articulate their own experiences and desires by creatively mimicking and rescripting what Luce Irigaray (1975) critically termed ‘phallogocentric language?’ Or must women develop new forms of

‘feminine writing,’ such as Helene Cixous’ “ecriture feminine” (1974)? Can strategies of

‘voiced’ or ‘embodied’ writing, theorized and practiced by Shoshona Felman (1980) create a form of feminist expression in which a palpably female body can author her own desires and

319 Amy Lawrence, Echo and Narcissus: Women’s Voices in Classic Hollywood Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 1-2.

197 experiences?320 Are the same patriarchal ideologies conferred upon the female voice as on her explicitly gendered body, as Mary Ann Doane (1985) and Kaja Silverman (1988) have claimed, giving Woman vocal autonomy only if she has no bodily presence, as in the

‘disembodied voice-over’? Or can the visual regime of classic Hollywood cinema described by Amy Lawrence (1991), Britta Sjorgen (2006), and Juliet Flower MacCannell (2007) simultaneously become a space in which feminine and feminist perspectives, experiences, and desires can be heard? Within the context of contemporary digital information society, how does the hybrid techno-human body of the feminist cyborg, conceived by Donna

Harraway (1990) and further analyzed by Margaret Morse (2006), produce new corporeal and linguistic forms for women’s experience and self-expression? And finally, what can the female voice evidence in surveillance society that her body cannot? How and to what effect do feminist surveillance artists such as Sophie Calle, Janet Cardiff, and Jill Magid voice distinctly gendered positions, narratives, and desires within the visual regime of surveillance?

These questions, reverberating from Echo’s broken yet enduring heart, form the investigative pulse of this final chapter. Just as Laura Mulvey’s re-reading of the Pandora myth served in the previous chapter to simultaneously illustrate and subvert central problems surrounding representations of femininity within patriarchal visual culture, “Echo and

Narcissus” at once solidifies and undoes the damning equation of authorship with masculine power and mimesis with feminine entrapment. For Mulvey, Pandora and her box exemplifies a powerful blend of fetishism and curiosity that, if read ‘against the grain,’ provides a road map for intrepid feminist scholars and practitioners to cut through limiting visual representations staged within patriarchal territory and chart new terrain in visual culture. In this chapter, Echo’s determination to speak her heart despite her linguistic

320 See also D. Soyini Madison, “Performing Theory/ Embodied Writing,” Text and Performance Quarterly 19.2 (1999): 107-124.

198 limitations provides a feminist model of embodied female desire spoken against all odds.

When ‘read against the grain,’ Ovid’s myth narrates the potential for subversive ‘feminist mimesis’ in the realm of language and sound, as Echo finds expressive power within the words scripted for her by Narcissus. At the same time, Echo’s bodily presence is grimly sacrificed for an eternity of aural responsiveness, describing a concern voiced by feminists who feel that women should not have to disavow their feminine images in order to be heard as desiring subjects and critical feminists. As such, the myth provides a rich overture to a range of second and third wave feminist strategies. From Helene Cixous’ ‘ecricture feminine’ to Shoshona Feldman’s ‘feminist speech act,’ Donna Harraway’s ‘feminist cyborg’ to Britta Sjorgen’s ‘voice-off,’ feminist scholars have theorized and debated models of speaking and writing that variously empower, limit, protect, diversify, and redefine female identities, desires, and experiences.

In the next section, I lay out some of the vital debates and strategies surrounding feminine writing and the (dis)embodied female voice that have emerged through several decades of feminist discourse in order to set the stage for my subsequent readings of feminist surveillance art works by Sophie Calle, Janet Cardiff, and Jill Magid. Set within the context of ongoing discussions about how women can speak for and by themselves in contemporary visual culture (film, print, and surveillance), Calle’s The Detective (1981),

Cardiff’s Eyes of Laura (2004), and Magid’s Evidence Locker (2004) emerge as important tactical artistic interventions in surveillance culture and in feminist discourse. These pieces are emblematic of feminist surveillance artworks that feature explicit critiques of dominant surveillance techniques by pointedly performing in excess of visual surveillance. By authoring their own representations of female voices and bodies under the gaze of surveillance, Calle, Cardiff, and Magid build feminist critiques of and alternative to the

199 patriarchal panopticism that, as I argued in Chapter One, undergirds dominant techniques and technologies in contemporary surveillance society.

While Cardiff is the only one of these artists to outwardly declare her work as

‘feminist,’ the surveillance art works of Calle, Cardiff, and Magid are each implicitly in dialogue with changing feminist perspectives surrounding embodiment, vision, evidence, and feminist authorial voice. In particular, the relationship between ‘embodied writing’ and visual self-representation in the work of Calle, Cardiff, and Magid situates their projects at the crux of important feminist debates about the critical relationship between female voice and image.

It is equally significant that Calle, Cardiff, and Magid came to prominence as artists at different junctures in feminist thought and practice: Calle in the 1980’s, Cardiff in the 1990’s, and Magid in the 2000’s. Even while each of these artists continues to develop in relation to changing technologies, aesthetic trends, and political ideas, their works have been greatly influenced by significant debates in feminist theory and practice throughout the last several decades.

Echo’s Legacy: The Problem of the Female Voice in Feminist Discourse

Echo’s aural limitations reverberate with important feminist critiques of and strategies to subvert the linguistic confines suffered by female speaking subjects within patriarchal culture. Particularly within second wave feminist discourse, the limits of what a

Woman’s body is given to evidence in mainstream visual culture was extended to what a

Woman’s voice and the ‘body’ of her writing could evidence in linguistic and aural representation. Just as Theresa de Lauretis and Laura Mulvey theorized the female body as trapped within a “given-to-be-looked-at-ness” under the ‘male gaze’ of visual culture, feminist linguistic theorists such as Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray argued that female social subjects have long been trapped within a linguistic system that has been defined

200 according to a male viewpoint of the world. Irigaray and Cixous emphasized that women, historically limited to being sexual objects for men – as virgins or prostitutes, wives or mothers – have been prevented from expressing or authoring their female sexuality, desires, and pleasures to men, other women, or even themselves through the limitations of what

Irigaray termed ‘phallogocentric language.’ As a potential solution, Cixous coined the term

“Écriture Féminine,” literally “women’s writing,” arguing that, as there was no room for women’s self-expression within patriarchal language, “Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies.”321 By privileging non-linear, cyclical writing, Cixous and

Irigaray embraced ecriture feminine for its ability to describe the female body, with its sexual difference and different sexuality (desire), through female-authored language and text.322

However, these attempts to articulate a distinctly ‘feminine language’ with which to free women writers from the prison of linguistically embedded patriarchal ideology were met with criticism from within feminist discourse. Feminists such as Audre Lorde and bell hooks criticized Irigaray and Cixous (as well as other feminist institutions such as Betty

Friedan and the National Organization of Women) for assuming that the particular experiences, values, and modes of expression of white middle-class women were universal to all women.323 Lorde and hooks argued that, by denying racial and economic differences in

321 Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Signs 1.4 (1976): 875. 322 Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). 323 Audre Lorde actively challenged white women feminists with her writing, confronting issues of racism in feminist thought. She maintained that a great deal of the scholarship of white feminists served to augment the oppression of black women, a conviction which led to angry confrontation, most notably in the scathing open letter addressed to radical lesbian feminist Mary Daly. See Audre Lorde, “Open Letter to Mary Daly,” in Sister Outsider (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1984), 66. Similarly, in her essay “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House,” Lorde attacked the underlying racism of feminism, describing it as unrecognized dependence on the patriarchy. Written in a similar vein, bell

201 the category of women, feminists merely reinscribed old patriarchal systems of linguistic and cultural oppression. Even fellow white, middle class feminists, such as Julia Kristeva, rejected the pursuit of a uniquely feminine language by Irigaray and Cixous, which Kristeva dismissed as emblematic of what she called ‘second phase feminism.’324 In contrast, Kristeva argued that culture and language are the domain of speaking beings, a domain to which women implicitly belong. While Kristeva argued that a new discourse of maternity and female creation was needed – as “real female innovation (in whatever field) will only come about when maternity, female creation and the link between them are better understood”325

– she most fully endorsed a “third phase of feminism,” which refuses to choose a consolidated female or feminist identity over one defined by difference, and instead embraces multiple sexual identities in language and other cultural representations.326

hooks’ Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981) examined the historical impact of sexism and racism on black women, devaluation of black womanhood in media representations and the education system, and the disregard for issues of race and class within feminism. See also bell hooks, Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies (London: Routledge, 1996). 324 In her essay 1979 “Women's Time,” republished in New Maladies of the Soul, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), Kristeva articulates her view of the three phases of feminism. She rejects the first phase, characterized by feminists such as Simone de Beauvoir, because it seeks universal equality and overlooks sexual differences. Kristeva also criticizes the second phase of feminism, as she does not agree with feminists who maintain that language and culture are essentially patriarchal and must somehow be abandoned. Kristeva endorses what she identifies as the third phase of feminism which refuses to choose identity over difference or visa versa; rather, it explores multiple identities, including multiple sexual identities. 325 Julia Kristeva, “A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident,” in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 298. 326 In a 1984 interview, Kristeva proposes that there are as many sexualities as there are individuals. See “Julia Kristeva in conversation with Rosalind Coward,” in Desire, ed. Lisa Appignanesi (London: ICA Documents, 1984), 22-27. Third wave feminist Kate Bornstein’s theoretical and performance-based interventions as a post operative transsexual powerfully argue against binary constructions of gender. Bornstein’s works, which include performance pieces such as Hidden: A Gender, The Opposite Sex is Neither, and Virtually Yours, and theoretical publications such as Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us (New York: Vintage Books, 1994) and My Gender Workbook: How to Become a Real Man, a Real Woman, the Real You,

202 Similar debates arose in feminist film theory, as Mary Ann Doane (1985) and Kaja

Silverman (1988) reasoned that aural representations of women in ‘classic,’ or mainstream,

Hollywood films were, like the visual representations of Woman discussed in the previous chapter, conditioned by patriarchal ideologies and masculine psychology.327 Silverman wrote that, in classic Hollywood films, “women’s words are shown to be even less her own than are her ‘looks…[her words] are scripted for her, extracted from her by an external agency, or uttered by her in a trancelike state….Even when she speaks without apparent coercion, she is always spoken from the place of the sexual other.”328 That is, in Silverman’s analysis, the male voice is typically permitted movement in and out of the diegetic frame, speaking to the audience from a rational, or naturalized, social order that exceeds the discreet narrative of the film. In contrast, the female voice remains imprisoned in the film frame, and in her female body, unable to ‘speak’ reflexively or critically to the audience or to ‘have a say’ in the structure of the film story. Like Echo, whose speaking self is literally defined by Narcissus’ view of her, female speaking subjects were, according to Silverman and Doane, limited in their self-expression to the words scripted for them by vision-obsessed patriarchal society.

or Something Else Entirely (New York: Routledge, 1998) provide particularly striking embodiments of Kristeva’s arguments. 327 Silverman and Doane sustained that the female voice in cinema, like the female body, is constructed by a patriarchal Hollywood system in such a way as to ‘protect’ the male psyche from his fear of castration and fragmentation. Like Echo, who, as a stone canyon, offers fragmented utterances that give Narcissus assurance of his own wholeness, women’s voices in classic film are relegated to mouthing words authored by men in order to prop up a masculine sense of wholeness. According to Silverman, the male psyche is protected in classic cinema through two practices: the transference of “enunciative power and authority from the site of production to a fictional male voice”, and the “hyperdramatization of woman’s symbolic castration” (Silverman, Acoustic Mirror, 39). 328 Silverman, Acoustic Mirror, 31. Silverman powerfully argues that position of the female voice is not a privileged interior space (associated as it sometimes is with soul, spirit, or consciousness) but rather inhabits a space characterized by “linguistic constraint and physical confinement – confinement to the body, to claustral spaces, and to inner narratives” (Acoustic Mirror, 45).

203 For second wave feminist film theorists then, there emerged a conflict between disavowing the visually mastered, fetishized, and ‘given-to-be-seen’ female body and investing in the possibility of a self-authored female voice. Silverman and Doane, like

Irigaray and Cixous, labored to carve out aural and linguistic space for women to voice gendered experiences and desires that were somehow free from patriarchal ideologies and representations. However, the female authorial voices they imagined spoke constructively for and yet problematically from explicitly female-gendered bodies. Fueled by the belief that

“Hollywood requires the female voice to assume similar responsibilities to those it confers upon the female body…filling in for and covering over what is unspeakable within male subjectivity,” Silverman and Doane argued that patriarchal representations of women’s bodies and female sexuality severely limited women’s vocal self-expression. 329 As a result, they each concluded that the ‘disembodied’ female voice was the key to resisting patriarchal psychology, as a disembodied voice is “freed from its claustral confinement within the female body.”330 Consequently, Silverman and Doane both developed taxonomies of the female voice in film that correlated the degree to which a female voice can resist patriarchal control to the ‘degree of embodiment.’331

329 Silverman, Acoustic Mirror, 38. 330 Silverman, Acoustic Mirror, 186. 331 Mary Ann Doane, “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space,” in Film Sound: Theory and Practice, ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton, 162-176 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 40-43. Doane’s categories are: (1)synch; (2)voice-off (a character speaking from offscreen but is not seen); (3) interior monologue (character is onscreen and we hear his or her asynchronous voice); and (4) disembodied voice-over (no visible character or designated diegetic figure – most often found in documentary). Silverman remaps these categories in terms of ‘embodiment:’ (1) synch sound (voice that links directly to an onscreen character); (2) the floating voice (which at times emerges as detached, at others, attached to a specific female body in the film); and (3) the disembodied voice (a voice entirely without visual locus during the course of the film). Silverman Acoustic Mirror, 46-54, 58-65

204 More recent feminist film theorists such as Britta Sjorgen have argued that these schematizations leave the female speaker dangerously stranded without recourse to a body from which she can be recognized as a speaking subject. In Into the Vortex: Female Voice and

Paradox in Film Sjorgen argues that Doane and Silverman mapped the female voice in film in ways that foreclose the possibility of agency for the female voice within the image structure of film.332 Sjogren asserts that these second wave feminist critiques reveal a “phobia about voices yoked to bodies,” as Doane and Silverman get mired in disavowing Hollywood films in which the female voice is invariably brought ‘back’ to the female body.333 As an alternative, Sjorgen suggests that the female voice can be read along side – rather than seen as subordinate to – the female gendered body in film, thereby creating a new model with which to explore contradictory and multiple aspects of feminine subjectivity in film. Whereas

Silverman and Doane privilege the distanced, ‘disembodied voice-over’ as a means of female authorial speech, Sjorgen introduces the term ‘voice-off’ as a way to describe a separate but equal space in which the sound is independent from the image with which it is later paired.

In doing so, Sjorgen attempts to avoid the connotation that sound is merely ‘layered over’ the filmic image: “Whereas ‘over’ suggests a top ‘layer’ or cloak of some kind, ‘off’ connotes

332 Britta Sjorgen, Into the Vortex: Female Voice and Paradox in Film (Bloomington: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 2. Sjorgen argues that their theories position the ‘disembodied voice- over’ in such a way that “subordinates supplemental meanings to a primary one (one of distance from the body), discouraging other possible simultaneous, contradictory meanings” (7). 333 Sjogren, Vortex, 137. Sjorgen claims that even while feminists such as Mulvey, De Lauretis, Silverman, and Doane are critical of Freudian, Lacanian, and Foucauldian viewpoints that view “transcendent distance to be synonymous with subjective power,” their theories of a feminist authoritative voice risk remaining caught within these patriarchal ideological premises which “conflates subjectivity with… a removed, yet central place of authoritative privilege” (Vortex, 13). Sjorgen argues that the privileging of a distanced, male subject position is supported by the tradition of perspectivism in the history of visual art, and has been central to much of film theory, as evidenced in Jean-Louis Baudry’s essay on ideological effects of cinematic apparatus, Christian Metz’ seminal film theory, as well as Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure.’

205 otherness – a distinctness that moves alongside, ‘elsewhere.’ In this sense, ‘off’ best evokes the tension of a dialectic to the image, a vital relationship to preserve in descriptions of the voice.”334

Similarly, in Echo and Narcissus: Women’s Voices in Classic Hollywood Cinema (1991), feminist film theorist Amy Lawrence argued that the female voice in classic Hollywood films should not simply be heard as a patriarchal mechanism to staunch the castration complex of the male viewer. Instead, feminists should listen to feminine voices in classic Hollywood cinema as voicing valid perspectives articulated by embodied women from within patriarchal society.335 In order to illustrate her point, Lawrence also turns to the myth of “Echo and

Narcissus” and makes note of Echo’s turn of Narcissus’ phrase mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, in which “May I die before I give you power o’er me,” becomes, on Echo’s transformative tongue, “I give you power o’er me.” Lawrence astutely points out that Echo, in repeating Narcissus’ phrases only partially, radically changes their meaning, indicating the slipperiness – and power – of linguistic mimesis. Through a subtle, yet radical, repetition and revision of Narcissus’ words, Echo finds a way to speak her own heart by carving out her own linguistic space within ‘phallogocentric language.’

Echo’s statement, re-amplified by Lawrence, could be called a kind of feminist speech act, a concept explored in depth by linguistic theorist Shoshona Felman in her feminist critical inquiry into the speaking body and voiced writing, The Scandal of the Speaking

Body.336 Drawing on J. L. Austin’s concept of performative speech acts – “expressions whose

334 Sjorgen, Vortex, 6. 335 Lawrence, Echo, 1-7. 336 The ‘scandal’ of which Felman writes is the scandal of “the incongruous but indissoluble relation between language and the body; the scandal of the seduction of the human body insofar as it speaks – the scandal of the promise of love insofar as this promise is par excellence the promise that cannot be kept…” (The Scandal of the Speaking Body, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983: 5). Felman writes of this scandal at the intersection of several

206 function is not to inform or to describe, but to carry out a ‘performance,’ to accomplish an act through the very process of their enunciation”337 – Felman examines the speaking body as a corporeal, contingent site of desire, and ‘voiced writing’ as a vessel to transmit such desire across bodies. 338 She investigates the radical potential of desire expressed through performative speech acts to defy classification as ‘true or false;’ instead of appearing as true or false, a performative act has “the capacity to miss its goal and to fail to be achieved, to remain unconsummated.”339 As Felman points out, this capacity for ‘failure’ or ‘misfiring’ in performative speech undermines the philosophical investment in the absolute distinction between the ‘truth’ or ‘falsity’ of language. Instead, as Austin describes, the true/false binary is replaced with a criterion he calls ‘felicitous’ or ‘infelicitous,’ or successful or unsuccessful.340

Echo’s use of Narcissus’ language likewise articulates a slippery relationship to ‘truth’ and ‘falsity’ as she performatively enacts her bodily desires. In stating that she gives

Narcissus power over her, Echo reverses the meaning of his previous statement, turning his

disciplines, the point, as she notes, “where psychoanalysis, linguistics, philosophy, literature, etc, meet and fail to meet…” The scandal that she writes of “is not so much what is said or could be said but what is happening, taking effect, producing acts, what is being done or could be done between speaking bodies, between languages, between knowledge and pleasure” (5). 337 J. L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 6-7. 338 Felman, Scandal, 65. 339 Felman, Scandal, 55-56. Taking Jacques Lacan’s quote, “the body is speech arising as such” as her starting point, Felman also draws on the linguistic theories of JL Austin; though Austin approached performative speech acts from a linguistic point of view, and Lacan from a psychoanalytic one, their theories overlap in the notion of an act/desire/speech that runs the risk of ‘misfiring.’ As she notes, Austin does not use ‘misfire’ in an psychoanalytic sense, and yet his conceptualization of the failure of a performative to act successfully is similar to the Freudian concept of slip and parapraxis, as well as to Lacan’s concept of the differential referential (Scandal, 56). 340 Austin, How To, 9-11. In other words, Austin argues that performatives are parts of language that cannot be logically true or false, but they can be successful or unsuccessful according to the action that they do or do not engender.

207 rejection of her influence into a performative declaration of her utter dedication to him.

Echo’s response cannot be judged according to categories of true and false; her offer to give

Narcissus power o’er her can either succeed or fail, and fail it does, on an epic scale. And yet, even though her statement is not ‘taken up,’ as Austin would put it, by Narcissus, her declaration powerfully evidences her corporeal desire. Taking Felman’s analysis of the speaking body to an extreme, Echo becomes her speaking self through her corporeal desire.

After the object of her affection perishes, her speaking self, fueled by unconsummated desire, remains for all eternity.

While it ends tragically for its heroine, the story of Echo sets up a valuable model for feminist surveillance art works that engage aural epistemologies as a means of constructing critical representational spaces for female desire, memory, and experience under the male- coded disciplinary gaze of surveillance. Just as the mythic Echo cleverly rephrases Narcissus’ callous words to express her love, Jill Magid, Sophie Calle, and Janet Cardiff each radically revise the discourse of discipline that traditionally structures surveillance practices. In place of disciplinary language, Magid, Calle, and Cardiff voice explicitly female-gendered desires, memories, and bodily experiences that elude the logic of visual evidence and discipline. In doing so, they challenge the limits of intimacy, communication, and knowledge that are possible through the disciplinary gaze of surveillance, and radically undermine the stability of the dichotomy between truth and falsity, fiction and evidence.

Calle, Cardiff, and Magid build feminist surveillance art works that critically stage the female body as simultaneously fetishized and defiantly unrepresentable by dominant systems of visual surveillance. They do so a) by troubling the dominance of the ‘gaze’ itself within the representational space of surveillance society (and art) by narrating personal, interior experiences and impressions of surveillance in everyday life that cannot be ‘read’ through a

208 visual CCTV record; and b) by challenging the truth-value and evidentiary status of visual surveillance by destabalizing visual ‘proof’ (and visual representations of their femininity) with personal narratives that blend documentary notations with fictitious, fantastical, and contradictory stories. Moreover, through practices of embodied writing Calle, Magid, and

Cardiff embrace and reify their gendered representations, even as they escape the confines of gender defined by surveillance (and visual culture at large) by writing from their embodied, gendered perspectives. As such, their work offers a valuable critique of the limitations of second wave feminist theorists who have privileged the “disembodied female voice-over” above a female voice that is simultaneously linked to her visually represented body. Calle,

Cardiff, and Magid instead represent themselves as at once powerfully vocal and explicitly embodied. Their work implicitly critiques dominant habits of representation and reception in visual culture, and yet they do so without disavowing classic Hollywood gender- representations produced through the patriarchal gaze of surveillance and cinema.

Through personal journals, love letters, and online blog entries, Magid, Calle, and

Cardiff produce embodied representations that, by virtue of their affective investments, escape the visual record. And yet, unlike Echo, the linguistic sleight of hand performed by

Calle, Cardiff, and Magid does not efface their bodily presence in front of the male, surveillant object(s) of their affection. Through practices of ‘embodied writing’ Calle,

Cardiff, and Magid make their gendered bodies clear, present, and palpably feminine. Their written personal narrations constitute what linguistic theorist Roland Barthes termed ‘voiced writing’ or ‘writing out loud,’ a concept that film theorist Kaja Silverman and linguistic theorist Shoshona Felman have both criticized and appropriated in their respective feminist

209 critiques of the female voice in cinema and literature.341 In practicing Barthes’ idea of

‘voiced writing’ – forms of writing that re-assert the author’s body into the text, such as the personal diary or journal342 – Magid, Calle, and Cardiff effectively re-appropriate the concept as a feminist strategy, binding their written personal narratives to their female gendered bodies.343

In Evidence Locker: One Cycle of Memory in the City of L, Jill Magid uses embodied writing in such a way as to make her female gendered body palpably clear. At the same time, she uses her personal narratives to exceed the visual representations of her gender that are stored by the surveillance cameras that monitor her. In the project, Magid turns Liverpool’s state of the art surveillance system, with its hundreds of CCTV cameras and team of police detectives who ‘man’ them, into the delightfully watchful eyes of a singularly attentive lover.

Writing daily love letters to an entity she affectionately calls “Dear Observer,” Magid spends

31 days – the length of time that CCTV surveillance footage remains on record in the

Liverpool police department before being erased – transforming the disciplinary relationship

341 While much of Silverman’s analysis focuses on the material, auditory voice, she also addresses what Barthes has termed ‘vocal writing’ or ‘writing out loud.’ See Silverman “The Female Authorial Voice” in Acoustic Mirror, 190-2, for her critique of Roland Barthes’ “Death of the Author” (in Aspen, 5-6, 1967), in which she argues that Barthes was trying, from his position as a male author, to androgynize the authorial body. Silverman seizes on his analysis of the authorial body as it is re-figured within the text of ‘voiced writing’ in order to undermine Barthes post-structuralist proclaimation of the “death of the author,” a claim, she argues, that ironically came at precisely the moment that feminist writers were claiming space for distinctively feminist voices – within forms such as Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous’ ecriture feminine and a ‘feminist canon’ – in order to stake out linguistic power for female authors. 342 See Roland Barthes, Image/Text/Music, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977). Barthes compares these forms of ‘voiced writing’ to ‘acoustic close ups’ in cinema, in which the audience can hear the breath, and see the movement of the speaker’s lips and tongue. 343 For Silverman, ‘voiced writing’ effectively re-asserts the body of the author into the body of the text, even as the text circulates without the author’s bodily presence. As Silverman writes, “no discourse of the body can foreclose for very long upon sexual difference,” despite Barthes’ attempts to do so (Acoustic Mirror, 190).

210 of surveillance into one of intimate communication and deep self expression. Magid describes to her Dear Observer what drives her comings and goings in the city of L, provides detailed accounts of people she meets, records the loneliness and longing she feels, and shares her sensual impressions of being watched.

…I stopped, near your feet, you are almost directly above me, in the middle of Lord Street. I closed my eyes and everything changed. The people around me kept going, I could hear them, but they were muffled. I felt only you. You held me with your eyes and I was safe. After a minute- was it more?- I opened them again.344

The resulting ‘diary’ of her time in Liverpool emerges as a co-authored series of documents consisting of daily letters written by Magid – notes on her movements, thoughts, feelings, interactions, and impressions of her appearance in her surroundings – and surveillance video footage of Magid captured by the Liverpool CCTV system, time-stamped and stored as

‘traces’ in “Police Log #2887.” The CCTV images of Magid were later made available to her

(by previous agreement), and she has now posted them online for “third party witnesses,” to view. 345

Insisting that the visual record produced by the CCTV footage was not enough to fully represent her ‘cycle of memory’ in Liverpool, Magid ‘fills in the gaps’ of her Observer’s visual record, describing the places he cannot follow her and the parts of her he cannot see

344 Jill Magid, “Evidence Locker,” last accessed August 25, 2010. http://www.evidencelocker.net/story.php, Day 23. 345 Once her 31 days under visual and written surveillance were complete, Magid set up a website for “third party witnesses” from around the world to view her Evidence Locker. In keeping with the intimate tone of her “Dear Observer” letters, Magid instructs her online visitors: “all material is confidential, intending to be viewed by you alone. Others wishing accesses must apply for it, as you are doing here.” Once a visitor has registered as a ‘witness,’ a notable linguistic right-of-passage from passer-by to invested viewer, he or she begins to receive the entries in Magid’s Locker in 31 installments; these entries, which include links to the visual ‘traces’ of Magid captured via CCTV, are sent directly to a personal email address at the frequency of either once an hour for 31 hours or once a day for 31 days. When I became a witness, early in December of 2009, I chose to receive her entries at the hourly rate, impatient in my role as researcher to take my vicarious journey through Magid’s time in Liverpool. See http://www.evidencelocker.net/story.php

211 in her “Dear Observer” letters.346 Her letters share details with her Observer that explicitly mark the interior of her body as female. Even though “silent” in letters, Magid’s writing is given body, ‘voiced’ via tell-tale markers of embodiment: “I got my period in the men’s bathroom of your building.”347 At another point, Magid expresses mixed feelings about appearing in a blond wig and mini skirt, symbols of the classic male fetish: “…there is something about blond hair that makes me feel like a whore. Maybe its because my eyebrows are dark, or the boots. Or the combination.”348 In verbalizing her experiences, Magid speaks with a feminist authorial voice imagined by Silverman and Felman,349 and yet she does so without disavowing the images of her female-gendered body produced quite literally by and for the patriarchal eye of disciplinary surveillance. Instead, Magid performs her feminist critique of the impersonal and sensually-limited aspects of mainstream civic surveillance in a strikingly inclusive and generative manner, verbalizing personal information in excess of the data gained from visual surveillance in order to help her Observer, and her wider audience of

346 In the early entries, Magid tells of the interior spaces both literal and figurative into which her ‘Dear Observer’ cannot follow, implicitly pointing out the failures of even the most comprehensive visual surveillance system: Thursday, January 29, 2004 Day 1 …I was wearing black jeans with gray cuffs, booties, and my blue hooded coat. Underneath- the part you could not see- I wore a long-sleeve t-shirt and a checkered cardigan. Its looks like a cheerleader’s from the 50’s…. At 7:25 Raj and I left the house. I was wearing the red coat I told you about and a blue vest underneath. We stood on the doorstep, figuring the keys. I have key anxiety and can never open foreign doors… I was tired, I still am tired, and wasn’t concerned with you. This cold is blocking my body, my taste, my vision. I can’t feel what I feel like. You would not have known this by watching me. Or hearing me- which you can’t anyway. 347 Magid, “Evidence Locker,” Day 12. 348 Magid, “Evidence Locker,” Day 10. 349 As Silverman puts it, “the crucial project with respect to the female voice is to find a place from which it can speak and be heard, not to strip it of its discursive rights” (Acoustic Mirror, 192). Silverman recommends a move away from a ‘monumental’ author, Bathes’ ‘auteur,’ towards an author that can be glimpsed through the ‘scenery’ and cinematic-semiotic body of the film.

212 ‘third party witnesses,’ to trace the contours of her internal and external life as a woman and visitor in Liverpool.

Like Magid, French artist Sophie Calle invests in performing her gender as a tactic of becoming visible to the surveilling gaze, a gaze that is always explicitly male. At the same time, her clearly visible gender, which has been theorized within much feminist discourse as that which contains and constrains women’s identities, is the very vehicle by which she escapes the trap of visual representation. Following her abiding fascination with watching and being watched by strangers, Calle created The Detective (also sometimes called The Shadow)

“in order to gain photographic proof of [her] existence.”350 Using her mother as an intermediary, Calle hired a private detective to follow her for a full day, taking surreptitious pictures of Calle, and recording notes about her movements and behavior.351 Throughout the period of her surveillance Calle records her own thoughts, memories, and emotions, producing a detailed, deeply personal account of the places and events she shares with the detective that shadows her. She writes, “I want to show ‘him’ the streets, the places I love. I want ‘him’ to be with me as I go through the Luxembourg [gardens], where I played as a child and where I received my first kiss in the spring of 1968.”352 In contrast, the detective’s notes, which are displayed next to Calle’s voiced writing in the installation and book version of The Detective, are brief and clinical, reducing Calle’s lengthy and deeply personal accounts to objective, mundane events. “At 12:08 the subject leaves the salon and crosses the Jardin du Luxembourg and appears to wait outside Odeon metro station.”353 In The Detective, as in

350 Sophie Calle, with Paul Auster, Double Game (London: Violette Limited, 1999), 122-23. 351 Calle also asked a friend to shadow her, taking pictures of anyone who looked like he was following her. The installation of The Detective also includes photographs of the detective photographing Calle. See Calle, Double Game, 122-129. 352 Calle, Double Game, 126. 353 Calle, Double Game, 131.

213 much of her other work, Calle points out the insufficiency of the gaze of surveillance, while also revealing her tender affection for its inability to truly ‘see’ the subject of its gaze.

Similarly, Janet Cardiff’s Eyes of Laura, with its clear reference to the 1978 cinematic thriller The Eyes of Laura Mars, brings to amplification the often invisible (and dehumanized) job of the surveillance guards by mimicking one of the most visually iconic roles in Western cinema – that of the female victim in the classic thriller genre. The project, which began in

2004, is an ongoing online installation that takes its form as the personal website of ‘Laura,’ a surveillance guard in Vancouver, British Columbia.354 The web-based project commissioned by the Vancouver Art Gallery features a split screen; on one side, Laura’s aural and textual commentary overlaps video feed of the scenes she surveys from her CCTV monitors, while on the other, a live camera aimed at the area outside the gallery is available for logged-in visitors to control. Cardiff’s slightly husky, yet distinctly feminine voice greets visitors as soon as the website loads, speaking slowly and quietly over the ambient noise of the urban area that Laura guards. From her first spoken diary-blog entry, dated June 3, 2004, Laura’s on-the-job boredom is laced with musings about the nature of her ‘control’ over the subjects of her surveillant gaze. She says, “Sometimes I wonder whether more happens because I’m watching or whether events line themselves up for my benefit.” 355 Laura’s query establishes a subtle sense of doubt with regard to the power of her surveillant gaze and the stability or

‘reality’ of any event she witnesses and describes. These doubts only grow, as visitors track her increasingly fragmented accounts of surveillance amidst a thickening, film noir-inspired plot that soon puts Laura’s own body under scrutiny. As I analyze at greater length below,

Eyes of Laura constitutes a unique point of view within representations of surveillance, as

354 Janet Cardiff, “Eyes of Laura,” last accessed August 26, 2010, http://www.eyesoflaura.org/. 355 Cardiff, “Eyes of Laura.”

214 Laura forms personal ties with her subjects of surveillance that lead her further and further astray from her ‘job’ as a surveillance guard.

Using several strategies articulated by the feminist linguistic and film theorists above,

Calle, Magid, and Cardiff add their voices (written and spoken) to the visual register of surveillance in order to give body to an interior that cannot be seen. On a simple level, as already discussed, their investment in interior experiences functions as a critique of the large volume of knowledge that surveillance, as a visual medium, misses. Their works resonates with what visual theorist Kirsty Robertson has astutely inquired of surveillance art: “what would happen if attention was turned away from the ‘eye’ of the camera, and instead concentrated on the suspended and ambiguous space in-between the watcher and watched?

How does surveillance perform itself in the body?”356 On a more profound level, their voice-based work reveals a feminist body constructed in excess of visual means. This feminist body does not avoid fetishism or even visuality; nor does it cease to be an explicitly gendered body. Instead, the female gendered bodies under/of surveillance created by Calle,

Cardiff, and Magid are at once given to be seen and in excess of visuality. They are seductive and knowledgeable, material and imagined, lasting and ephemeral, ultimately undoing the binary that seems, in surveillance logic, to separate seer from seen.

Echo and Shadow: Voice, Image, and Femininity in Calle’s The Detective

Sjorgen’s criticism of second wave feminist film theory and Lawrence’s re-reading of the female voice within classic Hollywood film are crucial to understanding the interventions being made by Sophie Calle’s work. In addition to The Detective, described above, The Hotel

(1983), Suite Vienetiene (1980), Appointment with Sigmund Freud (1999), Exquisite Pain (2004), and Take Care of Yourself (2007) chart Calle’s ongoing explorations of contentious

356 Kirsty Roberston, “‘Try to Walk With the Sound of My Footsteps:’ The Surveillant Body in Contemporary Art.” The Communication Review 11.1 (2008): 30.

215 constructions of gender, authorship, evidence, and embodiment. Her explorations resonate with the work of feminist theorists such as Cixous, Irigaray, Silverman, and Doane, and yet

Calle refuses to align entirely with the feminist theoretical perspectives they express. Calle represents herself simultaneously as author and subject, detective and suspect, visible and invisible, overlaying classically feminine poses with her idiosyncratic authorial voice. She evocatively blends private texts and public images, never allowing the two modes of representation to entirely line up or fully disengage from one another. In doing so, she turns her critical eye and provocative touch on systems of truth making in art or life, thereby challenging discourses of power, knowledge, and embodiment that have come to be entrenched in feminist theory and surveillance studies alike.

Throughout her career Calle has presented a world-view that is distinctively feminine, and yet not explicitly feminist.357 Sexual desire, femininity, voyeurism, and exhibitionism have been central themes in her work, and yet, her engagements with these themes tend to embrace classic, hetero-normative symbols, stories, and images. Her work explicitly engages the ‘male gaze’ and ‘patriarchal ideology’ of surveillance, psychoanalysis, and Hollywood film, and yet she does so in a way that is qualitatively different from performance, photography, and film work produced and discussed by feminist artists and theorists from the 70’s and 80’s.358 In The Detective, despite her position as mastermind of the

357 As a result, Calle’s identity as a feminist visual artist has been difficult to categorize. Even while she is often grouped with overtly feminist artists Calle has denied that she is, in fact, a ‘feminist’ in multiple interviews. See Leslie Camhi, “PS 1 Hosts ‘Wack! – Real Women Have Oeuvres.’ A retrospective look at the roots of feminist art,” Village Voice, February 26, 2008, accessed July 10, 2010, http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-02-26/art/p-s-1-hosts-wack- mdash-real-women-have-oeuvres/. 358 Feminist artists of the 1970’s and 80’s, such as Carolee Schneemann, Linda Montano, and Karen Finley staged their own bodies as art objects in order to reveal the implicit sexual structures involved in visual culture and the observing (male) gaze. See Fuchs, Death of Character, and Schneider, Explicit Body.

216 project, Calle writes, “I keep my eyes lowered. I am afraid to see ‘him’.”359 In her works,

Calle represents herself in familiar, iconic roles, appearing as lover, spy, undercover chambermaid, jilted partner, and lonely woman, performing distinctly feminine identities both through and in excess of classic patriarchal representations of femininity critiqued by second wave feminist theorists such as Silverman, de Lauretis, Mulvey, and Doane. Rather than speak from a disembodied, extra-diegetic perspective, Calle obsessively studies herself under the gaze of classic patriarchal figures such as Sigmund Freud, a male private detective, and her various male lovers.

At the same time, unlike Echo, Calle refuses to be confined to the glossy, reflective surfaces of femininity offered by Narcissus’ classic ‘male gaze.’ In her written accounts, which mimic the detectives methods of recording her behavior, Calle weaves together confession, emotional memory, and personal fantasies that powerfully augment and even eclipse the visual record and factual notes produced by the male private eye. Calle’s works, which are characterized by the juxtaposition of documentary photographs and personal narratives shot through with desire, destabilize distinctions between truth and falsity. Her monochrome photographs appear to be merely documentary at first glance; however, on closer inspection, they lose their benign sheen in relation to her stories, which are laced with fantasies and desires that seem unlikely to have happened and yet cannot be proven ‘true’ or

‘false.’ In Appointment with Sigmund Freud, Calle incorporated her own personal objects into the Freud Museum's permanent collection, pairing the objects with stories about the psychological roles they played in her life. She includes, among other things, a red shoe which she was caught stealing as a child, a love letter that she ordered from a professional letter-writer (because she had never received a real one), and a stuffed cat, which, when

359 Calle, Double Game, 126.

217 alive, had been strangled by a jealous lover when she preferred to share her bed with it rather than with him.360

In The Hotel, Calle took on the guise of a chambermaid in order to photograph and record the traces that hotel guests left behind in their rooms. As part of her ‘research,’ she wrote with tireless curiosity and imagination about the details what the strangers could have been thinking or feeling or preparing to do.361 In each of these pieces, Calle embarks on voyages of discovery, collects clues and information, and then presents them in what seems to be a neutral, factual manner. However, the longer one spends with Calle’s work, the more personal, subjective, and labyrinthine her artifacts become. Calle’s personal notes, presented as ‘objects’ collected as part of her socio-artistic experiments, are filled with her own fantasies, guesswork, predictions, and desires, as well as those she ascribes to other people.

Similarly, the photographs she presents do not merely document the text's history as visual evidence, but often focus just as much on carefully selected objects that trigger a personal memory or desire of Calle’s. As such, Calle situates her audiences as detective-voyeurs, who, like herself, sift through a range of artifacts that cannot be clearly divided according to truth and falsity, self and other, memory and fantasy.

In other projects, such as The Detective, opinions, ‘facts,’ and perceptions blatantly jar against each other. In The Detective, the private detective's photographs of Calle and his notes about her activities are presented alongside her own written descriptions of the day.

Discrepancies between the two perspectives become immediately apparent, not only between the differing viewpoints of the same events, but also with regard to seemingly concrete facts such as time and place. Calle makes no effort to correct these discrepancies;

360 Photographs of these objects appear in the subsequent book. Sophie Calle, Appointment with Sigmund Freud (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004). 361 Calle, Double Game, 140-185.

218 instead, she weaves them into the aesthetic fabric of her work, using these inconsistencies and multiple perspectives to articulate a unique worldview, and wage a subtle critique of surveillance as a reliable medium of knowledge-production. Even while Calle states her motive in The Detective “to gain photographic evidence of her existence,” her own diary-like records of the day run fantastical circles around the ‘evidence’ that the detective provides – blurry, distant figures and short notations in the detective’s dossier. Her entries do not function as obedient counterparts to photographic ‘proofs’ of surveillance, but instead masquerade as hysteric confessions that refuse to be aligned with the causal logic of classic, mainstream surveillance. For Calle, there are no criminal mysteries waiting to be solved according to established methods, no innocent clients who can be saved by identifying a perpetrator. Instead, Calle pursues the trails of longing and desire, possibility and memory, staging parallel stories that simultaneously confirm and contradict one another.

Calle’s texts also reveal another contradictory agenda at the heart of surveillance.

Calle wants the detective to get to know deep and personal things that matter to her through his routine observations and snapshots, and yet her intentions of intimacy continuously escape the purview of his job as a surveillance professional. For instance, at 12:30 pm, Calle writes: “We leave La Coupole. Nathalie walks with me to a hairdresser on rue Delambre. It is for ‘him’ I am getting my hair done. To please him.” And, at 7.00 pm: “I arrive at Galerie

Chantal Crousel, 80 rue Quincampoix, for the Gilbert and George opening. There I meet my father and take him outside with me. I want ‘him’ to see my father …”362 And, before falling asleep at the end of the day spent as a subject of surveillance, she writes: “Before closing my eyes, I think of ‘him.’ I wonder if he liked me, if he will think of me tomorrow.”363 Calle seems to pit the stakes of her own surveillant investigations, and her desire to be seen and

362 Calle, Double Game, 126. 363 Calle, Double Game, 126.

219 remembered, against the aims and aesthetics of the surveillance ‘professional.’ The detective’s notes, factual and precise as they are, cannot come close to understanding her intentions to show him important people and places in her life. He describes her loving farewell with her father: “At 1:02 the subject and the man part company,”364 and closes his time with her long before she stops writing of him: “At 8:00 the subject returns home. The surveillance ends.”365 It is not only the detective’s failure, however, as even her own pitiless self-exposures cannot fully elucidate her experience and inner-self to viewers of her exhibits.

Overall, her work reveals the failure of any viewing apparatus or representational medium to provide “evidence,” accurate or otherwise, of the mysterious interior of another person.

Calle’s work delicately but persistently points out the impotency of surveillance systems. Even while such systems produce “evidence,” the evidence fails to describe the intricacies and weight of relationships, memories, or what Calle might think of as affective truth. And yet, this is what seems to fascinate Calle the most about watching and being watched, and what brings her back again and again to explore the same themes in her work.

Calle obsessively bears witness to the slippery status of truth in processes of surveillance, examining the potential for such failures of sight from the perspectives of both the watcher and the watched. Her works provide a unique and valuable provocation to surveillance precisely because she understands and experiences visual surveillance as an artistic process that, in trying to survey a subject, fails to see. In order to emphasize this failure of sight, or

‘oversight,’366 Calle critically examines surveillance through sensory epistemologies beyond

364 Calle, Double Game, 131. 365 Calle, Double Game, 137. 366 Calle represents surveillance as a visual process riddled with failure, one that might be more accurately described by the word/concept of ‘overlook.’ ‘Overlook,’ taken from the German Übersehen, contains the double meaning of ‘survey’ and ‘fail to see,’ indicating that processes of surveillance may fail to do anything more than scan a surface. Kirsty Robertson also notes the double meaning of ‘overlook’ in Calle’s work (Try to Walk, 29-30).

220 the visual, attempting to augment (and even overshadow) visual records produced by surveillance with her own records of affective memory and sensual experiences of surveillance. By pointing out the inability of the classically male-gendered gaze of surveillance to see her, The Detective implicitly critiques the gaze of visual culture to fully see any one person, male or female.

When Calle displays her works (in museums or art books), she leaves her audience uncertain of where the ‘truth’ or ‘authority’ lies (in both senses of the word). Calle achieves this slippery uncertainty by placing her own declarations of truth – such as, “I’ve become part of the life of X, private detective”367 – next to other modes of truth-telling, such as the detective’s time stamps or brief, impersonal descriptions of her actions. In her own description of The Detective, Calle states that she is depending upon the male gaze of surveillance to provide “photographic proof of her existence.”368 And yet, as Petra

Gördüren writes in Ctrl [space], Calle’s true target is “the failure of the ‘myth of information.’… her investigative pursuits, be they real or invented…bear witness to the failure of art to penetrate a stranger's life, to understand and grasp it through observation.”369

From a feminist perspective, this “failure of penetration” at the heart of Calle’s work would seem to problematize the classic binary of male as given-to-see and female as given- to-be-seen. And yet, Calle does not aim to erase or do away with that gendered division.

Instead, her work fleshes out the multiplicity of perspectives and depth of experience possible within classic representations of surveillance and gender in dominant visual culture.

As a result, her work dances provocatively at the edges of feminist critique, menacing the

367 Calle, Double Game, 126. 368 Calle, Double Game, 122-24. 369 Petra Gördüren, “On the Trail of the Ego: Sophie Calle’s Pursuits,” in ctrl [space]: Rhetorics Of Surveillance From Bentham To Big Brother, ed. Thomas Levin, Ursula Frohne, Peter Weibel (Leipzig: ZKM, MedienKunstNetz, 2002), last updated October 2, 2001, http://hosting.zkm.de/ctrlspace/d/texts/10

221 primacy of visual representation even as she performs herself as both hyper visible and a less than reliable source of information. In her “embodied writing,” Calle always speaks as herself, and yet she never limits herself to a single identity, viewpoint, or truth. Instead, Calle tries on a range of feminine identities in order to more broadly ‘evidence’ the range of perspectives and experiences available to her.

Janet Cardiff: Walking with the Eyes of Laura

Similarly balanced between performative speech acts and dizzying fictions, Janet

Cardiff emerges as a rare example of a conceptual feminist artist who is more frequently heard than seen. Resembling a personal blog, Eyes of Laura is comprised of a fictional author and a factual webcam, exhibited online at the web address www.eyesoflaura.org. On Day 1 of the project the blogger introduces herself to her online audience in a voice over: “My name is Laura. I am tall with reddish-blonde hair. I’ve lived in Vancouver for ten years working as a security guard. I’m waiting for something to happen in my life.”370 In clipped phrases such as these, Janet Cardiff, the artist behind the blog, voices the boredom, desire, restlessness, and curiosity that shape the fictional Laura’s days as a security guard. The project, which is periodically restarted to appear ‘live’ for online viewers, is comprised of 58 daily journal entries, along with audio and video clips, which Laura writes over a 253-day period as she observes the happenings of Robson Square in downtown Vancouver via a surveillance camera situated on the Vancouver Art Gallery’s rooftop.371 In order to make the

370 Cardiff, “Eyes of Laura.” 371 Interestingly, Eyes of Laura stays current by resetting after each cycle of diary entries are complete; currently, June 3, 2010 is “Day 3” of Laura’s blog, and the rest of her story is yet to unfold for new visitors. According to the web designers, “the website was launched on September 1, 2004; it is linked to search engines through key words like “voyeur,” “watching,” “webcam,” etc. The blog postings run for a nine-month period; the website then sits dormant for three months until it is restarted with the first posting. Eyes of Laura was created to be exhibited and viewed online in private domestic and work spaces, rather than in art institutions. On this basis, it has been part of two online exhibitions: Subversive Souvenirs

222 project interactive, as well as to give the project the illusion of reality, a live webcam transmits real-time images of Robson Square and its vicinity to the website, showing panoramic views of the area at 3 minute intervals. Users may log on at any time to control the view of the webcam, watching the live feed on the right half of the screen.372

Unlike Calle and Magid, Laura and Cardiff remain unseen, acting as the invisible yet palpably present protagonist of the serial blog. Laura’s physical self-description – the first thing she shares after her name – is the only ‘peek’ her visitors get of her. Other than learning that she bears a cursory resemblance to Nancy Drew girl detective, visitors never get to ‘see’ Laura; her facial expressions, habitual gestures, and the color of her all-seeing eyes remain a mystery. Despite her invisibility, Laura becomes intimately accessible to and present with her visitors through the texture of her spoken voice and the content of her blog entries that appear to be typed ‘live’ across the screen. Laura shares her other senses as well: when she is not examining the odd things that people do through her viewfinders, she makes audio recordings of herself walking in stiletto heels, drinking water, reciting the alphabet; she posts photographs of her favorite pair of glasses (though not while she is wearing them); and she passes the time by letting visitors take control of the security cameras where she works. By leaving her visitors ‘in the dark’ as to her physical appearance, Laura’s voice, soundscape, interior thoughts, feelings, and desires are brought into sharper relief.

In Eyes of Laura, as with her famous audio walks that I discuss later, Cardiff avoids the visual fetishism that shape the works of Magid and Calle (and those of Hatoum and

– produced by Toronto-based Gallery TPW with the Virtual Museum of Canada in 2006 – and revolutionsonline – as part of the Sydney Biennale in 2008.” See “Janet Cardiff: Eyes of Laura, 2004” by DOCAM Research Alliance, accessed July 10, 2010, http://www.docam.ca/en/component/content/article/351-janet-cardiff-eyes-of-laura- 2004.html 372 See technological specifications involved at DOCAM, “Janet Cardiff: Eyes of Laura, 2004.”

223 Scher, discussed in Chapter Four). Cardiff chooses instead to foreground Laura’s own voyeuristic drive and the pleasure she eventually finds in watching others. Whereas the 1978 film Eyes of Laura Mars from which Cardiff takes her title repeatedly shows close-ups of Faye

Dunaway’s eyes, stretched wide in blind terror as her sixth-sense/third-eye shows her yet another horrific murder being committed, Cardiff’s project delivers its promise in a different way: instead of ever showing Laura’s eyes, she places her audience behind Laura’s own eyes.

Cardiff whispers Laura’s inner thoughts to online visitors who stand in for the ‘self’ to whom Laura, in her solitude, speaks; with her voice in their ears, visitors peer out, as she does, at the monotonous scene of urban banality surrounding the Vancouver Art Museum.

As such, visitors to Cardiff/Laura’s site literally stand in for Laura’s sense of sight (and her invisible, indeed fictional, eyes), seeing what she sees from her surveillance post and sharing a sense of ‘what it feels like’ to sit where she sits. Moreover, it is Laura’s voice-offs, narrated by a sublimely dispassionate Cardiff, and her blogged diary entries that paradoxically grant her audience far greater access into her inner life and thoughts than any amount of gazing into her eyes would yield.

In Cardiff’s construction, the classic site/sight of the male disciplinary gaze that

Laura occupies as a surveillance guard is thus paired with the equally iconic disembodied feminine ‘voice-off’ of classic cinema and feminist film theory. Following Silverman and

Doane, Cardiff’s choice to screen Laura from view could be seen as a positive model of female empowerment within surveillance society, and as a protective tactic undertaken to shield Laura from the visual commodification, idealization, and fetishization that characterize feminine experiences within the visual field of film and surveillance. However, even while Cardiff de-emphasizes Laura’s physical appearance, her gender as a surveillance guard eventually becomes significant, as Laura – a woman playing too fast and loose, it

224 would seem, with the power of the male gaze of surveillance – soon finds herself in danger.

Fulfilling the dramatic promise of its title, Laura’s narrative soon leads visitors down a path slippery with ambiguous ethics, crimes of passion, and fetishizing fantasies of spies and secrets.

In the early days of her blog, Laura obsessively watches a cute, unrepentant thief she calls “Rabbit.” She writes, “I just saw Rabbit steal a woman’s walkman! He’s always stealing,

I think, but I don’t usually catch him at it. I don’t know what to do. I should report him but

I’ve gotten to like him too much. I’ll think about it.”373 Laura spends time pondering the physical and metaphysical boundaries of contemporary life under surveillance, noting in her characteristically unperturbed voice: “There are more surveillance cameras around here than even I would ever have imagined… I wonder how far those cameras could film a person walking through the city before there would be a blank spot that no camera reached. It’s almost as if we all live privately only in the gaps.” As the days turn into weeks, Laura’s breathy, conspiratorial voice reveals her growing fascination with the seductive pleasures of surveillance, narrating her slow tumble through the looking glass of her own surveillant imaginary: “…it’s still so fascinating to watch people. Even when I’m dreaming now, it’s like

I’m watching everything from behind a camera. Zooming in and out.”

Spending more and more time in this permeable boundary between waking and sleep, reality and dreams, Laura begins to take ethical and physical risks on her job, crossing boundaries of anonymity and professional distance and becoming personally involved in the lives of those she watches. When Rabbit drops his wallet on the ground, Laura picks it up in order to stalk him. She finds that she has no desire to turn Rabbit in, and instead uses his library card – found in his wallet – to go in search of the text of “Blow Up,” Julio Cortázar's

373 Cardiff, “Eyes of Laura.”

225 short story about a crime solved by the enlargement of a photograph.374 Laura is aware of the risks she is taking; in fact, she seems proud of them, galvanized by abusing her position as a surveillance guard. Speaking directly to her blog viewers, she murmurs: “…remember this is all illicit and voyeuristic and illegal. Remember, I am putting my job on the line so you can see this stuff.” Laura’s ruminations are eerily echoed in the next plot twist, as the network of surveillant gazes in which she is enmeshed is revealed to be more interconnected and ominous than she had previously imagined. A month into her increasing fascination with watching others, Laura’s entanglements within the world of surveillance become even more intricate and reflexive as she finds herself to be mysteriously placed under surveillance as well.

At this point, Eyes of Laura begins to reverberate with the echoes of the classic

Hollywood thriller Eyes of Laura Mars, directed by Irvin Kirshner. As in the 1978 film, in which a photographer is haunted by her ability to see things that are not actually appearing in front of her eyes, Cardiff’s Laura is disturbed, and possibly put in danger, by her own exceptional power of sight. In the film, Laura Mars, portrayed by Faye Dunaway, is a fashion photographer whose commercial success and cutting edge reputation has come from her graphic representations of stylized violence. Asleep in her luxurious Manhattan apartment,

Mars has a nightmare that her friend Doris is viciously murdered; upon waking, Mars looks at her soon-to-be-published book of photographs, titled “The Eyes of Mars,” in which there appears an image of Doris, identical in pose to the horrific death she met in Mars’ dream.

After Mars learns that Doris has indeed been murdered, she continues to be overcome by visions of her friends meeting horrific deaths (most often they are killed by stabbing in the eye). She tries to stop the murders, but the police refuse to accept her visions as serious

374 Julio Cortázar's short story is the basis for Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 film, Blow Up.

226 evidence. Soon Mars begins to see visions of the killer coming after her. In twist after twist, the plot eventually concludes with Mars shooting through a series of mirrors to kill the only person who believed her story, the handsome young detective played by Tommy Lee Jones who ends up being a schizophrenic killer obsessed with her violent artistic vision.

According to film theorist Linda Williams, this gendered approach to the power of vision is common in classic horror films and thrillers. In “When the Woman Looks,”

Williams argues that when viewing scenes of terror on screen “little boys and men make it a point of honor to look, while little girls and grown women cover their eyes… [T]here are excellent reasons for this refusal of women to look – not least of which that she is often asked to bear witness to her own powerlessness in face of rape, mutilation and murder.”375

As Mary Ann Doane, writing in the same edited volume, puts it, “the woman’s exercise of an active investigating gaze can only be simultaneous with her own victimization.”376 Like

Laura Mars, Cardiff’s Laura is haunted by her ability to see crimes that others cannot.377

Similarly, where Laura Mars is a photographer who becomes the victim of her artistic vision,

Cardiff’s Laura eventually becomes the subject of her own professional sight: surveillance.

Read from the feminist perspective of Williams and Doane, Cardiff’s Laura is caught between the reality of her life as a surveillance guard, in which she is given-to-see, and her

375 Linda Williams, “When the Woman Looks,” in (Re)Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, and Linda Williams (Los Angeles: The American Film Institute, 1984), 83. 376 Mary Ann Doane, “Women’s Films” in (Re)Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, and Linda Williams (Los Angeles: The American Film Institute, 1984), 72. As Doane puts it, the woman who looks is often punished for looking, as “failure and frustration of her vision can be the most important mark of her sexual purity” (“Women’s Films,” 83). 377 Of course, in Cardiff’s construction, Laura is empowered through a fairly unexceptional surveillance system, whereas Laura Mars possesses a paranormal connection to the murderer targeting people she knows (and eventually her).

227 experience as a woman, in which she is not only given-to-be-seen, but also given-to-be- punished for seeing.

Indeed, Cardiff’s story seems set to mirror that of classic thrillers critiqued by feminist theorists such as Williams and Doane.378 A month into her blog entries Laura becomes the victim of mysterious acts of surveillance; she reports, “today when I was almost home there was a photo lying on my sidewalk. It was a picture of me walking along the street…” The phone rings, interrupting her. On the ‘live’ surveillance viewfinder, one of the people she routinely observes turns and looks directly up at the camera. The next day, a sign appears in a window across the street: “Call the police.” A few days later, chalked on the sidewalk are the words: “why are you watching?”379 However, Cardiff does not echo the thrilling climax of Eyes of Laura Mars. Sinister as they are, the mysterious events never culminate in anything happening to Laura, and at the end of the 58 days, Laura is still working as a bored guard. By letting Laura off the hook and back into her bored, but safe job as a surveillance guard, Cardiff breaks the pattern of the classic Hollywood thriller in which the woman is punished for looking, or for consorting with the ‘abject’ position of the monster in horror films.380 In effect, Cardiff’s Laura ‘gets away with’ empowering herself with the classic male gaze of surveillance. Viewers, now only able to lazily spin the live

378 See also Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993). 379 Cardiff, “Eyes of Laura.” 380 Linda Williams suggests an interesting reading of the relationship between the monster in classic horror films, and the woman who, as its victim, gets a close look at it: “in classic horror film, the women’s look at the monster offers at least a potentially subversive recognition of the power and potency of a non-phallic sexuality,” a look of recognition that is thus violently punished (“When the Woman Looks,” 84-85). She argues that the monster is the distorted double of the woman, prompting an alternative reading of why the woman must indeed not look: the destruction of the monster’s body is her own re-castration and mutilation, by which the patriarchal order is restored.

228 camera that Laura ‘mans,’ are left to wonder if Laura created the entire story merely to entertain herself.

Read as a feminist intervention into surveillance and visual culture, Cardiff’s project raises provocative questions about the relationship between truth and fiction in ‘real life’ and online surveillance. Beyond the uncertainty surrounding the fictional Laura’s invention of the whole murder mystery plot, Cardiff’s design to make Eyes of Laura appear as a ‘real’ blog

(and Laura as an actual surveillance guard) caused a good deal of controversy in the art world. The web-based project was, at least initially, carefully disassociated with Cardiff’s name, and from its host, the Vancouver Art Gallery. Despite the fact that her name is registered as the site’s domain name, and her voice is palpably familiar to anyone who has gone on one of her ‘walks,’ her anonymity did last for a few months. However, Cardiff’s aural identity could not remain dissociated from the work for long, and it soon came out that

‘Laura’ was not an actual surveillance guard posting rogue blog entries.

The responses to this discovery were surprisingly harsh. As Sarah Boxer of the New

York Times wrote of the project, “despite all the trouble Ms. Cardiff has taken to camouflage herself, in this case the Laura fiction does not hold. The illusion breaks and it breaks completely… What a disappointment to learn that Laura is not a real surveillance guard!”381 Although Cardiff’s identity is apparent in other fictional works she has presented, such as Her Long Black Hair (2004), an audio walk in New York’s Central Park,382 Eyes of

Laura upset cultural expectations regarding the secure borders between truth and fiction, fame and anonymity to a surprising degree. After it was discovered to be piece of fiction

381 Sarah Boxer, “When Seeing is Not Always Believing,” New York Times, July 11, 2005, accessed July 10, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/11/arts/design/11laur.html. See blogger’s response: “Are you there God? It’s me, Janet,” accessed July 10, 2010, http://greg.org/archive/2005/07/14/are_you_there_god_its_me_janet.html. 382 See “Janet Cardiff: Her Long Black Hair,” by Public Art Fund, accessed July 10, 2010, http://www.publicartfund.org/pafweb/projects/04/cardiff_J_04.html

229 created by Cardiff, the piece suffered dismissals from the art world, such as “the Web is a hotbed of hoaxes, false identities and illusions, and this is just one more. Who cares if this fiction happens to be the work of a master sound artist?”383

While Eyes of Laura has received more positive notices in surveillance art and web art circles, the piece has been largely overlooked in catalogues or references to Cardiff’s body of work. However, the piece is not only thematically consonant with Cardiff’s more widely lauded artistic investments, it offers valuable insights into Cardiff’s investments in surveillance, embodiment, and communication within her more well-known works. Cardiff’s famous ‘sound walks’ are not explicitly about techniques and technologies of surveillance, and yet they are deeply concerned with the relationship between narration and sensation, seeing and not seeing. Using binaural recording techniques (like Rosenberg in Contains

Violence, discussed in Chapter Two), Cardiff arranges her voice to surround her listener from all sides, coersively directing her audience’s gaze and movements through a given space.384

Speaking and walking quickly, Cardiff urges her listener to keep up, telling them to witness things they cannot see and filling their perceptual field with sounds that correlate with long absent objects and events. On these audio walks, Cardiff uses sound to foreground and defamiliarize her audience’s senses of embodiment and their relationship to sight; in doing so, she augments and counteracts normative experiences of watching and being watched, of following and being followed.385 Cardiff’s fragmented narratives chart a geographical locale,

383 Boxer, “When Seeing.” Boxer concludes, “All of this just goes to show that there is only one thing better than a really compelling illusion, and that is the plain old truth.” 384 Cardiff has installed audio walks in cities around the world, including New York City, Washington DC, Montreal, Berlin, San Francisco, and London. For a listing see Janet Cardiff “Walks,” accessed July 10, 2010, http://www.cardiffmiller.com/artworks/walks/index.html. 385 In a conversation with Candadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan, Cardiff shares, “I want the pieces to be disconcerting in several ways so that the audience can’t just forget about their bodies for the duration of their involvement like we do in a film.” Atom Egoyan, “Janet

230 as Cardiff grafts her own movements onto those of her audience, and yet her authority as a spatial guide is continually unsettled by temporally chaotic observations. The listener’s ears may be flooded with a honking horn or street musician’s seranade that Cardiff encountered when she recorded the ‘walk,’ while his or her eyes see only an empty sidewalk and a car quietly parked at the curb. As one reviewer of her London Walk notes, “such disjunction between video and audio in some cases and correlation in others… [creates] a bleed-over effect: what is heard influences what is seen and vice versa.”386

As such, Cardiff’s audio walks operate as a unique mode of surveillance art, in which

Cardiff powerfully counteracts normative understandings of embodiment, listening, looking, and being looked at. In these walks, Cardiff emphasizes ways of knowing within the visual matrix of surveillance that have less to do with normalized processes of seeing, and more to do with embodied experience, voiced narrative, and textured sound scapes. Visual art critic

Kirsty Robertson has described Cardiff’s sound walks as “surveillance turned inside out,” as

Cardiff’s voice guides her listeners to observe people, places, and sounds that may or may not be present before them.387 Rather than describing Cardiff’s audio walks as inverse surveillance, as Robertson suggests, I contend that Cardiff’s walks constitute a form of retrospective surveillance, a kind of ‘surveillance drag’ in which time folds back across the body and space of Cardiff’s walker, exerting the gravity of Cardiff’s colorful descriptions and audible movements to pull him or her into a time and body that no longer exists.

Cardiff,” BOMB Magazine 79 (2002), accessed July 10, 2010, http://bombsite.com/issues/79/articles/2463. 386 Monica Biagioli, “Janet Cardiff the Missing Voice (Case Study B): An Audio Walk,” Artfocus (2000): 12-14. 387 Robertson, “Try to Walk,” 36. Robertson goes on: “The voyeuristic moment is thus simultaneously created and consumed….In an uncanny flip, the directions given by Cardiff give the feeling that she might be there herself, watching…. The listener-beholder thus oscillates between being the viewer and the viewed, the subject and the object” (36).

231 Echoing Elizabeth Freeman’s notion of ‘temporal drag,’388 which plays with associations of retrogression, delay, and the pull of the past upon the present (and vice versa) in the term ‘drag,’ Cardiff’s audio walks function as ‘surveillance drag,’ as past spaces and movements exert their gravitational pull on the listener’s bodily experience. Cardiff pits her own surveillant ‘time’ against the surveillant ‘time’ of her audience, forcibly restaging (or re- sounding) her own time, quite literally, within the listener’s imaginary. Near the beginning of a walk, Cardiff will say to her listener, “Try to walk with the sound of my footsteps so that we can stay together,” or “I am standing with you, facing the window. Place your fingers against the glass. It feels cold to me.”389 Cardiff’s voice asks her listener to mimic her now absent body, telling her audience what they would see and feel, if only they had been in the very same time as her. The effect is notoriously disorienting to her walkers’ senses.

Participant responses to undergoing her ‘surveillance drag’ have included phrases such as

“panic attack,” “paranoia,” “surreal,” and even “schizophrenic” to describe their experiences of Cardiff’s walks.390

The disorienting effects of Cardiff’s ‘surveillance drag’ in turn create what could be called a ‘hysteric subject of surveillance,’ a strategy that puts Cardiff’s surveillant audio walks in conversation with a range of feminist theorists from the past three decades. Luce Irigaray,

Elin Diamond, and Juliet Flower MacCannell, each theorize hysteria, once understood as a pathological display of an uncontrolled ‘wandering’ womb, as a powerful form of feminist mimesis in which women tactically exhibit symptoms of the patriarchal reality they are

388 Elizabeth Freeman, “Packing History, Count(er)ing Generations,” New Literary History 31.4 (2000): 727-744. 389 Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Janet Cardiff: A Survey of Works (New York: P.S.1 Contemporary Arts Center, 2002). 390 See Christov-Bakargiev, Janet Cardiff, and Biagioli, “Janet Cardiff.” As Biagioli puts it, “…in the end, you are not quite sure how to orient yourself and become almost entirely dependent on the recording to lead the way. The listener, thus, temporarily hands over control to Cardiff by putting on headphones and is lulled into the rhythm she establishes.”

232 expected to inhabit.391 As Irigaray argues, ‘hysterical mimicry’ can become a critical tactic by which women can exhibit symptoms of patriarchal oppression, rather than the ‘imposed mimicry’ that patriarchal society expects her to exhibit.392 Diamond goes on to describe an explicitly ‘feminist mimesis’ in which female bodies reflexively and intentionally perform the symptoms of ‘femininity,’ thereby revealing, however ironically, the ways in which the symbols of femininity are mimicked into seeming ‘reality.’393 Similarly, in The Hysteric’s Guide to the Future Female Subject, MacCannell posits that psychoanalytic models of the hysteric and the sado-masochistic pervert quite accurately describe the ‘masks’ of femininity described by

Joan Riviere (1929), which are forcibly imposed upon the bodies of girls as they are taught to become proper female subjects.394 MacCannell contends that as the hysteric and pervert are conditions that place women outside the ‘law’ and logic of mainstream patriarchal society, these seeming ‘pathologies’ can lay the groundwork for a critical and empowered femininity.395

By forcibly merging her own palpable yet absent body with that of her listener,

Cardiff breaks the normative ‘laws’ of temporality and perception, and undermines the authority of visual surveillance. Within the aberrant space created by her ‘surveillance drag,’

391 Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis, 13-19. 392 Irigaray, Speculum, 54. 393 Diamond, “Mimesis, Mimicry,” 68-70. See also Schneider, Explicit Body, 116-17. 394 Juliet Flower MacCannell, The Hysteric’s Guide to the Future Female Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2000), 50. 395 Reading sado-masochistic behavior in girls-becoming-women – which could range from how a girl dresses to how she expects to be treated by male admirers – against the grain, MacCannell insists that these learned ‘womanly’ behaviors could, in reality, constitute a mode of empowerment rather than a loss of power. MacCannell analyzes the notion that the ‘pervert’ at once acknowledges and disavows the Law, as well as the ways in which both Freud and Sade constructed femininity in relation to pleasure, power, and loss of power (Hysteric’s Guide, 42). Whereas Freud viewed femininity as a passive position in which the woman relinquished pleasure, Sade (preceding Freud) formulated passivity and subjection as the path to pleasure. MacCannell attempts to recuperate Sade’s visions of pleasure within Freud’s view of femininity as subject to pathologies of sadomasochism and exhibitionism/voyeurism.

233 she asks her audience – her hysteric feminist subjects of surveillance – to exhibit the symptoms of her own lived experience. Obedient and willing, her walkers mimic her motions and emotions from the past, flinching at sounds made by long gone cars and pausing to smile at a passerby who has left the vicinity days ago. Cardiff attempts an impossible merger between a recorded past and living present, self and other, sound and sight. These are feats that are destined to fail, and Cardiff knows it; and yet, in their failures,

Cardiff’s ‘surveillance drag’ and ‘hysterical subjects of surveillance’ evocatively represent the problem that lies at the heart of surveillance. Her work creates embodied representations of the irreconcilable divisions between invisible inner state and external appearance, pitting the lived ‘truth’ of interior emotions and perceptions against the visual ‘evidence’ that can be gathered by mainstream civic surveillance systems.

Locking Eyes, Locking Hearts: Jill Magid and the City of L

Jill Magid, who placed herself under and in love with surveillance for 31 days in

Liverpool, could likewise be called a ‘hysteric feminist subject of surveillance.’ Knowingly mimicking poses and prose from classic Hollywood love stories, Magid’s is a love story to bridge the millenium, replete with CCTV screens, remote control lenses, and in-ear cell phones on one hand, and bathtubs, Brigitte Bardot, and old fashioned love letters on the other. Magid’s love affair with her “Dear Observer,” a romantic figure who is fragmented across Liverpool’s hundreds of surveillance cameras, does not deliver a classic fairytale ending (though she does get to ride off on the back of a motorcycle with a surveillance guard on her last day in Liverpool). Instead, Magid uses one of the most comprehensive civic surveillance systems in the world to articulate a radically different, and cleverly hysterical, subject position for herself, as a woman and as a subject of contemporary surveillance society.

234 Dear Observer,

Make me a diary and keep it safe. Take care it is mine.

Hold this photograph of my face. Keep all our entries in order. Put the letters in your desk file and the images in your evidence locker. You can edit everyone else out.

I will fill in the gaps, the parts of my diary you are missing. Since you can’t follow me inside, I will record the inside for you. I will mark the time carefully so you will never lose me.

Don’t worry about finding me. I will help you. I will tell you what I was wearing, where I was, the time of day... If there was anything distinguishing about my look that day, I will make sure you know.

Hold onto my diary for at least seven years.

I am enclosing a cheque. Use it for whatever expenses you have.

Sincerely, JSM396

This love letter-cum-artistic directive opens Magid’s cycle of daily “Dear Observer” letters, which form the backbone of the project. These letters give voice to the unseen

‘interior’ of her personal life, her thoughts, desires, and obsessions, as well as details of her deepening relationship with her Observer that the CCTV system cannot trace. Viewing

Magid’s project as a ‘third party witness,’ it soon became clear to me that Evidence Locker was more than a playful, romantic romp with some surveillance guards and their cameras in a new town; Magid had created a savvy feminist critique of surveillant epistemology in which she performed a linguistic and visual challenge to the impersonal, mechanized divide between watcher and watched in mainstream civic surveillance, using the CCTV system of

Liverpool to build meaningful, emotional connections with the people, places, and cameras of “the city of L.” As the relationship between Magid and her Observer progresses through time, her letters and the CCTV ‘traces’ reveal increasingly complex interactions between

396 Magid, “Evidence Locker.”

235 watcher and watched. On one day, her Observer uses surveillance cameras to direct and film Magid in a re-enactment of a scene from Jean Luc Godard’s l963 film Le Mepris. On another, Magid asks her Observer to use surveillance cameras and an in-ear cell phone to guide her through the busy streets of Liverpool with her eyes closed.

The written accounts of her deepening intimacy with her Observer do not function as classic ‘confessions;’ in fact, the more letters she writes, the less likely she seems to be

‘cured’ of her own (hysterical) symptoms. Like Calle, Magid masquerades as an obedient feminine subject, displaying outer symptoms of ideal femininity in love with the classic male gaze. However, these ‘symptoms’ do nothing to diminish her sense of self agency or self- representation as the female authorial voice of the project. Instead, Magid embodies a viewpoint similar to that of third wave feminist film theorist Britta Sjorgen, writing on the female voice and body within classic Hollywood films: “The specific contradiction of being female in patriarchy, thus is amplified through [the feminine] voice-off, in its evocation of a heterogeneous consciousness, of a self that is also other. This experience of sustained difference points to a feminine politics of sorts that exists in dynamic tension with patriarchy.” 397 While Sjorgen, like Irigaray and Diamond, runs the risk of mistaking

“explicitly hysterical realism” for “implicitly realistic hysteria”398 within visual or aural representations of femininity, Magid’s engagement with the ‘hysteric feminist subject of surveillance’ makes its critique, and its homage, clear.

As is quickly apparent in Evidence Locker Magid’s love affair with her “Dear

Observer,” is shaped by a ‘hysteric mimicry’ of iconic Godard films, blonde Bardot wigs, and fervent love letters written in the classic style. Magid structures several of her experiments

397 Sjorgen, Vortex, 17. 398 Schneider, Explicit Body, 116. Rebecca Schneider uses these terms to further articulate Elin Diamond’s concept of ‘realism’s hysteria.’

236 according to filmic references, depending most significantly on Godard’s film Le Mepris. She wants her Observer, this time referring to the actual detective with whom she communicates, to use the film as a guide to ‘how to watch’ her: “I still need to show you

Godard’s Le Mépris since you have not seen it. I have selected parts of the film for you. Then you will know how to follow me like the camera follows her.”399 Brigitte Bardot’s blonde wig from the film inspires Magid to buy a wig of her own in order to spice up her relationship with her Observer with a healthy dose of fantasy and intrigue. 400 On Day 13,

Magid, wearing the blonde wig, takes direction from her Observer, using surveillance cameras and a cell phone: “You said, ‘Stay right there but don’t look at me. Get closer to the man with the red jacket.’ You said the pace I was walking was good. It was slower than I usually walk. I liked you telling me how to move; it made me feel more confident, like I was not alone…”401

Nine days later, Magid and her Observer film their re-enactment of a scene from

Godard’s Le Mepris in which Bardot walks down a set of broad stairs on the island of Capri, looking sultry and elegant as the film’s femme fatale. In her “Dear Observer” letter from

Thursday, February 19, 2004, Day 22, Magid writes of the planning and execution:

We planned something beautiful. We looked at the steps of the Cathedral through your window, and pulled the window close….I planned to walk directly up the steps, but you preferred me diagonally, from one corner of the window to the other. We compromised: my way the way up and your way the way down…. I ran to the house and dropped off my stuff. I wanted to be on the steps with only my handbag. I left my coat open so you could see it move in the wind.

399 Magid, “Evidence Locker,” Day 10. 400 Magid writes, “I told you about the wig. I told you I want to take on a new identity for you and that we don’t have to tell the others, not right away. I tell you about being blond and you say go for it, even if it’s expensive, it’s all relative. You just paid 300 quid for a bike part. You say the blond hair must change my whole face. We are going to go to the symphony. I’ll wear my blond wig and you’ll wear black leather. You prefer that to a tuxedo.” Magid, “Evidence Locker,” Day 10. 401 Magid, “Evidence Locker,” Day 13

237 We did the shot 5 times; I walked up and down the stairs for you. Thank you for being patient. I know you like when I go slower. I am sorry I always rush ahead before you are ready. I saw you spinning in circles to find me! It was nice when all the other people went away and it was just the stairs and us. Your directions were really good. The diagonal walk was nice. You did not seem too thrilled on the phone. You think I walk too fast. But I am sure it will be good. We will look tomorrow. Don’t worry; it’ll be good.

In addition to the explicit references to iconic films, Magid plays the part of the classic Hollywood heroine in her passionate obsession with her “Dear Observer’s” gaze.

Mary Ann Doane, writing about classic Hollywood films that focus on female protagonists

(what she calls “women’s films”), remarks on the repeated motif of women looking through windows. As a feature of domestic architecture that divides the woman from the ‘working world’ of men, Doane argues that “the window has special import in terms of the social and symbolic positioning of the woman – the window is the interface between inside and outside, the feminine space of the family and reproduction and the masculine space of production. It facilitates a communication by means of the look between two sexually differentiated spaces.”402 Magid develops an obsession with windows, of being seen through them and of her Observer looking back. She often refers to the surveillance cameras through which she is observed as ‘windows,’ and when she does appear to her Observer through a window, the reference to film, for both of them, is immediate: “You said that watching me today in that window was like watching a movie.” 403 Magid begins seeing the

402 Doane, “Women’s Films,” 72. She goes on, “within the ‘woman’s film’ as a whole, images of women looking through windows or waiting at windows abound….That interface becomes a potential point of violence, intrusion and aggression in the paranoid woman’s films.” 403 Magid, “Evidence Locker,” Day 20. She offers a detailed account of being observed by her beloved through a window: “I walked into the round brick building at the bottom of Duke, at the crossing of Hanover. There is a window I wanted to be in. It has a black gate and stands along the balcony on the first floor. I call it the second floor, but you call it the first. From the balcony I can look you straight in the eye….[The secretary] brought me upstairs. From the doorway, through the window, I could see you perfectly. Your back was

238 city as a series of spaces in which she can be observed, appearing in them for her dear

Observer’s gaze:

Instead of going straight to you, I walked in search of windows. From the sidewalk, I looked at different buildings, their windows, and fantasized being in them. I began to see you in relation to the windows. Which ones can you see in? What if you turn your head up, or a bit to the side? I would find you, follow your gaze, and imagine myself at the end of it. I imagined what I would wear and how the light would be and if you would catch me by surprise or if you would have followed me. 404

It would seem that Magid plays her role of Hollywood starlet so well that she risks losing herself in her experiment. Indeed, some of her letters describe an unhealthy obsession with pleasing the male gaze of her observer, as Magid dresses, gestures, smiles, and performs for her “Observer,” always with his watchful gaze in mind: “At home before the mirror, I pinned my hair back and applied concealer around my eyes. I like wearing makeup when I know you will see me…. I smoked a cigarette. It was for you and it calmed me down.”405

When she isn’t ‘made-up’ for her Observer, she does not wish to be seen: “I didn’t want you watching me this morning... I wore no makeup, my hair was a mess, my bag was heavy and pulling me down. I snuck behind your back and ducked into Lewis’s Department Store.”406

And even when Magid expresses mixed feelings about appearing in a blond wig and mini skirt, admitting that dressing as a symbol of the classic male fetish makes her feel like a whore, she writes the next day, “I dressed conservatively to get your respect back.”407

to me so I called you. You were in an operation still, but I told you I was on a beautiful balcony, and just to look quickly…I filled the frame and you turned around.I sat in the window, with my head slightly out, and the wind blew across my face and through my hair. It was a good window. I could hear the traffic and see the river. The secretary, from behind the blind, asked me questions about New York. I answered slowly so she would stay. I kept her there so we could watch each other.” 404 Magid, “Evidence Locker,” Day 20 405 Magid, “Evidence Locker,” Day 13 406 Magid, “Evidence Locker,” Day 12 407 Magid, “Evidence Locker,” Day 15

239 At the same time, Magid slips in plenty of sly reminders about the absurdity of her story, lightly poking fun at the sincere love story she mouths. Not the least absurd element of Evidence Locker are the hundreds of surveillant bodies that answer, as it were, to her “Dear

Observer” salutation. For Magid, “Dear Observer” refers to each publicly installed surveillance camera she encounters, as well as the chief detective who locates her through the cameras and with whom she communicates in the Liverpool surveillance unit. Magid writes, “When you called me at noon, I was not sure which ‘you’ you were- you all sound the same. You said, Hi Jill Its me. But you are all me. We planned to meet at 1:30.”408 Her description of being watched by multiple, mechanical surveillance cameras is likewise humorous: “You followed me through the center of town, on the streets without the cars. I walked in circles around your feet and your neck got stuck. It was funny to see you following me. You constantly moved to meet me.”409 In addition to the schizoid fragmentation of her Observers’ body throughout the city of L, Magid’s own identity gets confused with another woman wearing a red coat that her Observer sees: “I arrived and came upstairs. You told me you’d made a mistake. You thought you’d seen me but you saw someone else. She was in a red coat, also on the phone, and from far away you assumed that she was me. You followed her, got close, and realized your mistake.”410

Magid’s ‘hysteric mimicry’ and identity-play constitute an important but only partial aspect of her project. Her time in Liverpool is also shot through with a deep and sincere investment in connecting with other human beings through the city’s surveillance system. In building these interpersonal connections through the mechanized apparatus of surveillance,

Magid interfaces with another significant branch of recent feminist theory, inaugurated by

408 Magid, “Evidence Locker,” Day 16 409 Magid, “Evidence Locker,” Day 4 410 Magid, “Evidence Locker,” Day 5

240 Donna Haraway’s 1991 “Cyborg Manifesto.”411 Haraway describes the contemporary cyborg

(a term she applies to all contemporary subjects) as “a mythic figure and tool of thought, an ironic intervention that shifts existing relations among society, science and technology through an act of declaration.”412 Building on Haraway’s groundbreaking work, Margaret

Morse (2005) focuses on the relational space that makes up the cyborg, that is, the space ‘in- between’ the human and machine counterparts of the cyborg being. She theorizes the ‘in- between space’ that makes up the cyborg as crucial to contemporary formations and experiences of embodied subjecthood, arguing that “it is the relation between the felt and seen that correlates them and forges the body. The body, whatever else it is, is also this space- in-between where vectors, links and bonds intersect.”413 Interpreting Haraway’s claims that cyborg subjects are the new models for feminist subjectivity, Morse writes, “cyborgs are subjects who make statements that transform themselves and the boundaries of the way things are.”414 This is to say that, for Morse, like Haraway, the cyborg interface of

411 Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991). Haraway asserts that virtually all contemporary subjects are cyborgs: “By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation.” Her concept of a cyborg translates well to the interface between passersby (or users) and surveillance technologies. See also Andy Clark, Natural Born Cyborgs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Clark builds on Haraway’s work, making a similar claim that cyborgs exist in the real world and, moreover, that they are us. 412 Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto,” 176. Haraway goes on, “Writing is pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs….Cyborg politics is the struggle for language against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly….” 413 See Morse, “Sunshine and Shroud: Cyborg Bodies and the Collective and Personal Self.” Her argument draws on an oversight in Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage: “Lacan’s infant viewer identifies with the mirror image as self or me, in what is a dualistic and imaginary relation to the body ego; alternatively, the body image in the mirror is part of a triad, a symbol of self that is based on not self. What Lacan doesn’t elaborate on is the space in- between the body and the mirror, on which embodiment implicitly depends.” 414 Morse, “Sunshine.”

241 surveillance contains within it the potential for an active subjecthood, an empowered feminist usership that can, in effect, re-write the surveillance interface, even as she is written by it. As Morse puts it, “The cyborg body both writes and is written and in the process learns and change,” articulating the reflexive interplay made possible within cyborg relationships.

Magid’s aims in Evidence Locker resonate with Morse’s belief in the power of the relational space within contemporary cyborgian relationships to change existing conditions in techno-social culture. Magid labors re-write the hybrid ‘body’ formed between herself and her mechanized ‘observers’ in the surveillance system of Liverpool. The close personal relationship that Magid forms with her detective-Observer gives body to the systemic love affair that Magid has with the entire surveillance network of Liverpool. Her commitment to forging this connection and re-writing the parameters of the surveillant interface is made most clear on Day 24, when Magid’s Observer uses surveillance cameras and an in-ear cell phone to guide her through the busy streets of Liverpool with her eyes closed. Magid’s description of the experience expresses a profound intimacy and a deep feeling of inter- connectedness with her Observer:

I called you. You called me back. I tucked the phone in my pocket and secured the earpiece in place. We were connected, and it was invisible. I told you: I will close my eyes now, and you will walk me there like this…. You told me I looked good, that I looked peaceful, You look good Jill. You look peaceful, and asked me how I was. I like when you use my name. I said It’s easier when you talk to me. Please just keep talking to me. And you did.

The voice and body of Magid’s Observer seem to extend into the entire world around her, becoming the entire field of vision that enframes her through the CCTV lens. Magid continues, “Sometimes people would bump me, or brush against me and I would flinch.

242 You’d go: Oh sorry! Oh excuse me. Were you me or the person who bumped into me?” At the end of the walk, Magid and her Observer linger in the intimacy of the moment:

… I stayed still and kept my eyes closed. I had no desire to open them, no desire to end. I imagined myself as you saw me and let my hands drop to my sides. I felt your approach. You stopped speaking. I could feel when my face filled your window. And you said, Oh, that’s a nice shot. And we rested like that, for maybe a minute. I said, I want to look at you. You said, Ok, turn a little to your right. A little more. Yes. Now open your eyes. 415

Magid describes her commitment to building a deep and meaningful human connection with her Observer through the techno-human interface of Liverpool’s surveillance system as “making love” to the surveillance system.416 The scenes and conversations she records between herself and her ‘Observer’ pointedly re-frame the relationship between surveiller and surveilled, watcher and watched, as a libidinal, even loving, contract, an affair played out in the surveilled cross walks and cafés of Liverpool.

Magid melds her own interior and exterior body with Liverpool’s system of memory in order to produce an embodied record of her existence in that location. In a letter dated late in her stay in Liverpool, Magid reassures her Dear Observer of her devotion to and respect for him, the city of L, and to the surveillance system itself:

You are nervous, scared for those above you. This city is unique and you want it protected… And I tell you, hurting the city’s reputation is not my intention. Neither is it to judge what you do. Let the others do that. I tell you: I did not critique your system; I made love to it.

415 Magid’s project offered a new experience of intimacy for the surveillers as well. Magid’s letters speak of the new experiences of watching that her project brought up for her Observer: “You said, It’s much different, to watch it like this. Things jump out. You explain: Usually when you are following me you are also busy with other tasks; you are watching the other windows; you are picking up the phone; you are watching the other yous. But this time, you were responsible. This time, you concentrated. You said, It’s really sensual. You said, Don’t take this the wrong way, but it felt a little bit like…well…” (Magid, “Evidence Locker,” Day 25). 416 Magid, “Evidence Locker,” Day 30

243 You blushed.417

Set within the frame of her ‘love-making,’ the CCTV video clips of Magid function less as evidentiary verification of her personal narratives and more as mutually produced artistic representations of a deepening relationship between Magid and her Observer. Re- enacting a scene from Godard’s Le Mépris (1963), or doing a ‘trust walk’ via surveillance camera and in-ear cell phone, seemed meaningful for Magid and her Observer not for their visual elegance or cinematic beauty – in fact, they both acknowledge that the resulting ‘films’ are awkward, jolting, and far from the visual pleasure of classic Hollywood products – but instead for the intimate bonds they create between watcher and watched. In the final week of her time in Liverpool the relationship between Magid and her Observer takes on the tone of a love affair, electric with its passion and risk:

We talked about the day you walked for me, the first time. I told you again the intensity I had felt. That that moment was everything. After that, the cameras were only cameras. You told me you’d played it down, and had cried after. You said, At the end, when you smiled at me, the screen disappeared. You said, You know, when you sat on that bench I could have made love to you. And I said, You did.418

Rather than a fleeting moment of peeping-tom arousal, or a hot one-night stand caught on video, Magid and her Observer create an intricate, intimate relationship that radically tests the limits of trust, communication, desire, and inter-subjectivity possible through a citywide surveillance system. Magid – a cyborg of the everyday – re-writes the normative code of civic surveillance that has been written for her; in doing so, she exceeds a number of technological, social, and cultural limits set by surveillance society and classic

Hollywood love-stories, and breaks new ground for future hysteric feminist subjects of surveillance.

417 Magid, “Evidence Locker,” Day 30 418 Magid, “Evidence Locker,” Day 31

244 Powerful Echoes in the In-Between

Jill Magid, Sophie Calle, and Janet Cardiff draw implicitly and explicitly upon feminist discourses of the body to guide their radical engagements with affective, relational, and lived experiences of surveillance that augment their visual representations as women under surveillance. They each position their feminist surveillance art works within relational space, described by feminist-cyborg theorist Margaret Morse, enlivening and rewriting the space in-between their bodies and the surveillance cameras that they watch and are watched by. While a purely visual understanding of surveillance does not preclude awareness of this

‘in-between’ space, sensory epistemologies of sound, touch, and emotion are particularly well suited to exploring the in-between space of surveillance. As such, these artists re-create surveillance space as a space of embodiment, and insist that embodied writing is crucial to articulating feminine and feminist experiences of surveillance society. For Calle, Cardiff, and

Magid, the disciplinary and desirous gaze of surveillance can be understood most fully by gaining embodied knowledge of its contours and possibilities. If we stop to listen, perhaps we can hear their echoes reverberating in the relational space in-between surveillant apparatuses and subjects of surveillance, where gazes and desires intersect.

245 CONCLUSION

Stepping Out: The Secret of the Looking Glass

This dissertation makes the claim that surveillance technologies are particularly effective tools with which theatre, installation, and performance artists can stage formal provocations to habitual conceptions of and interactions with apparatuses of surveillance. As the preceding chapters have illustrated, surveillance society is not simply an expanded and updated system of Foucauldian discipline and Althusserian interpellation. Artists, engineers, and everyday subjects have chosen to respond to contemporary surveillance systems in a wide variety of creative, humorous, provocative, and politically charged ways that interrupt capital-H Hierarchies of surveillance society and enact what I called at the opening of this dissertation a “small history of surveillance.”

However, the ‘writers’ of this small history do not intervene only in capital-S

Surveillance. In addition to targeting the sweeping, large scale flows of data and networks of information that characterize state and corporate surveillance, surveillance artists also critically challenge the minute, casual, ‘user-friendly’ interactions and patterns of movement within everyday surveillant interfaces. As in Camera Letters, with which my inquiry began, surveillance art and performance projects by Jill Magid, Sophie Calle, Janet Cardiff, Coco

Fusco, Hassan Elahi, Mona Hatoum, Gilles Walker, Julia Scher, Steve Mann, Edit Kaldor,

David Rosenberg, the Institute for Applied Autonomy, and the Surveillance Camera Players

(among a growing number of others) utilize surveillance technologies to intervene in habitual processes of seeing (or not seeing) surveillance interfaces in the everyday.

That is, to stage another return to Walter Benjamin, surveillance artists ask passersby to ‘step out’ of routinely moving past surveillant interfaces on their daily perambulations, and, in the arrested act of ‘passing by,’ to look again at the details within the monumental

246 facades of surveillance society. In “A Small History of Photography,” Benjamin noted that the camera supplied ‘another nature’ through which to comprehend and examine the acts of

‘passing by’ and ‘stepping out.’ Through machine-enhanced perception, photography, like surveillance, can create an ‘other’ mode of seeing:

… other in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious. Whereas it is commonplace that, for example, we have some idea what is involved in the act of walking, if only in general terms, we have no idea at all what happens during the fraction of a second when a person steps out. Photography, with its devices of slow motion and enlargement, reveals the secret.419 Benjamin’s observations about the capacity of the camera to ‘slow and englarge’ predicted the great impact that photography would have on intellectual, scientific, and artistic understandings of movement – both in the sense of individual, corporeal movements, and in the sense of wider spread social movements. Similarly, surveillance technologies have been used in service of a range of corporate, state, military, communications, and entertainment interests, enhancing understandings of foreign military and paramilitary offensives, threats of terrorism, consumer spending patterns, economic shifts, and popular trends in television and the Internet.

In surveillance art, these technologies also function to promote a different set of understandings. Alongside her skillful employment of fetishistic sexual imagery, Magid used her Surveillance Shoe to facilitate understandings of the power dynamics at play within the relationship between the individual walker and urban architecture. In Point Blank, the slippery and unstable relationship between the real and the representational that has historically been associated with the concept of theatricality served to challenge understandings of the ‘truth- value’ of surveillance data. The Surveillance Camera Players stage performances that point

419 Benjamin, “A Small History,” 243.

247 out the invisible and dehumanized labor on the other side of publicly installed surveillance cameras, asking for understanding and empathy from both sides of the camera.

In order to stage these interventions, surveillance art must function like the shutter of a camera, stilling a scene in order to facilitate critical inspection of it. In effect, surveillance artists must perform a kind of citizen arrest, stopping passersby in their tracks and halting quotidian patterns of circulation in which the ubiquitous surveillance cameras are, quite literally, passed by without notice, without a glance. This mode of ‘arrest,’ however, is quite different than that of Althusser’s policeman, who’s “Hey You” stops a strolling pedestrian in his or her tracks and, in doing so, turns the arrested body into an obedient subject cognizant of his or her own subjectivity. Instead, surveillance art practices halt the automated, naturalized movements of everyday subjects of surveillance, and hold the surveillant moment up for examination.

Consider the arrested citizens of the surveillance art pieces discussed in this dissertation: the pools of onlookers that inevitably stop to gather around the Surveillance

Camera Players’ street performances, the binocular clad audience members of Contains

Violence whose bodies are stilled by their birds’ eye view and enhanced powers of sight, the

‘Sound Walk’ participants who hand over their bodies to Cardiff’s vocal grip, and the audience of Hatoum’s Deep Throat, caught by the conflicting layers of revulsion, intimacy, and titillation the piece invokes. As illustrated by the IAA’s “GraffitiWriter” and Steve

Mann’s “wearcam” products, humor and absurdity can also cause passersby to stop in their tracks, to look anew at what has become invisible because of its sheer normalcy, its failure to surprise. Each of these ‘arrests’ physically contradicts the dominant message of state, corporate, and commercial surveillance, as these surveillance artists counter the dictum

“nothing to see here” with radically arrested (and arresting) citizenship.

248 In recalling the multiple spectatorial perspectives arrested by the surveillance artists in this dissertation, I return to the interview with Mike Colacicco, the Private Investigator who attended a performance of Contains Violence at the Lyric Hammersmith in London.

Along with his other practical insights regarding the differences between the expectations and rules of surveillance and theatre, the P.I. offered a word of caution from the professional world of surveillance to audiences of surveillance theatre: “Watching people is addictive. Clients, especially in domestic cases, sometimes have a real problem calling off the surveillance, even when the original objectives have been achieved.”420 Indeed, surveillance artists do not necessarily have a difficult time making people stop and stare, whether their piece is staged on a street corner or in a theatre or gallery. The spectre of a body under surveillance – or being put under performative surveillance ourselves – is titillating, triggering our desires to play at being disciplined by a socio-political gaze. And, as Colacicco predicts, surveillance art and performance – along with reality TV, Facebook, and Twitter – is not likely to ameliorate our cultural addiction to watching and being watched.

However, some consideration of the ‘objectives’ such models hope to ‘achieve’ would be wise. Once again, returning to Benjamin is instructive. For him, the ‘secret’ that can be ‘revealed’ through photography is the “optical unconscious,” made visible by the camera’s capacity to slow and enlarge. Drawing on theories of the ‘unconscious’ in psychoanalysis, Benjamin proposed that a scene, stilled by the camera, could reveal to a careful eye details of a trauma that was holding a subject or a society prisoner to a violent or unjust past.421 This capacity to ‘reveal’ underlying traumas and injustices was, for Benjamin,

420 Arendt, “Another View.” 421 The “optical unconscious” could be made visible through photography’s “devices of slow motion and enlargement… Details of structure…which dwell in the smallest things, meaningful yet covert enough to find a hiding place in waking dreams, but which, enlarged

249 the ethical duty of photography. Even more importantly, he believed that this process would construct and empower critical spectators of photography.

If my comparisons between photography and surveillance continue to hold true, it follows that surveillance technologies in the hands of artists and interventionist engineers can (and should) likewise point out to the astute spectator the traumas, injustices, and dangers secreted within the architecture of surveillance society. Works such as Hatoum’s

Deep Throat, Fusco’s Dolores from 10 to 10, or Magid’s System Azure labor to reveal social and political traumas covered over and suppressed by dominant features of surveillance society and visual culture. Projects, such as Cardiff’s Eyes of Laura, Mann’s “HeartCam,” or my

Camera Letters likewise exhibit the capacity to draw attention to details of the individual performing body under (or behind) the gaze of surveillance and to thus highlight an individual’s gender, race, or class as determining factors in the way in which that body may be read and treated by the disciplinary gaze. And yet others, such as Rosenberg’s Contains

Violence and Walker’s Pole Dancing Robots, fall short of a deeper critique of subconscious social prejudices enacted within the spectator’s field of vision. Jill Magid’s Evidence Locker and the

Surveillance Camera Players’ performances, as provocative and delightful as the pieces are, could likewise do more to humanize the surveillance guards to which they play; they could raise questions about the hidden structures of labor in state and corporate surveillance and the socio-economic status and racial demographics of surveillance guards employed within them.

Moving forward from the studies, artworks, and social circumstances explored in this dissertation, I am struck by the need to define some future objectives for surveillance art as a present and future performance form. In order to effectively engage, write, and enact a and capable of formulation make the difference between technology and magic visible as a thoroughly historical variable” (Benjamin, “A Small History,” 243-4).

250 “small history of surveillance,” it seems that surveillance artists must do more than re- present splashy new surveillance technologies or glancingly reflect a host of contemporary social and political hot button issues. Surveillance artists, now and in the future, must search for ways to look deeper at the details and listen more closely to the secrets within the cracks and corners of the sprawling architecture of contemporary surveillance. Surveillance art, as a genre and a strategy, might then achieve its objectives of critically reframing the stakes of discipline and desire for subjects on both sides of the looking glass. And yet, even then, despite Colacaccio’s professional recommendation, I do not think that surveillance art should be ‘called off.’

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