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CTRL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother
Edited by Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Frohne, and Peter Weibel
MIT Press/ZKM Center for Art and Media (hardbound, 655 pp.)

Review by Dave Mandl

There's a certain thrill in having the odd rule to break, the
occasional shitty product to ostentatiously not waste your money on.
In 2002, dumping your TV set or eating food that hasn't had the taste
and nutrients removed is practically an act of sedition–making
dinnertime that much more fun. Hakim Bey's now-classic "Temporary
Autonomous Zone" (originally subtitled "The Pleasures of
Disappearance") was an ode to the joys of building a utopia in the
System's own cracks, which were still easy enough to find back in
1991. But what happens when food that hasn't been genetically
modified simply doesn't exist, when every hole in the landscape has
armed guards and an airport-style scanner stationed nearby?

While the infrastructure of the modern surveillance state has been
building up steadily since the dawn of the state itself, there's no
doubt that the curve has turned sharply upward in the past decade,
with the biggest spike of all coming in the short time since the
events of 9/11. Power's gaze now reaches–often quite openly–into
virtually every corner of the populated world, not only public streets
and living rooms, but our own bodies and beyond. Is disappearance
even remotely possible anymore? Will privacy exist in any form ten
years from now?

With uncanny timing, the exhibition "CTRL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of
Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother," an overview of decades of
artistic discourse about "the merits, uses, and limits of
surveillance," opened at the Center for Art and Technology in
Karlsruhe, Germany, in October 2001. The exhibition's massive and
beautifully produced catalog, published this year, supplements the
work from the show with contributions by more than two dozen prominent
theoreticians, historians, social critics, and investigative
reporters. Together, these art works and essays form what is surely
one of the most wide-ranging looks at surveillance, its pleasures, and
its horrors ever undertaken.

Not surprisingly, much of the material here is unremittingly bleak.
Filmmaker Harun Farocki, who has made extensive use of footage taken
from prison surveillance cameras, talks about the total control and
dehumanization achieved by the technological systems employed in
modern prisons (which no longer even pretend to aim for
"rehabilitation"). Prisoners' contact with humans is kept to an
absolute minimum, with iris-scanners checking their identities and
electronic chairs subduing them when necessary. Fights between
prisoners are sometimes staged by the guards, who bet on the outcome.

Timothy Druckrey's "Secreted Agents, Security Leaks, Immune Systems,
Spore Wars" details the nearly unlimited powers that the
U.S. government has granted itself in the wake of 9/11, and the new
generation of monitoring systems that are being developed or
considered as a result: face-scanning software (already used covertly
on every attendee of the last Super Bowl); National Identity cards;
"DNA identification"; "tissue-based biodetectors"; etc. Journalist
Duncan Campbell provides a history and taxonomy of Echelon, the NSA's
global spy system, which is already capable of intercepting most of
the world's satellite coommunication, and will be able to do much more
in a few years.

On a more positive note, every oppressive regime inspires a resistance
movement, and contemporary surveillance technology is no exception.
Druckrey relates how two marines became "genetic conscientious
objectors" by refusing to provide DNA samples to the Department of
Defense. Outdoor surveillance cameras are a favorite target of
resisters: Photographer Frank Thiel's series *City TV* reveals 101
"hidden" cameras on the streets of Berlin; the New York Civil
Liberties Union has blown the cover on most of New York's surveillance
cameras (2,397 of them) with an extensive map; and the Institute for
Applied Autonomy, also in New York, has created a web-based app, iSee,
that will create a "path of least surveillance" for you given the
starting end ending point of your journey. But will there *be* such a
path when the city is completely blanketed with cameras? Even worse,
will jaded pedestrians eventually find the cameras unremarkable?
(Compare your reaction the first time you saw an advertisement in a
movie theater to your reaction now.)

Other works in *CTRL [SPACE]* explore the possibilites of using the
machinery of surveillance for one's own ends, or simply rejoicing in
the liberatory "detournement" of oppressive technologies. Webcams
naturally make several appearances–the legendary JenniCam, Josh
Harris's ill-fated "We Live in Public"–as does Andy Warhol's
obsessive video-voyeurism. But Paul Virilio, who acknowledges the
benefits of a decentralized, worldwide network of web cameras, wonders
whether this network won't also allow for massive monitoring of the
population (in effect, inviting Big Brother into our own homes), not
to mention "universal advertising."

Subverting oppressive technologies is fun, healthy, and necessary
under extreme conditions–as any former citizen of the Soviet Union
can attest. A life of gloom-and-doom is no life. But resistance at
the source is equally important, especially in the post-9/11 world.
While *CTRL [SPACE]* makes no pretence of being an activist tool, it
would be nice to see more works in the collection by the Luddites of
today (not in the inaccurate sense of "anti-technology," but in the
sense of "anti-*oppressive*-technology"). Hacktivism, the Critical
Art Ensemble's Digital Resistance, the ultra-hard-line digital-privacy
activism of the Cypherpunks, and thousands of nameless "crackers" all
have an important place in this story.



--
Dave Mandl
dmandl@panix.com
davem@wfmu.org
http://www.wfmu.org/~davem