COLLECTIVE SURVEILLANCE PLAY
Will Pappenheimer (Digital Art Dept, Pace University, New York)
Network performance, especially conducted through technologies such as the web camera, suggests from the onset, a reversed emphasis on the subject. Conversely, if viewers or online participants are able to affect the performance, the resulting composition can be understood as collective. In a recent paper entitled, “The Plays and Arts of Surveillance: Studying Surveillance as Entertainment1,” written for surveillance-and-society.org, authors, Anders Albrechtslund and Linsey Dubbeld explore the alterior potential of surveillance in playful, humorous, pleasurable and even caring practices. Adopting sinister social (and now socio-technological) interactions for pleasure, play, mimicry, and diversion is indeed a subversive tradition within the arts and culture at large.
This paper will explore avenues within the arts, particularly the technologically based arts, which further subvert this territory. I will look specifically at projects that confound one-way directives, suggest alternate motives for viewing, and collapse the concept of Panopticism by providing the subject with evidence of the presence of the hidden virtual viewer or controlling network (however distant and disembodied). Questioning traditional oppositions of virtual and corporeal, empiricism and representation, “embodiment” can take on more pluralistic or holistic dimensions. What might constitute avenues of caring and community within a surveillance apparatus and its artistic counterparts? The presentation will focus on network/collective artworks attached to, reaching towards, or in conjunction with performance/installation, engaging overlapping technological, virtual and public space in testing this trajectory.
lecture at the digital art weeks in Zurich
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