introduction

Surveillance art is the use of technology intended to record human behavior in a way that offers commentary on the process of surveillance or the technology used to surveil. Surveillance art manifests itself in many different forms, from short films to architecture, but all have been shown to provide some type of critical response to the rise of surveillance by various authorities and the technology used to achieve it, especially when dealing with issues of security and enforcing laws.

- from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_art 

...international artists, whose practice aids to expose the usually obscured mechanisms of state control through a mix of photographic, textual, sculptural and filmic approaches. Exploring the inextricability of public and private spheres, the works embody the inherent tension of a system of surveillance whose purpose is the restriction of personal freedoms to maintain a specific status quo. Its omnipresence in our lives was demonstrated in 2013 by Edward Snowden, whose leaked reports revealed – among other things – court-approved access to American’s Google and Yahoo accounts, while the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018 highlighted public ignorance to the socio-political manipulations of our online data.

Although the Cold War ended in 1991, the monitoring of the public by the state has only increased, with four to six million CCTV cameras active in the UK – roughly one for every eleven people... photographs illustrate the fallacious notion of privacy, especially in our highly networked age. Gaining untroubled access to CCTV feeds around the globe, he photographed their isolated landscapes from his computer screen, with these images of unpopulated mountains or barren deserts evidencing the modern impossibility of escaping observation... the entanglement of the personal and the political... a variety of work, implicitly challenging networks of obscurity and the veiled power of state control...

- excerpted from exhbition text: https://www.ashleylumb.com/work/now-you-see-me

Surveillance has been an increasingly omnipresent force in North American culture. A social expectancy and understanding that we will be watched in some capacity has formed. Physically and digitally, a person’s actions are monitored, and the question of whether or not that is harmful to one’s existence arises… works which explore the social and political mechanisms and structures that create surveillance states…Interrupt, intercept, investigate, interrogate…The irony of our contemporary condition is that the type of sweeping, mass surveillance engaged in by governments and corporations occurs at a level that is necessarily invisible to the public, even though surveillance of any type is predicated on making visible, or exposing, its subjects. This marks a shift from earlier regimes that relied upon our visual awareness of the tools used for policing, for example through deterrent devices like the CCTV camera or watchtower. Behavior in public space was, and continues to be, modified by the knowledge that with every use of an ATM or stroll through a public square or visit to a civic building, we can see the cameras looking back at us and are simultaneously made visible to them. This is the classic model of the panopticon, famously designed by Jeremy Bentham and theorized by Michel Foucault: we see the apparatus and we know its potential to see us, which transforms us into its obedient subjects. The panoptic model of surveillance is built on this mutual visibility. But the contemporary model of surveillance is structured almost entirely upon the opaque realm of data and computer coding hidden within our devices. Information replaces the watchful eye as the central metaphor for power and control in this algorithmic model.  To lose control of the wealth of personal information that shapes contemporary subjectivity–the preferences, habits, searches, posts and tastes that form our digital selves–amounts to a kind of exposure that leaves us both extremely visible and vulnerable… In a discourse about the rights to be made visible and the rights to maintain invisibility, aesthetic practices have much to contribute. Art is so often about revealing society’s frayed social consciousness, about finding a visual language to describe its unseen edges, or to point to the places where it breaks down and disappears completely. For the artists in this exhibition, the urgency of interrogating surveillance and security culture is expressed in works that examine the role of activism, identity politics, social media, personal surveillance, predictive behaviour and non-visual modes of communication. These projects together express the right to be visible on one’s own terms, a right to interrupt and interrogate the underlying power structures that frame mass surveillance as a necessity. As theorist Jasbir Puar has pointed out, “the temporality of surveilling is not just reactive, but also preemptive and increasingly, predictive. The artists gathered here interrupt this temporality with interventions that offer moments of counter-resistance within the very networks–digital networks, activist networks, social networks–that are implicated in surveillance regimes. However minor such interventions may be, to find resistance within these networks is to acknowledge and respond to one of the most ethical challenges of our time.

- excerpted from exhibition text: http://www.thenewgallery.org/surveillance/