Prof. Julia Scher
Mass Observation
We are moving towards the maximum security society comprised of data, where bodies without organs of thought are turned into images.
The form, the skeleton upon which surveillance images hang, is even more brilliant than its TV counterpart. Its luminance has become interchangeable with information.
The image has become knowledge.
The surveillance apparatus appears, in this light, as a perverse social mechanism. Its purpose is to create suspicious behavior, not to detect it.
Surveillance codifies patterns of conduct,
articulating systems of dominance painted out in vertical and diagonal rows. Surveillance reproduces a landscape that is not only watched, but that watches back. The notion of landscape is
central – for the system has proliferated through our lives to the point where the systems are invisible and familiar. With the surveillance image, civil transgression can be created, implied or
invoked. It is a tool of social control regulated by the infiltration of observation.
We are increasingly aware that although "live", we watch surveillance imagery as the registration and display of a file. In the future, what will it mean to see our image file in different circumstances?
The monitors of surveillance are the eyes of a social body gone berserk. They signify a marked space. The screens of its network police and patrol space. The surveillance image is the reconstruction
of a target. The screen flickers and slowly switches images. This is the arena of observation, "a montage of colliding video samplings", as Joshua Decter says, where the machine is an architecture of
discipline, where machine eyes are objects gathering information. Time lapse recorders maintain up to 749 hours of images on a two hour cassette.
The images may be different but the theme is always the same – order. The cameras are never turned off. The surveillance image is thus an ode to interception. It represents access to the city/environment/space/home
as the electronic system that replaces the journey. The video switcher replaces the turning of the head or the movement of the eyes.
The bank of monitors becomes an electronic frieze – comprised not simply of the camera image but detector verifiers (biometrics), computer data graphics, and text fields.
In this sense, representation bears the weight of repression.
Whatever you do can be used against you.