Surveillance is back in the public eye thanks to the release of a film by Oliver Stone that focuses on the whistleblower Edward Snowden. The topic has been relatively absent from public debate in America, only arising due to questions of national security raised by Hillary Clinton’s now notorious leaked emails. Yet over the past decade artists have seized upon the subject, and with good reason: in the UK there is almost one security camera per 11 inhabitants, and whilst some of them are not in use, there seems nonetheless to be a growing distaste for this mania for surveillance.
Critic Paul Ardenne explains that “political art can of course be propagandist or genuinely engaged, but can also just be simple actions which are not concerned with any given ideology and indeed just set out to ask questions, or to stop us going round in the same circles, to challenge the accepted wisdom.”
Trevor Paglen, NSA/GCHQ Surveillance Base, Bude, Cornwall, UK, 2014 — Courtesy of the Artist, Metro Pictures, New York and Altman Siegel, San Francisco
In 2016, Trevor Paglen was one of the joint recipients of the Deutsche Börse Prize for his work on mass surveillance. “I’m interested in images that teach us how to see the world that’s around us all of the time,” he says. In this way, Paglen uses art to “educate, defend and explain quasi-philosophical concepts.” The panel of judges announced through the chair Brett Rogers, that they selected Paglen for his “significant contribution to current issues that deal with the disquieting impact of unseen aspects of technology on our daily lives.
In the last few years the photographer Arne Svenson has thrust into relief the difficulties inherent to this topic. His long-lens snapshots of his neighbours in their apartments, taken unbeknownst to them, have generated polemic and helped to attract a large audience to his exhibitions. “I do not view Arne’s work as an infringement of privacy. But, many people enjoyed discussing the boundaries around public/private in today’s technology-driven world,” says Nora Abrams, the curator of Svenson’s exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver “The exhibition also really facilitated larger conversations about the role of surveillance in today’s world.”
Installation shot, Tracking Transience by Hasan Elahi from “Surveillance Series”
Liza Faktor, curator of the exhibition “Surveillance Series” at the New York Media Center in 2014 and Dubai’s East Wing gallery in 2015, cites the artist James Bridle who has claimed that “the problem with too much Surveillance Art is that it simply creates more surveillance.”
In an essay on the website Digital ethics, the journalist Nikki B. Williams denounced the hypocrisy of artists working on the subject of surveillance, in particular on CCTV, stating, “most of this art encourages the breach of privacy through the publication (or re-publication) of personal images without authorization… At the very least, artists should set an example.”
