Surveillance

Context

Technology and Surveillance have always been comfortable bed-partners. Each new technology has led to new and more ubiquitous form of surveillance practices premised on intensive data-mining and centralisation of data. In the age of Information Technologies, where Information is the new capital, Surveillance, as a theoretical concept and as practice takes on an unprecedented everydayness. The experience of the urban is necessarily one of being an object of surveillance. Everyday practices are now structured around models of surveillance—from CCTV in areas of consumption to physical surveillance at areas of transit—such that surveillance has become almost value neutral in its presence around us.

This overwhelming sense of being watched has led to two distinct forms of manifestation in the last four decades. The first is the sense of paranoia—the Big Brother syndrome—which has found many proponents lamenting the loss of privacy and the abduction of the personal by the State and the market. The second is in the anti-surveillance stance which demands either for an abolishing of the surveillance practices or for an ethical use of the data. While both these forms have their own merits, the debate and the stakes change considerably once we enter the digital domains.

Especially within the digital spaces, where ‘presence’, a ‘record of the presence’, and an archiving of the records are inescapable, surveillance becomes more than just a practice; it becomes an inescapable condition of being online. To be online is to leave traces, physical and digital, personal and pseudonymous. In such a case, instead of taking an either-or position around surveillance, we are now looking at what surveillance enables and what are the ways in which it mediates the complex mechanics of urban survival.

Research Agenda

1. What are the various forms of surveillance that we encounter in the digital world? How do we understand being subject to surveillance as a part of being online?

2. What are the ways to negotiate, mediate, and surpass the various forms of surveillance that are a part of cyberspaces? Who are the agents of surveillance?

3. What does surveillance enable for the different actors within a given space? For example, for the agent conducting the surveillance, it might be a question of collecting data. For the actor being watched, it might be a narrative condition where s/he can manifest him/her self in the process of surveillance. For the audience that becomes witness to the surveillance, a new set of relationships might emerge with the object being manifest and the practice of surveillance.

4. How does surveillance become a threat when it is especially conducted in the promotion of safety and security? What are the paradoxes it generates and how do we negotiate with them?

5. With the proliferation of portable media capture devices, what is the value of surveillance? What are the new forms of authorship that it creates? Can we look upon surveillance—the process of being watched, the knowledge of being watched, and the incessant historicisation of the present—as an aesthetic paradigm?