Stanza: An artist’s
engagement with surveillance, privacy, technology and control
I write about surveillance,
privacy and technologies of security. Most frequently this is from a political
perspective, engaged with issues of power, but also particularly with issues of
representation – how are these technologies and the social practices
facilitated by them represented in thought and in language? To what problems
are these technologies being presented as an answer? And what type of political
climate do we have that doesn’t simply justify their use, but actively seems to
mandate it. Often this is political language – the language of policy documents
and speeches as well as the procedural documents which pass
thought-made-technical through the assemblages of organisations, actors and
technologies that make up contemporary society. However it also reaches out to
the broader culture of surveillance.
This also means paying attention to
those representations of surveillance and security technology that counter or
complicate these narratives of control and management. This makes the netart,
data sculptures and networked space artwork of the UK artist Stanza of
particular interest as it explicitly and actively engages with surveillance,
privacy, technology and control.
This essay takes a theoretically
guided walk through Stanza’s various body of work, including both recent and
older pieces, supported by my own engagement with the growing body of
surveillance theory. Particular themes to be explored include time, space and
landscape, ambiguity of meaning, and counter-mapping. For the surveillance
studies audience, I hope to pull out some of the tensions involved in the
examination of surveillance art, and for the general audience, to consider Stanza’s
work against this context.
Surveillance
Surveillance is a key feature of
modernity. Surveillance “involves the collection and analysis of information
about populations in order to govern their activities.”
If governance is understood as
including a wide range of social practices of management, administration, and coordination
then it becomes apparent that surveillance
is not solely limited to policing and intelligence, but rather is an organising
principle found in many areas of life; including commerce, education,
healthcare, insurance, and entertainment. Surveillance is a combination of
knowledge and intervention. Any social process which functions through the
gathering and processing of information can therefore be understood as having a
surveillant dimension. Whilst many of these processes are functional, useful,
and even desired and enjoyable,
they can also be part of profoundly exclusionary politics. Surveillance is
linked to power, and is therefore fundamentally a political question. Understood
in this way, it is clear that surveillance is not a new phenomenon. However the development of contemporary
information technologies has brought about a multiplication and acceleration of
forms of surveillance, and at the same time brought this practice to greater
levels of cultural salience and public awareness. Although not always well
understood, surveillance has caught the public mood in recent years.
Stanza writes “the patterns we
make, the forces we weave, are all being networked into retrievable data
structures that can be re-imagined and sourced for information. These patterns
all disclose new ways of seeing the world.”
In parallel with multiplication,
acceleration and public attention, the phenomena of surveillance has attracted
the attention of scholars and thinkers from a wide range of academic
disciplines, leading to the development of surveillance
studies, an eclectic multi-disciplinary field strongly influenced by
sociology, criminology, political and legal studies as well as geography,
history, computer science and ethics. The field has established journals such
as Surveillance and Society,
and a number of research centres around the world. Questions that drive surveillance studies
include the impacts of surveillance on surveilled populations, the different
forms that surveillance takes in different cultures and different contexts, the
spread of surveillance, its history, its politics, as well as the
aforementioned investigation of the cultures of surveillance.
Surveillance art
The field of surveillance studies
has practiced an engagement with the world of what might be called
“surveillance art” (although we will return to the suitability of this
terminology in later sections of this paper).
Surveillance and Society has an
ongoing remit to publish accounts of artistic work alongside its more
conventional academic papers
and in 2010 devoted an entire special issue to the topic of Surveillance, Performance and New Media Art.
Whilst artists such as Jordan Crandall and Manu Luksch have spoken at
surveillance studies network conferences and workshops, and a number of writers
have engaged with the subject.
By any measure, Stanza’s work
takes it rightful place in this field. His work engages with the “sophisticated
real time panopticon” of the Internet of Things and big data that he calls “the
mother of big brother”. His works are combinations of technology and visuals
that prominently feature CCTV, sensors, data(mining), and tracking, as well as
urbanism, a key concern of many of the geographers in surveillance studies.
Maria Chatzichristodolou states that Stanza’s work is “Questioning the way
technology is used to log and control people’s movements” and is “warning
against the ubiquity of technology within modern cities.”
In a previous article, published in Surveillance
and Society, my co-author and I argued that surveillance art, or at least,
the surveillance art that had come of the attention of surveillance studies,
was often limited to focusing upon the portrayal of the surveillance of the
human body in space. We were concerned that these accounts were often not
sensitive enough to the way that contemporary surveillance practices, and
particularly some of the most socially important ones, are often to do with the
collection and processing of data, rather than images. This is what Roger Clarke has termed
“dataveillance”.
We examined a small number of artists and works that engage with what we termed
‘invisible surveillance’ and are glad to include Stanza within that field. His work is very much about data, and data
flows, in particular those flowing from and through the city.
It is however, worth reflecting upon the nature of any such
interaction, such an attempt to cross disciplinary boundaries in search of new
knowledge. In that same article we expressed our concern that surveillance
studies had been somewhat over-eager and occasionally unreflective in its
engagement with artistic representations of surveillance. On our part there is
certainly an attraction, a desire to add something to scholarly accounts.
Surveillance studies has a clear desire to bring artistic production within its
ambit. In part this is because of the legitimate concern for culture, context
and representation. However there is also a different form of credibility on
offer in the artistic sensibility, and a desire to step outside of the text as
a primary means of communication. Surveillance studies has a concern for
communication and dissemination, and a politically motivated desire for public
awareness. We have an awareness that our
academic papers are read in small numbers and that our formal methods of
communication might be systematically hobbled. Perhaps “surveillance art”
(alongside other cultural representations of surveillance in films, movies and
music) offers another way of expressing concerns or of communicating new ways
of perceiving and understanding surveillance. For example, Dietmar Kammerer
argues that
“scholars of cultural sciences could examine
the constitutive role of fiction and imagination in security discourse. This
way of thinking about the “cultures of surveillance” can criticize and
counterbalance the alleged “rationality” of the security and surveillance
dispositive as well as expose the techno-fetishism that dominates much of the
debate”
This raises a concern regarding
the potentially utilitarian approach to surveillance art and what we might ask
from it. A reflection on Stanza’s body of work in this area starts to provide
us with some answers.
Time
Stanza has been engaged in
constant work on these topics through a thirty year period of change
and development. This therefore allows us to consider changes in his work over
time, and place these against developments in the subjects of his work.
Surveillance has not stood still during this period, and its changes can be
traced, if sometimes indirectly, through Stanza’s own development. Stanza’s work spans a period which John
McGrath describes as including a shift in public attitudes to surveillance.
McGrath describes this as a “transformation from deep-seated fear of
surveillance, to a largely apathetic acceptance, to an apparent ecstasy of
engagement”.
McGrath’s argument is that this shift is less one of government positions and
policies, or even of technology itself, but rather of cultural practice.
Stanza’s earlier work fits within
a broader field of video and CCTV art,
such as that brought together by Thomas Levin, Ursula Frohne and Peter Weibel
in CTRL [SPACE]. Works such as History is
personal and A world of endless
possibilities repurposed CCTV and webcams. More recent works have
demonstrated a clear shift away from this aesthetic towards the active construction
of sensor networks, and exhibit more of an interest in data than images, of
real time systems of constant flow and change. CCTV was, for a time, the
paradigmatic technology of surveillance, particularly in the United Kingdom.
Debates revolved around the loss of privacy in public space, and CCTV imagery
became widely spread across cultural representations of surveillance. Urban
webcams also became popular in this period, as part of projects of public
branding and civic identity. On the side of surveillance studies there were
many studies of the way that CCTV operators worked, or how people in space
responded to the presence of the cameras. In a world of smart cities and linked
big-data, the focus upon CCTV, both in art and in surveillance studies seems
somewhat quaint. The shifts
in Stanza’s work are in response to his belief that the problem has morphed
with the developing technologies and the powers and possibilities of big
data. He believes that tensions created by such technologies have actually
increased. The shift in the direction of data is driven by a desire to
understand and explore these flows, and to find other systems that could
offer open ended space for agency to take place.
Looking at
Stanza’s work chronologically, against this background of shifts in both
technology and the popular reception of surveillance allows us to realise that
Stanza’s individual works are so of their moment, that they perhaps hide some
of the history of the subjects with which they engage. The surveillant desire
to make the city knowable, visible and open to governmental intervention has a
long pedigree that predates our current technology. Patrick Joyce has written about the way that paper
maps and surveys of Victorian Manchester and other cities were also a
technology of government.
The similarities are not absent however. The paintings in Stanza’s Control series, City of Dreams, and Matrixity
evoke the historic maps of Manchester and other Victorian cities that Joyce
uses to illustrate his book on urban governmentality.
Stanza’s work carries the legacy of the technologies that he repurposes
as his medium. Might we then anticipate a future shift towards the cleaner
aesthetic of contemporary surveillance and technology? A relatively consistent
part of Stanza’s imagery, especially in pieces such as The Emergent City, has been the exposure of circuitry and electronics,
the obvious evidence that something technological is occurring. The artworks
have the air of prototype, a jaggedness and kit-built appearance reminiscent of
an electronics work bench, or on the other hand, of the “greeble” on Star
Destroyer – irregular shapes providing a sense of scale and complexity. The
current aesthetic of surveillant technologies is moving away from such an
unfinished, work-in-progress, to a world of contained (unopenable) white
plastic, with smooth angles and glossy screens. The contemporary
Internet-of-things appears not as a creature of wires and cables, but rather a
glossy set of images with substantial amounts of white-space. Echoing Stanza’s terminology of the “mother of
big brother”, Mother from Sen.se is a paradigmatic example of such a technology:
A smooth white, bowling-pin of a networked sensor system. So much design work
is being done here to deny the technology and the circuitry. Stanza’s most recent piece hints at moves in
this direction, despite the tangle of wires, The Agency at the End of Civilisation is noticeably smoother, than Stanza’s older work. The
extent to which this is an aesthetic choice, or simply a result of the
technology that Stanza is required to adapt and modify in the creation of his
art remains an open question. If the latter, it highlights the extent to which
technology-related art is, even when reworked and intentionally subversive,
dependent upon existing technological directions, often commercial, but also
occasionally military. Things shape what can be done with them, even if they do
not determine it
Space
Despite an orientation towards data, Stanza’s work is
inherently tied up with the representation of space, and in particular of urban
space. Earlier works such as Urban
Generation exhibited thematic
interest in the city that would later be explicitly related in form in works
such as The Emergent City. A life from
complexity to City of Bit. And Capacities: Life in the emergent city.
Some of Stanza’s most striking works take the form of miniature cities. According
to Stanza:
“Cities offer the
opportunity for unique types of data gathering experiences via a variety of
sources. With this perspective there are many unimagined threads of data and
connections that describe our world that can be explored through wireless
mobile networks, within which we can create new artistic interpretations.”
In choosing to simulate and explore the environment being
surveilled, rather than focusing upon the individual (apart from occasional
works such Body 01000010011011110110010001111001) Stanza moves in the direction
of dataveillance, and avoids the trap of focusing solely upon the physical body
of the human being in space. Much surveillance that gets media, cultural or political
attention is surveillance of the individual. We have a (potentially damaged)
traditional of individual rights, and privacy is generally considered to be
something possessed by and protecting individuals. Narratives of surveillance
often focus upon the harms to or impacts upon specific named individuals,
rather than upon the reformulation of environments as a whole.
Taking this further, we believe it allows us to situate
Stanza within a broader historical tradition of landscape art. This posits the
question for surveillance scholars attempt to use surveillance art – to what
extent is it reductive, or even colonial, to label such art as “surveillance
art” when it might be more accurately be considered contemporary landscape art.
Surveillance becomes epiphenomenal to the extent that if one is to accurately
capture, or meaningfully interpret the modern urban landscape, one simply must
include surveillance and information flows if one is not to leave out half of
the picture. The urban environment includes invisible data flows. Landscape art
is not just the admiration of the natural,
and the tradition has long since broadened from the agricultural to the modern
and post-modern city.
Landscape is political, although the particular politics can
often be in tension. Does landscape tend to obscure relations of production and
forces that have shaped the environment, including power and conflict? Or does
it offer an emancipatory potential, carrying an alternative way of seeing? Stephen
Daniels is cautious about the claims to power of landscape art, acknowledging
that if it has a power, it is a subtle, passive one, but that one that does
play a role in setting the scene for further decisions and political acts.
Martin Warnke reminds us that the actual physical landscape is the result of
political decisions by authorities over time,
and this is certainly true in the case of the contemporary urban environment
and its surveillance capacities.
James Corner is more optimistic regarding the potential of
landscape art. He believes that “landscape has the capacity to critically
engage with metaphysical and political programmes that operate in a given
society”. It plays an important role in negotiating the relationship between
the imaginary and the built. Corner quotes Augustin Bergue in saying that
landscape is the sensible aspect of the relationship between a society and
space, as well as noting the potential for landscape to assist in appreciating
how today’s space and time are phenomena radically different from their
historical antecedents.
Capacities: Life in the emergent city can therefore be understood as real-time, urban
landscape art, making urban data flows, already an inherent part of the urban
environment, an explicit part of the artwork, and bringing them to the
attention of the viewer as part of a new urban sensibility. Stanza argues in this direction in several
places:
“We need to
imagine the city at a different scale. The possibility is to extend our imagination
and enable that perception of the city as a dynamic network. We can now put
systems in place that can re-employ our perception and thus create new
understanding of how this behaviour unfolds. There are patterns, they are
connected and the systems that evolve, can be simulated and acted upon.”
Ambiguity
It is difficult for a particular type of political
scientist to make the methodological and theoretical assumptions required to
make clear claims about what a piece of art suggests or means. I can say what
it evokes for me, but then I’m a particular subjectivity. I’m also aware of my
own particular sensitivity to surveillance in a way that I concede is not
normal (although, with the spread of surveillance, it is perhaps more normal
than it once was). Beyond this, making inferences about audiences’
understanding and perception is fraught with difficulty even in the prosaic
fields of TV news and print journalism. One route to understanding is to look at what
the artist has to say about the intent and meaning of their work, although we
should remain careful that this is not taken as gospel. Fortunately, Stanza is
not afraid to provide conceptual background to his work. He makes artworks that
arise from his own research into “control space” and “surveillance space” and
issues to do with privacy.”[27]
There is therefore a set of texts one can access for a deeper understanding. From a reading of these texts, it is possible
to identify a productive ambiguity in Stanza’s work on surveillance.
Ambiguity
is interesting because it offers the potential to highlight the politics of
knowledge that relates to surveillance, including the frequent asymmetries of
information between watchers and watched.
In the textual descriptions of
several of Stanza’s urban sensor network pieces, and the text associated with
them on his website, it is often unclear what data are being collected and what
is being done with that data. We know that his sensor networks involve
environmental sensors, temperature, pressure etc, but is this all? Might we not
wonder if, like the Google Streetview cars that also recorded wi-fi data as
they circulated around the roads, there are other sensors in the mix? In the
generative artworks, the algorithms and software that take the raw data and
convert it into art are hidden from the gallery visitor. This is a deliberate strategy for Stanza who
is investigating the malleability of
data as a medium and how it can be reformed and remediated. However when Stanza
is in control of the networked hardware in his work, then the data collected
can be made open source and publicly available. This connects to a central
tension of big data: the ownership and control of data flows (including what
gets recorded in which contexts, and how are decisions based upon that data
enacted), as well as the transparency of systems, and the extent to which an
outside observer can understand their processes. The answer to this tension is not necessarily
simple transparency, as descriptions of systems that rely too much on the
technology can also cloud the situation.
A second source of playful, productive ambiguity is at work in Stanza’s
mock cityscapes. These are composed of hundreds of pieces of electronics, wired
together. It is difficult (without a detailed investigation that would not be
permitted within a gallery space) to immediately know which of these technological
elements are functional, which are functional but redundant, which are
potentially functional and may be activated in the future, and which are purely
decorative. You can start to imagine further capacities buried in that
technology. The possibilities of contemporary data surveillance are that much
more complicated that the ambiguous presence or absence of the guard in the
central tower of Foucault’s panopticon.
Thirdly, researchers on surveillance language have noted in several
places that the language of surveillance and security practices is often
ambiguous and unclear ("images are being recorded for security
purposes" for example).
Stanza’s most recent work The Agency at
the End of Civilisation plays upon this theme. This artwork, previously mentioned, is described as
a real time interpretation of data from the Internet of Cars project,
a project responding to data and research on traffic flow analysis through ANPR
(automatic number plate recognition). In an interesting form of access, the
artwork claims to draw upon images from one hundred CCTV cameras in the south
of England. When driving along the motorway, one is hardly likely to anticipate
potentially becoming part of an exhibition in a gallery – more evidence of the
capacity for re-articulation and repurpose of all forms of data.
In
addition to the ambiguity of what exactly is the “future predictive software”
stated to run the artwork, the work’s emotional content comes from a moment of
dislocation, where a familiar narrative of surveillance is shifted in an
alternate direction. This challenges the audience to consider the extent to
which they believe the claims about how the system operates or not, and the
extent to which it may or may not have been manipulated. In combination with
CCTV imagery, the computer generated voice of the system announces time-stamped
locations of particular vehicles, including identifying the occupant by name.
If the system does have access to the data it claims, then this seems
plausible, it seems aligned with the known function of ANPR (at least to this
viewer). The artwork then continues to make announcements that seem a little
more of a stretch for such a system: that the occupant of one car might be
considering suicide, that another suffers the increased possibility that life
will pass him by and be meaningless. The viewer is forced to make an assessment
about the extent to which such extrapolations are possible from the data that
might be gathered in such a system. A now familiar surveillance narrative is
subtly ruptured, but also points towards the fantasies of big data. Such an
extrapolation is probably not possible now, but might it be in the future?
Would we want it to be?
These forms of ambiguity relates
closely to contemporary concerns about the politics of Big Data. In their call
for a critical data studies (something now inherently implicated in studies of
surveillance), Craig Dalton and Jim Thatcher warn that big data technology is
never a neutral tool, but one that both shapes and is shaped by a contested
cultural landscape. They argue that the myths of big data, quantified self, and
smart cities are myths of society more generally. This means that it is
important to go beyond an instrumental examination of big data. It is not
sufficient to simply ask if these technologies work “better” or “worse” that
others, but is it also necessary to ask what types of experiences big data is
enabling, and which it is closing off.
Counter-mapping / Opening up
In Cities Under Siege geographer Stephen Graham analyses what he calls
the New Military Urbanism – the set of militarised surveillance practices and
technologies that are honed in “experimental” conditions in the cities of the
developing world before being returned to the “homeland”. In the final chapter
he examines a set of practices he terms “countergeographies”. Responding to the failure of academic
disciplines such as geography and political science to overcome their own
colonial legacies, Graham looks at the ways that artists have experimented with
ways of countering these militarised urbanisms in public through various forms
of public spectacle, including (re)using the very control technologies otherwise
used to create and enforce ubiquitous borders. These include exposure (rending
the invisible visible), Juxtaposition (countering binaries that support
surveillance such as domestic/foreign, friend/enemy), appropriation (reverse
engineering and finding new uses for military infrastructure), Jamming
(undermining the use and ritual of the problematic practices), Satire, and
Collaboration (working together with the populations subject to such
surveillance).[31] Might
these categories give us further purchase on Stanza’s work?
In one clear way, Stanza is not
involved in the exposure of existing surveillance systems that are in place and
functioning, for good or ill. He does not show us the morphology or topology of
surveillant assemblages, as much as he hints at their possibility by building
their mirror images. His work is much more likely to involve building a new
system of sensor networks, and pulling that data into a gallery space as the seed
for generative art. There is therefore much more evidence for what Graham terms
appropriation, although absent the explicit concern with militarism. One
wonders to what extent militarised technology can sit outside of Stanza’s work
in the future, if the trajectory towards fortress urbanism Graham identifies
holds true. Stanza makes use of existing technology which he repurposes and
combines with elements he creates himself to present alternative potential uses
of control technologies. If one was opposed to all forms of surveillance, then
the addition of more sensors to the cityscape might be problematic. If it
contributes to counter-mappings then the addition might be distinctly valuable.
As in Joyce’s maps of urban Victorian cities, mapping and
geographic knowledge have been linked to imperialism, governance, capital
accumulation, and exploitative material relationships. The
knowledge of the city that arises through contemporary surveillance offers
similar coercive potential. Dalton and Thatcher, however, warn us against
eschewing ‘big data’ entirely for its ties to surveillance, capital, and other
exploitative power geometries. For them, this forecloses the
possibility of making use of Big Data for liberatory, revolutionary purposes.
Rather, they suggest the (limited) potential in counter-data (a concept derived
from research into counter-mapping and with strong similarities to Grahams
concept of counter-geographies). This
movement is echoed by Stanza: “Can we use new technologies to imagine a world
where we are liberated and empowered, where finally all of the technology
becomes more than gimmick and starts to actually work for us or are these
technologies going to control us, separate us, divide us, create more borders?”
Conclusions: Surveillance art for surveillance scholars
Stanza and Surveillance studies
share a similar set of pre-occupations. Our toolkits for exploring them are
different and I hope that this collision between the two is productive. In conclusion to this essay, we return to the
question of surveillance art, and by necessity, its politics. I must admit to
some frustration. Stanza’s work gets the technology, it gets its relation to
urban space, it plays with ambiguity in capacities, language and information
asymmetries in powerful ways. It offers
up some alternative constellations of information systems, and has shifted in
interesting directions over time. However, for me, the social structures
surrounding surveillance must be continually pressing on the boundaries of his
art. There is fertile ground for considering the historical traces of how
surveillance comes about, the conflict that encourages heavily policed borders,
secured identities and the categorisation of populations. In an interview, however,
Stanza does demonstrate a clear political stance in relation to surveillance:
“We know about the surveillance
cultures and the notions of the Panopticon. Too much is being “invested” into
this controllable space. There is no doubt in my mind, the there are obvious
benefits which are easy to cite. However, such a blanketing of control is a
sophisticated red herring. It is too risky for a large population of have-nots.
We are better off with no surveillance, and the investment should be made
elsewhere.”
Maria Chatzichristodolou further
points us in this direction, arguing that Stanza’s work is “subtly, rather than
polemically critical of urbanism and the way digital technology is employed for
the surveillance of our every move.”
And perhaps this is the case. It is important for those of us thinking and
writing about surveillance from an academic perspective to be careful that we
avoid a form of surveillance studies disciplinary colonialism. It is very easy
to go out into the world of art, or film, music, or other forms of popular
culture and plant a surveillance flag on bits of art and culture. There is a
danger of an unsophisticated identification of the surveillance that progresses
no further than the very act of noting. Look! This piece of art is about
surveillance! Perhaps this is a feature of a surveillance studies engagement
with artistic practice and material which is still in the data-gathering phase,
still seeing the need to build a corpus of surveillance-related art that can,
later, with the appropriate theoretical tools, serve some analytic or
pedagogical function.
By any measure, Stanza’s work
would fit within such a corpus. However, it is important to start to build such
theoretical tools. Some of this will involve familiar questions, for example,
do we use too big a concept “surveillance”? Some of Stanza’s work is clearly
about information, and technology, and the instantiation of those factors in
the urban environment. But is this necessarily what we are getting at with the
concept? Are we missing some of the nuance? What if surveillance is
epiphenomenal, but fundamentally necessary in contemporary landscape art?
Similarly, we must find a way to think through surveillance
as material, in addition to subject. Stanza has called data “the medium of the
age”, and as we have seen, his work carries the
legacy of its technological components within its aesthetic. We will need to
think about what happens when the nature of the subject material comes up against purely aesthetic
considerations? What separates counter mapping from the aesthetisation of
surveillance? Perhaps we are too instrumental in our demand that art
represents, informs, educates about surveillance. Perhaps that’s our job?
Stanza,
"From Big Brother to the Mother of Big Brother."
Stanza
2014
