surveillance art

very interesting question. i am less interested in the question of our right to privacy, since i read a pretty convincing argument by michael warner that nothing actually is private, that the "private sphere" has always been mediated by public dialog. i am interested in the way that surveillance art can cause us to think more carefully about how we view ourselves and how we view art. surveillance adds another frame to reality. an extra frame can lead us to think about the way in which we think of things in more traditional frames. perhaps surveillance art lead us to be less satisfied with television drama and ushered in reality tv shows.

there was a video piece fox last year, footage from an ATM camera. as the footage shows the ATM users withdrawing money, checking over their shoulders, fixing their hair, a very dramatic classical score plays. it viewed like a movie with non-actors. the musical score was so moving that it lead me to think about money, personal money problems, isolation in contemporary society, the individual against the world.

at the dan graham show in the whitney this autumn there were a few pieces of art that incorporated surveillance. they seemed to be stating that the way we act in the present is always influenced by our memory of the immediate past and our expectations of the immediate future, so that the present gets muddled and cannot be said to clearly exist at all.

i like these two projects.