There’s More Than One Way to Stare Down a Camera

The park outside my office window, Cal Anderson on Capitol

Hill, was recently outfitted with three city-owned surveillance
cameras. I look at the playing field occasionally; the cameras watch it
all the time.

These are the first cameras to be installed in a Seattle park, but
not the last. More will come: to Hing Hay Park in the International
District, Occidental Park in Pioneer Square, and Victor Steinbrueck
Park near Pike Place Market. The cameras operate continuously, but city
bureaucrats don’t monitor them unless a complaint is filed or 911 is
called. They demonstrate Jeremy Bentham’s principle of internalized
surveillance, that people watch over themselves on behalf of the
authorities when they know they can be watched but don’t know when or
by whom.

Then there is the raging flip side to the fear of surveillance: the
desire to be seen. Nobody has to talk bloggers or reality-TV stars into
“oversharing”; they joyfully relinquish their rights to privacy, even
if they regret it in the morning (an experience that, of course, must
be publicly narrated as well). We have a love-hate relationship with
surveillance. It’s no wonder the American government finds itself
engaged in a global war whose fundamental challenge is finding the enemy. This country has been projecting images into the world for
decades without doing much deep looking in return. The global “clash of
cultures” is, among other things, a problem of vision.

Artists are ophthalmologists. In the small, rich exhibition Don’t
You F#{%ING Look at Me!: Surveillance in the 21st Century, curated
by Misha Neininger at 911 Media Arts Center, three technologically
sophisticated artists address big questions about contemporary
surveillance: Does it matter if you can’t control your own image? Where
is privacy? How do you look back at whoever or whatever is looking at
you?

Each artist works in film, and each rejects the idea of the artist
as director—these are far less stable forms of filmmaking. In
these films, the relationship between the “filmmaker”—sometimes a
closed-circuit surveillance camera—and the subject is recursive
or deliberately reversed. It’s not as simple as a director giving
instruction or an objective camera capturing an unwitting subject.
Instead, the feedback loop is very messy.

London-based artist Manu Luksch takes advantage of the fact that
Great Britain is highly surveilled. She creates films entirely from
CCTV tapes she gets from the government, which she calls “legal
readymades.” Her Manifesto for CCTV Filmmakers explains how to
get footage from the government: Send a letter naming your protagonist
or “data subject” along with 10 pounds, a photograph of your “data
subject,” and a promise to blank out other people in your final
project.

The results are creepy and funny. In Faceless, a sci-fi
fairytale with voice-over by Tilda Swinton, Luksch organized Busby
Berkeley–
like choreography for CCTV cameras, whose operators
must have been wondering what the hell was going on. The cameras
weren’t “capturing” their subjects; their subjects, in a gentle revolt,
were creating preordained scenes for the cameras. (Like the recent
works of L.A. artists Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, this project is an
implicit critique of
auteur-driven video art like Matthew
Barney’s.) The entire premise of Faceless is that the “data
subject,” though suffering under a regime of continuous real-time
observation, is also reinscribing herself by performing rather than
being recorded.

Public parks, with their conflicting promise of personal escape, are
a perfect place to play out these tensions. In 2004, when Chicago’s new
Millennium Park opened, its art quietly spoke volumes about the current
culture of hypersurveillance: Anish Kapoor’s giant bean-shaped
sculpture became the city’s largest multidirectional mirror; Jaume
Plensa’s beloved tower of LED images of the faces of local residents
contrasted with protests against a surveillance camera on top of the
tower, demonstrating a troubled border in representative democracy,
between being counted and being called out.

When Seattle-based artist James Coupe wanted to create surveillance
art, he went back to his native England, to a park called Parkers Piece
in Cambridge. Ten cameras he placed around the city collected footage
of people going about their business; at the end of the day a computer
sorted the footage according to an algorithm Coupe wrote that
recognized movements similar to scenes from the classic Antonioni
photo-thriller Blow Up. Then, each day for four days, the
computer assembled and reassembled all its footage and projected a
narrative film onto a cinema-sized screen in the park in the center of
the city. Interspersed with the images were text cards with lines from
Julio Cortázar’s 1959 short story “Las Babas del Diablo,” the
source for Antonioni’s film. On four screens in the gallery at 911, the
remix of the material continues, and what was once documentary takes on
a tone of mystery. What must CCTV operators think is going on when they
watch? Or are we all doing the same things, moving in
clichés?

Part of what’s intriguing about Coupe’s piece, called
(re)collector, is its presentation as a public spectacle, a
giving-back of individual stories as a public puzzle. In a gallery,
even though the material is continually remixed, the larger feedback
loop has been closed and the piece takes on a little of the moldy smell
of the archive.

The large screening room at the back of 911 is reserved for Gary
Hill’s 2003 video Blind Spot, which is terribly simple and yet
pretty much a Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art. The camera (Hill, presumably) captures an older man in Belsunce, an Algerian neighborhood in Marseilles, as he walks out of a building and down the street. The action is probably only a
minute long, but Hill stretches it to 12 minutes by slowing the
playback and increasing the length of the blackouts between frames. At
first the frames blink quickly, but by the end you’re waiting for what
seems like forever between them.

Not much happens, but in this slowed-down format you have time to
register every shred of emotion that crosses the man’s face as he
reacts to what seems to be an unexpected and unauthorized filming. He
looks protectively at the women near him, their heads covered. He
hesitates. He looks the other way. He hesitates again. He becomes
angry. He approaches the camera. When he gets close he has cold feet.
His face slackens to bored. He regains his determination and clenches
his jaw. In the climactic moments, he raises a fist and makes a gesture
at the camera. His middle finger is up, but does it mean the same thing
to him that it does to us? Through it all, the camera never looks
away.

These few seconds of a man coming to terms with a camera speak
volumes about the mutual gaze between a human and a machine. After
every frame, you’re left with more total darkness in which to run over
the possibilities of what’s going on. Is this man the archetypal
“other,” watched by a wealthier, technology-equipped overlord? What
does it mean that as the man gets closer and angrier, we are left more
and more in the dark? Hill magnifies decades of fancy theory about
surveillance and power by isolating the rush of conflicting emotions
that accompany this mutual deadlock stare. One man, one camera. You’ll
see: You can’t look away.