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CCTV/Creative Control seeks to question the oppressive mechanisms and discourses implemented in the city through the temporary appropriation of public space. The intervention consists of a video projection displaying an over-sized eye onto the lower surface of the 10-story-height Milton Street water tower in Brooklyn, New York. Still the highest point in the area, until it is dwarfed by new gentrification plans, the water tower exists as a relic of the neighborhood’s industrial past. |
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“raising questions of private control over public space in the urban context.”
Courtesy of the artist.
The State of Things: Occupy Everywhere and Interventionist Art
Marcos Zotes
CCTV/Creative Control seeks to question the oppressive mechanisms and discourses implemented in the city through the temporary appropriation of public space. The intervention consists of a video projection displaying an over-sized eye onto the lower surface of the 10-story-height Milton Street water tower in Brooklyn, New York. Still the highest point in the area, until it is dwarfed by new gentrification plans, the water tower exists as a relic of the neighborhood’s industrial past. The intervention temporarily transforms this iconic landmark into a discernible CCTV tower, raising questions of private control over public space in the urban context. By intervening in the everyday order of contemporary urban life, CCTV/Creative Control aims at both producing moments of antagonism –however transitory, fragmentary or ephemeral– and finding new ways to practice the city, not simply as consumers but as creators.
Marcos Zotes is an architect/artist who lives and works in New York. www.metacitizen.com.
*** This article was published by NY Arts Magazine, 2011. NY Arts Magazine is published by Abraham Lubelski. Sponsored by Broadway Gallery, NYC and World Art Media.
