| In global surveillance society, the technologies and strategic alliances that constitute surveillance regimes are variously embraced and held suspect, loved and feared. Artistic practices have kept pace, scrutinizing the social, political, and aesthetic dimensions of surveillance. Tapping into current expressions of this phenomenon, Sorting Daemons: Art, Surveillance Regimes and Social Control has been developed in partnership with a multidisciplinary international research project, the New Transparency, based at Queen’s University. |  |
Jan Allen
In global surveillance society, the technologies and strategic alliances that constitute surveillance regimes are variously embraced and held suspect, loved and feared. Artistic practices have kept pace, scrutinizing the social, political, and aesthetic dimensions of surveillance. Tapping into current expressions of this phenomenon, Sorting Daemons: Art, Surveillance Regimes and Social Control, taking place at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, has been developed in partnership with a multidisciplinary international research project, the New Transparency, based at Queen’s University, and was curated by Jan Allen and Sarah E.K. Smith. Featured artists are: Brenda Goldstein, Antonia Hirsch, Dave Kemp, Germaine Koh and Ian Verchere, Arnold Koroshegyi, Tran T. Kim-Trang, Ruthann Lee, Michael Lewis, Jill Magid, Walid Ra’ad, Kathleen Ritter, David Rokeby, Tom Sherman, Cheryl Sourkes, and John Watt.
A range of themes and artistic strategies are deployed in Sorting Daemons. In Evidence Locker: Trust (2004), Brooklyn-based artist Jill Magid probes a civic surveillance system by instigating encounters with those charged with its implementation, re-inscribing and personalizing the flow of authority in a way that confuses its trajectory. In Antonia Hirsch’s The invisible hand (after Adam Smith) (2009), convex surveillance mirrors are arranged as Braille cells spelling out 18th-century moral philosopher Adam Smith’s optimistic formulation of the beneficent mechanisms of capitalism. In a similar vein of analysis, Kathleen Ritter’s Hidden Camera (2006) offers the slapstick failed disguise of a camera in a purse as a punchy emblem of the integration of the tools of financial interest and surveillance regimes. And in Michael Lewis’s Some will take more prodding. Others will be more difficult. (2008), a trade show stripped of product and promotional signage is depicted from the high viewpoint of a surveillance camera: here, blank-eyed figures engage in the ritualized theater of selling, networking, and (bizarrely) shaming.
Other works focus on data capture systems. Dave Kemp’s Data Collection (2009) is a photographic grid of 100 “portraits” of the database-connected identity cards found in the wallet contents of volunteers. Kemp’s project registers changing attitudes, from a conception of identity as a private object of value to be closely controlled, to identity as a network of affiliations that is enhanced/actualized through use, permeable and in constant reformation. David Rokeby’s Sorting Daemon (2003) snares the images of passersby, sending them to a “theater” where they are tugged apart to disturbingly beautiful effect. Rokeby has cannily made color his system’s criterion, a choice that is both irrational and charged in its reference to race. Cheryl Sourkes’ stunning Cam Cities, Virtual Toronto (2001) draws on civic and corporate traffic monitoring systems as part of her ongoing investigation of the emerging dynamics of surveillance-infested Web-based culture.
In another transformation of the material of the surveillance environment, Germaine Koh and Ian Verchere’s Broken Arrow, version 2 renders the identifying signals of electronic communication devices as a video projection. A suspended stack of beehive boxes pulls in ambient transmissions from cell phones, emergency services, and air traffic towers. By transforming WiFi, Bluetooth, and CB radio transmissions into insect-like looping traces and sound effects, the piece points to the biological impetus behind proliferating signals and their monitoring. Rupture (2008) is part of Arnold Koroshegyi’s ongoing investigation of the aesthetics of surveillance. Digital images of artificial flowers were captured by a flat-bed scanner, then processed through the data-sorting (packet-sniffing) software Carnivore, a program used by the FBI to identify and track terrorists following the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks. The resulting twitchy, high-chroma slurry of images distills a pure language of suspicion.
Sorting Daemons includes a continuous-run three-part compilation of artists’ video spanning 1981-2004 offering an overview of surveillance-related themes from security and popular culture, to self-control and the complex entwining of anxiety and allure that such systems entail.
