Visualizing the Surveillance Archive: Critical Art and the Dangers of Transparency

• In Event: Seeing through New Eyes: Science, Truth and Technologies of Visualization - II

Abstract

This paper investigates a number of critical art projects that construct counter-archives of visual material as a response to institutional surveillance programs. Some of these works seek to reveal the materiality of state surveillance infrastructures, such as secret military installations and satellites; others demonstrate the objectifying effects of routine corporate surveillance systems like Google Street View; and still others take advantage of social media platforms to intentionally oversaturate viewers with personal images as a way to challenge—and highlight the irrationality of—government programs targeting suspected terrorists. These works hold in tension the goals of making hidden surveillance programs perceptible through counter-archiving and visualization projects while also critiquing the violence of surveillance operations that reduce human complexity to manageable data elements. As such, they appear to place great stock in the political efficacy of transparency. They also depend upon archival modalities that have historically functioned in the service of the state, even—or especially—in the implementation of the liberal archive that individuates and disciplines subjects. Thus, I argue that the archival mechanisms deployed by artists harmonize well with and perhaps solidify the rationalities that animate surveillance abuses in the first place. I contribute explicitly to STS literatures by extending critiques of the politics of infrastructure, especially archival infrastructures, to security and surveillance domains.

Author

• Torin Monahan, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill