The Irrepressible Campaign by Amnesty International

I have just pledge support for the Amnesty International campaign to support freedom of expression on the Internet. On their website they note:-

"The web is a great tool for sharing ideas and freedom of expression. However, efforts to try and control the Internet are growing. Internet repression is reported in countries like China, Vietnam, Tunisia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria. People are persecuted and imprisoned simply for criticising their government, calling for democracy and greater press freedom, or exposing human rights abuses, online.

But Internet repression is not just about governments. IT companies have helped build the systems that enable surveillance and censorship to take place. Yahoo! have supplied email users’ private data to the Chinese authorities, helping to facilitate cases of wrongful imprisonment. Microsoft and Google have both complied with government demands to actively censor Chinese users of their services.

Freedom of expression is a fundamental human right. It is one of the most precious of all rights. We should fight to protect it."

You can pledge support at - http://irrepressible.info

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Who watches you?

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I have been re-reading 'Discipline and Punishment : The Birth of the Prison' by Michel Foucault. I have turned to this work because I think that it is a good starting point for thinking about notions of visibility and the effects of surveillance in my work. Foucault argues "visibility is a trap" (Foucault 1977:200). Furthermore, he has a number of things to say about the role played by surveillance on the disciplining of society. He is particularly dark on the subject of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon .

I found the image above of this 'all-seeing' piece of architecture on WIKIpedia. Foucault notes that the prisoners are in individual cells around the edge of the structure and the warden is housed in the central observation post. In this configuration the prisoner "is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication" (Foucault 1977:200). According to Foucault's account the major effect of the Panopticon is "to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power". Basically, they act to discipline themselves!

Arguably, the most contention thing that Foucault argues about the Panopticon is that it is not just a pile of bricks and mortar. It is a "generalizable model of functioning; a way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men" ( Foucault 1977:205). As I understand this, it means that we are all disciplined through the metaphorical equivalents of the panopticon. Basically, we are self-normalizing and conform to ill-perceived social norms because of an internalized sense of being constantly watched by others.

I think this argument is important for any work of art that makes use of detection or surveillance technology because there is a need to acknowledge that the sense of being under surveillance does not end with the direct observations being undertaken through the apparatus of the work. These effects carry on outside of the work in the internalized prohibitions of society. It raises ethical issues about constructing panoptic spaces that observe the actions of the participants engaging with the work.

These issues, in turn, raise issues for this research project. Primarily, what is the role of this work? What is it intending to do (if indeed I can talk about intention in this convoluted context) with this technology?

I guess I am saying that I am keen to move away from merely deploying the technology as a novelty or curiosity. I am beginning to ask myself - How does the work relate to the technology it deploys? Does it serve as warning about effects of the particular technology. A Cassandra wailing about doom in the face of a world that is not listening? Or is it more like an engagement with the pre-existing issue of the role played by surveillance in ordering and disciplining our societies.

I came to these technologies from my work with Mikhail Bakhtin. I had argued in that work that the addressivity of certain examples of computer-mediated textual art help foster a valuable self-consciousness about participating in the act of meaning-making. I had a rather agnostic view of technology in that work. I did not make a techno-utopian argument but I tended to sound a cautious but optimistic note about these works of art. I am now feeling less optimistic and less confident about deploying these technologies. I am keen not to turn into a luddite but instead to come up with a more nuanced response to encountering surveillance technologies.

I find myself encountering fundamental questions in response to this pessimistic view of observation and control which I need to explore further. One task that I have set myself is to try and photograph all the apparatus of surveillance on my route into my office. I am thinking about traffic cameras, CCTV cameras, automatic door sensors, computer log-ins, passwords for the hole in the wall. I think this might help to context my unease and to demonstrate to myself just how deep the culture of observation has gone. But what about the low-earth orbit satellites, the unobserved observers. What about my sense of needing permission to photgraph these kinds of street furniture? What about my lurking sense of fear that I am doing something wrong? How to explore these ill-perceived sense of consciousness?

Every project has a conception phase. The pre-planning and proposal phase that often stays hidden because subsequent events make it look ill-conceived, ill-informed or just plain silly. However, when recording process it is often quite important to know where one has come from ( if for no other reason than knowing that you have gone somewhere...even if that is just round in circles). The first post of this blog is, therefore, my research proposal which I drafted first in late August-September 2006. It has been modified more recently and I believe that it sets out what it is that I am trying to achieve with this project.

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Writing(s): Not for WIMPs? - Proposed Research Scheme
Gavin Stewart - Researcher in New Media Writing - RIMAD September 2006

Context of Research and Practice

The research programme described in this proposal builds directly on my PhD studies at the University of Bedfordshire 2001-2006.

My doctoral thesis described contemporary practice in the area of computer-mediated textual art; an emergent art practice that encompasses elements of programming, writing, visual art, sound art and animation. It argued that the unusual addressivity of some examples of computer-mediated textual art are valuable because they facilitate an awareness of participation in the act of meaning-making. The practice element of my PhD illustrated the value of this unusual mode of address by developing ‘Homecoming’, an Internet-based work that investigated my understanding of the aesthetics of these texts.

‘Homecoming’ and other examples of my practice , such as ‘choice/cuts’, from this period were developed in Macromedia Flash and used standard control elements known as WIMPs (windows, icons, mouse and pointers) to interact with the reader-participant. This technology was deployed because it facilitated the distribution of the work to a widely-dispersed audience via the World Wide Web. However, the theoretical element of my research also identified a much wider range of modes of address. This research programme aims, therefore, to investigate the aspects of the addressivity of computer-mediated textual art by focussing on the role played by technical mechanisms other than the WIMPs controls.


Elements of the Research

The research programme described by this proposal has two complementary elements:

The first element involves researching examples of ‘computer-mediated textual art’ created for demonstration and exhibition spaces (an environment that generally requires modifications to assumptions underpinning the standard WIMPs systems); and

The second element involves developing a new work that will deploy a non-WIMPs-based technology (for example RFID tag detection, motion detection with video cameras or some combination of these technologies) in a reflexive manner.



Research Activities

The research programme described by this proposal will involve the following research activity:-

The creation of a research blog dedicated to recording the process and to exploring some of the issues that arise out of this research opportunity;

The development of a strand within the research blog dedicated to exploring the issues facing a writer developing a non-WIMPs based artwork within a gallery/public space;

The selection of an appropriate technology for my own work; and

The development of a new work of computer-mediated textual art.



Research Outcomes

The research programme will aim to deliver:-

1. A new work of computer-mediated textual art; and
2. A research resource that critiques and contexts 1 above.