CCTV Oddity: Archaeology and Aesthetics of Video Surveillance

<strong>CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF LAW AND GOVERNANCE Jawaharlal Nehru University</strong> SEMINAR SERIES <strong>PAOLO CARDULLO</strong> Associate Lecturer, CUCR – Goldsmiths, University of London on <strong>CCTV Oddity: Archaeology and Aesthetics of Video Surveillance</strong> The paper reflects on two hackivist projects, an art installation and a performance, which sought to exploit opportunities offered by ubiquitous CCTV cameras in streets and academic campuses in London. Through experimenting with misuse/hacking of surveillance system we start unpacking video surveillance(s) and the function of control implicit in the surveillance gaze. The projects plot two main reflections. Firstly, we highlight the 'normal' functioning of surveillance gaze as a dispositif of control: this starts re-surfacing even in our projects, which meant to disrupt its determinism. Drawing on Fuller's analysis of video surveillance as 'media ecology' (Fuller 2005) – that is a complex process and assemblage of materialities, meanings, and affordances – we however suggest that visual output of CCTV cameras is contextual to the specific configuration the system takes. Our projects, in fact, by temporarily changing roles and accountabilities between 'watchers' and 'the watched', favoured the development of hybrid forms of -veillances and reflexivity. Secondly, and consequently, we devise art projects as a form of critical methodology in visual studies. We hope that such forms of intervention contribute to make visual surveillance unstable, by not only investigating its apparatus, but by also engaging and complicating its capabilities as a security technology. In this sense, art interventions are inventive methodologies (Lury et al. 2012). They critically engage with a specific apparatus, here and now, rather than becoming tools to be deployed always and everywhere in the same way. <strong>Friday, 08 April 2016</strong> <strong>ABOUT THE SPEAKER: </strong>Paolo Cardullo is Associate Lecturer of Sociology (Goldsmiths), currently teaching modules of the MA in Photography and Urban Culture. He is affiliated to the Centre for Urban and Community Research (CUCR) and was CHASE-AHRC 'Going Digital' Scholar (2013). His PhD in Visual Sociology at Goldsmiths (UoL) is around the affective geographies of gentrification in East Greenwich (2012). Further info and publications: http://kiddingthecity.org