Note: If you see this text you use a browser which does not support usual Web-standards. Therefore the design of Media Art Net will not display correctly. Contents are nevertheless provided. For greatest possible comfort and full functionality you should use one of the recommended browsers. |
(«Time Delay Room,» 1974; «Yesterday/Today,» 1975). The eighty-two-minute video «Der Riese» (1982–1983) by Michael Klier consists exclusively of images taken by surveillance cameras, thus suggesting an omnipresent controlling authority. Julia Scher equips museum galleries with so-called ‹security systems› that film visitors and transmit the resultant images all over the exhibition space («Welcome to Security Land,» 1995). Harun Farockis video piece «Ich glaubte, Gefangene zu sehen» (2000) focuses on surveillance technologies in American high-security prisons.[55]
Some artists have been creatively diverting surveillance and security systems, today almost omnipresent in public spaces, since the mid-1990s. The aim here is to develop potential protective or counter-measures against the control device. This can be done for example by converting entertainment electronics
into (self-)surveillance technologies (Bureau of Inverse Technology, 0100101110101101.org) or by unusual use and redesignation of existing surveillance systems (Surveillance Camera Players). One of the earliest Net art projects on censorship is «The File Room» (1994) by Antoni Muntadas. Cases from all over the world of state, religious and political censorship were archived in a database that was openly accessible via the Internet and that users could add to—thus revealing the act of deletion and censorship. The Surveillance Camera Players (SCP) have been performing short plays by Jarry, Poe and Beckett to New York surveillance cameras. The dialogue is not spoken, but displayed on panels—rather like the subtitles in silent films. The audience is made up of the security staff who monitor the surveillance camera pictures, and passers-by who happen to be upon the performance venues. Between 1997–1999, the Bureau of Inverse Technology developed