auto_surveillance

OVER_EXPOSURE
Disintegration: from silent movies to political silence
All normal expectations went by the board and one's daily habits were disrupted by a sense of ever-spreading all-consuming chaos which rendered the future unpredictable, the past un-recallable and ordinary life so haphazard that people simply assumed that whatever could be imagined might come to pass, that if there were only one door in a building it would no longer open, that wheat would grow head downwards into the earth and not out of it, and that, since one could only note the symptoms of disintegration, the reasons for it remaining unfathomable and inconceivable, there was nothing anyone could do except to stand still, to look and to be looked at.

Tele Genesis (the birth of Social Cinema)

1.1 THE PUBLIC GAZE/external: the panopticon was the ultimate realization of a modern disciplinary institution. It allowed for constant observation characterized bu an «unequal» gaze. Perhaps the most important feature of the panopticon was that it was specifically designed so that the prisoner could never be sure whether s/he was being observed. The unequal gaze caused the internalization of disiplinary individuality and the docile body. This means one is not likely to break rules if they believe they are being watched, even if they are not. Thus prison, and specifically those that follow the model of the panopticon, provide the ideal form of modern punishment.

Fact: The first CCTV system was installed by Siemens AG at Test Stand VII in Peenemunde, Germany in 1942, for observing the launch of V-2 rockets.


1.2 THE PRIVATE GAZE/internal: the emergence of a new kind of (tele)-vision, a (tele)vision which no longer has the task of informing or entertaining the mass of viewers, but of exposing and invading individuals' domestic space, like a new form of lighting, which is capable of revolutionizing the notion of the neighbourhood unit, or of a building/district/community.

Fact: In October 2009, an «Internet Eyes» website was announced which would pay members of the public to view CCTV camera images from thier homes and report any crimes they witnessed.


1.3 THE PUBLIC/PRIVATE GAZE/biological: the overexposure of our «selves» to the image and at the same time our necessity to saturate our «selves» with the image, has created a new optic virus: the collective Stokholm Syndrome. This virus is characterized by the fact that the hostage has become one and the same with the hostage taker. The evolution of this strain has already led to a voluntary servitude and an evolved form of master-slave relation.
Fact: 2010 UK statistics: 1 camera for every 14 people.

1.4: THE HAGIOGRAPHY OF THE MUNDANE/ or taking James Bulger by the hand

In this state of affairs, the iris is enticed by it’s being programmed by the largest image (and not only) propaganda machine in history: web 2.0. All users optic horizon has been modified by (for example) You Tube in that low quality images uploaded and watched seem to provide the user/viewer with a sense of security in that these images are designed to function under a certain aesthetic code that make them home-movie like, and therefore more user friendly and personal. As such, they seem to offer no threat to the user. The syllogism in this case is that the less identifiable the image material is, the more real it becomes, the more real it becomes the more secure and reliable it is for consumption.
1.5: THE SOFT EXTERMINATION
The propaganda machine has taken Chris Markers quest for the mundane, the simple, the ordinary (as can be seen in his cinematographic essay: “Sans Soleil”) and they have devised a new “Concentration Camp”. The axiom for this “Concentration Camp” is based on the murderous violence of banality, in which a very subtle form of extermination has been designed using indifference, monotony and the mundane as its raw (basic) materials.
Fiction(s)
Future Films (the birth of the involuntary cinema of control)
_1: empty film cans
Zanzibar: Coleridge and Citizen Kane
An infinite set of surveillance films stored and never seen.
Never seen film # 6,206
A man walks down the street holding the child’s hand. The man stops at the candy store and buys the child some sweets for school. He then waits with the child until the school bus arrives. The man departs after he has put the child into the bus.
Everyday. Winter, spring, summer, fall.
The child grows, the man slouches.
The child, now grown, walks down the street holding the man’s hand. The child stops at the pharmacy store and buys the man his medication. The child then waits with the man until the retirement home bus arrives. The child departs after he has put the man into the bus.
Everyday. Winter, spring, summer,fall.
Everyday, eternally.



Future Films
_2: internal control/auto surveillance
p.k.dick and jeremy bentham
Perhaps our eyes are merely a blank film which is taken from us after our deaths to be developed elsewhere and screened as our life story in some infernal cinema or dispatched as microfilm into the sidereal void.

Developed eye film # 11900
I do not know if it was under the influence or of a change that was already under way, as yet unnoticed, in my outlook, but i was increasingly possessed from day to day by a passionate, nagging desire for the ordinary life of an ordinary person.
 To transform to such a degree that i might loose myself in this all too ordinary otherness that looses itself in the grand scale of the ordinary nothingness that is the day to day.


To fade out.
To be passed by.
To be hidden in plain view.



Fact: Not a single word of this text is original. It is composed of appropriated fragments just as CCTV absorbs our image and re-composes us of our own fragments.