Surveillance
A double-edged sword: comfortable security and confined society
Netfilmmakers 19. edition
24.03.10-12.05.10
http://www.netfilmmakers.dk

Foucault’s Surveiller et Punir (1975) can in a narrow sense be seen as the result of a historical reflection on theories and systems of punishment, derived from the form and concept of a prison known as a panopticon. In a broad sense, however, the book is a detailed investigation of how methods introduced since the beginning of modernity – rules, discipline, correction and observation – have been applied as techniques for exercising power in society outside prison. Ultimately, Foucault’s intention was to analyze structures and mechanisms of power, by asking not what power is but how it acts. This exhibition, too, is an attempt at a contemporary construction of Foucault’s question.

In contemporary society, the meeting of surveillance mechanisms and scientific technology has helped make surveillance still more effective and elaborate. We feel such a society to be highly convenient. Hardly any place is without CCTV cameras, watching over actions of individuals, and the rapid proliferation of electronic passports that can prove identity any time and anywhere, is another typical example of the phenomenon. To city dwellers, the absence of such things sometimes brings unease and fear. This phenomenon is all the more striking in a megalopolitan like Seoul, where it is believed that the appearance and proliferation of CCTV cameras has brought new success in maintaining public order.

But the central issue that we must note is that, as stated in Foucault’s book of 35 years ago, the action of power since the beginning of modernity is found not in the exercising of vertical, one-way authority but takes place through a network that spans the whole of society and is made up of the relationships that directly affect us. Through the microscopic surveillance entwined with our relationships, not only are our bodies trained to the rules and discipline of society; we live lives where all aspects of our everyday activity are individually recorded in the minutely detailed information network. This signifies a move from suppressing the body to the action of “authority over the body”, which disciplines it. Such a situation proves that modernization has not liberated humans but, on the contrary, is controlling them effectively.

The three artists of whose work this exhibition is composed all attempt, from different perspectives, to convey their own message about the kind of surveillance mechanisms we have seen above. Each work, rather than making a value judgment about surveillance, shows wittily how its mechanisms operate in a city like Seoul. Yangachi’s work <Surveillance Drama Series: King Kong>, < Surveillance Drama Series: Purpose of love> firstly, is based on the concept of hacking into CCTV cameras installed in public places. The artist conducts a counterattack against the gaze of the surveying subject, whereby actors in each of a series of episodes parody a scene from a film. Byeong Sam Jeon’s work <Dereliction of Duty> attempts to overturn the subject of surveillance, by regarding the CCTV camera as a living subject. A CCTV camera constantly points downwards from above, watching, but this work was created on the supposition that it must sometimes want to gaze up at the sky with a feeling of idle relaxation. This concept was born as the visual product of the addition of lyricism. Kim Gok’s works focus much more on filmic techniques and their subversion than those of the other artists, since Kim is highly active in the field of independent (or experimental) film. His work “Digression” ever-so-naively begins from the question of whether the nature of porn films is such that they are better than any other media at revealing the internalization of surveillance. Through a different and unfamiliar property, the dissolution of film, the work shows an attitude of counterattack against intrinsic surveillance.

As work of the above three artists shows, the mechanism of surveillance, though it is an absolutely necessary element that can bring comfort and convenience to people in modern society, also functions as a kind of means of exercising regulatory power, by capturing detailed information about society’s constituent elements and individuals. The omnipresence of regulatory power leads to (to borrow Foucault’s term) a “confined” society. Surveillance is like a double-edged sword, characterized by its role of keeping us safe and locking us into this confined society.

by curator Yoonsun Shin, from the curator collective Lab.Preparat

http://preparat.org/