Public Art Encounters

Art, Space and Identity

Martin Zebracki, Joni M. Palmer, Martin Zebracki, Joni M. Palmer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317073833
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Public art is produced and 'lived' within multiple, interlaced and contested political, economic, social and cultural-symbolic spheres. This lively collection is a mix of academic and practice-based writings that scrutinise conventional claims on the inclusiveness of public art practice. Contributions examine how various social differences, across class, ethnicity, age, gender, religion, ability and literacy, shape encounters with public art within the ambits of the design, regeneration and everyday experiences of public spaces. The chapters richly draw on case studies from the Global North and South, providing comprehensive insights into the experiences of encountering public art via a variety of scales and realms.

This book advances critical insights of how socially practised public arts articulate and cultivate geographies of social difference through the themes of power (the politics of encountering), affect (the embodied ways of encountering), and diversity (the inclusiveness of encountering). It will appeal to scholars, students and practitioners of cultural geography, the visual arts, urban studies, political studies and anthropology.

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Part I

Power

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2 Subverting surveillance

Power and incivility in public transit art

Martha Radice and Brenden Harvey

What happens when an art installation disrupts the social order of an urban public space? This chapter explores the power dynamics at work in Time Transit, an interactive media art installation by Kim Morgan that ran on a public bus in Regina, Saskatchewan (Canada) for two months in autumn 2006. Time Transit was created during Morgan’s artist’s residency at TRLabs, a research consortium associated with the University of Regina. It was installed on a bus operating on Route 4, which was fitted with two pairs of flat-screen monitors (one at the front and one toward the rear), a GPS system, a computer and a wireless network connection. Six digital cameras attached to computers transmitted photographs of six major bus stops along the route (Figure 2.1), and a website was set up for remote viewing and participation in the installation (www.timetransit.com). The connections between the hardware components were managed by a server at TRLabs. On the bus, the left-hand monitors showed translucent, overlaid photos of stops where the bus had already been – a layering of ‘memories’ – while the right-hand screens showed real-time single photos of where the bus was going – the stops ahead. The website showed a map of the route with the camera locations and real-time images and the real-time location of the bus. The key interactive element was that members of the public could send short text messages to the installation via mobile phone or the website. These scrolled along the screens beneath the photographs (Figure 2.2); if no new messages were incoming, the screens displayed messages selected at random from the pool of those already sent. A disclosure statement was posted on the bus and along the route to tell people about the project (Box 2.1). Time Transit was a complex, innovative assemblage of devices, software, data and people; its existence and functioning depended not only on close collaboration between Morgan and Craig Gelowitz, lead engineer on the project, but also on negotiation with institutions such as the City of Regina, Transit Regina and SaskTel, the regional telecommunications company.¹

Time Transit constitutes a rich case study for analysing how different forms of power can circulate through public art. Unusually for an interactive installation, it left behind traces that are available for empirical analysis. While the photographs had to be discarded within 24 hours to comply with privacy legislation, the 3,960 text messages sent to the installation, which did not include any personally identifying data, were retained. As anthropologists who study the social and cultural dynamics of urban space, we seek to understand how public art intervenes in the urban public – the routine or unpredictable configurations of people, places, information and events that make up a city’s public life – and vice versa. The Time Transit text messages provide a rare opportunity to investigate one facet of how members of the public actually interacted with urban public art. We have conducted a qualitative analysis of this dataset, coding the messages along themes of content, genre and form. Time Transit deliberately engaged with the topic and technologies of electronic surveillance; it also created a space for subverting surveillance by enabling the public to ‘talk back’ in the installation. Our analysis shows that in so doing, it unsettled the social order of the public bus.

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Figure 2.1 Time Transit, Regina, 2006: one of the cameras. Source: Kim Morgan.

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Figure 2.2 Time Transit, Regina, 2006: the view inside the bus. Source: Kim Morgan.

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Box 2.1 Text of signage announcing Time Transit

Disclosure Statement

One of the buses traveling route #4 (Walsh Acres/Hillside) and the following bus stops are part of a mobile and interactive art installation entitled Time Transit.

11th Avenue/Cornwall Street

12th Avenue/Scarth Street

Albert Street/6th Avenue

Rochdale Boulevard/Radway Street

SIAST Campus Road/SIAST Main Campus

University Drive West/Riddell Centre

The project involves the use of surveillance cameras, a Global Positioning System (GPS), flat screen monitors, a public website and an instant text messaging device. Real-time images of individuals and activities at and within the vicinity of the bus/bus stops/bus shelters, and messages received from the public, can be recorded and displayed on-board and on the website, as part of the project.

For more information, call the City of Regina at 777-7000, or visit www.regina.ca and www.reginatransit.com.

This ground-breaking project encourages discussion about sustainable public transportation, and explores the relationship between art, engineering, public service and technology. It was designed and produced by TRLabs.

www.timetransit.com
text message: 1-306-526-6038

Source: Kim Morgan.

This chapter follows two lines of inquiry. First, we analyse Time Transit as a work of counter-surveillance. Specifically, we draw on sociological studies of surveillance and ‘artveillance’ to identify four key concepts – visibility, location, technology and participation – which, along with our analysis of interviews that we conducted with Morgan and Gelowitz, their writing about the work (Morgan, Gelowitz and Benedicenti 2008, www.timetransit.com) and its press coverage (Anderson 2006, Beatty 2006, TRLabs 2006), illuminate how Time Transit challenged the ‘institutional power asymmetries’ embedded in surveillance systems (Monahan 2006: 516). Indeed, some such challenges were made explicit in a number of messages in the dataset. Second, we show how the text messages sent to Time Transit disrupted the ambience of urban civility that normally reigns on public transport. Although the bus company demanded a degree of censorship of the messages, some got through that were quite offensive – sexist, racist or homophobic. Using concepts from urban sociology and gender studies, we show how the unusual technological conditions of production of these messages (anonymity, mediation, ephemerality), combined with generalized hegemonic masculinity, allowed certain Time Transit contributors to breach the normal social order of the bus. We conclude by considering what implications Time Transit, as an artwork that enabled socially controversial interactivity, has for public art.

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Art as counter-surveillance

One of the key roles of art is to trouble received wisdom, to induce uncertainty or wonderment about significant social and cultural phenomena (Barone and Eisner 2012). The burgeoning of surveillance, which raises questions about power relations, human rights, and the right to privacy versus the public good, is one such critical topic. Bennett et al. (2014: 6) define surveillance as ‘any systematic focus on personal information in order to influence, manage, entitle, or control those whose information is collected’. Systems of surveillance have been expanding and intensifying for the last three or four decades, especially since the destruction wrought by hijacked planes on 11 September 2001. This expansion is driven by constant technological improvements, the profitability of the personal-information economy, and the entanglement of the neoliberal state with private lives and private enterprises; it is also bound up with increasing societal emphasis on risk management and national security (Bennett et al. 2014, Lyon 2003). While older surveillance methods involved personally monitoring individuals and manually compiling files on them that only select people could read, surveillance is now ubiquitous, largely automated and relatively accessible. Countless closed-circuit television cameras scan specific locations, but the biggest increase is in ‘dataveillance’ – surveillance extrapolated from the huge banks of personal data that are generated whenever humans interact with networked computer systems – surfing the Internet, buying things with credit or debit cards or using mobile phones, for instance (Lyon 2002). Such everyday surveillance contributes significantly to ‘social sorting’, meaning that data is abstracted from embodied persons to create sets of information and construct profiles that ‘classify and monitor sets of people deemed risky and, sometimes, to exclude them from full participation in society’ (Bennett et al. 2014: 47).

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Enough artists have created work on surveillance – mainly visual, but also data-based – for social scientists to have started analysing it (Albrechtslund and Dubbeld 2005, Barnard-Wills and Barnard-Wills 2012, Brighenti 2010, Genosko 2006, McKay 2013, Monahan 2006). To delineate the topic, Brighenti has coined the broad term ‘artveillance’, ‘the domain of the reciprocal influences and exchanges between art and surveillance’, with its subset ‘surveillance art’ being ‘every contemporary artwork that in some way hints to or deals with topics, concerns and procedures that falls within the interest of surveillance studies’ (2010: 175). Drawing on surveillance studies, artveillance and social science at large, we identify four intertwined concepts that shed light on surveillance art in general and Time Transit in particular: visibility, location, technology and participation.

First and most importantly, dynamics of visibility are fundamental to both artistic practices and surveillance – and a fortiori to surveillance art. As McKay (2013) points out, artists are trained specifically to look, to observe, to stare. Vito Acconci and Sophie Calle have pushed this skill to its limits in surveillance artworks in which they pry into the personal lives and effects of strangers. Other artists employ digital cameras and closed-circuit or wireless transmission networks, which make surveillance depersonalized, mediated and remote. For example, in McKay’s video art made from filming strangers in public places, ‘The closely zoomed images . . . suggest proximity, even uncomfortable overproximity, and imply a level of intimacy with a stranger in a copresent space, when in fact, I was on another train some distance away’ (McKay 2013: 344). This potential for distortion points to three ‘models of visibility’ – or ways of looking – identified by Brighenti (2010: 176). Visibility as recognition means that by looking at others, we acknowledge them as persons; ideally, it is reciprocal, with invisibility implying social exclusion. Visibility as control, in contrast, is non-reciprocal: here, unseen watchers look at others to gain power over them, often turning embodied subjects into abstract information; seeing becomes tracking. Finally, visibility as spectacle, also non-reciprocal, puts the viewer and the viewed on different planes, since ‘the spectacle is a set of images detached from life and simultaneously falsely proposed as an illusory form of unity of life’ (Brighenti 2010: 176). Here, the act of looking bridges yet separates the ordinary (watchers) from the extraordinary (watched).

While control might be the most common mode in surveillance as such, the other modes are often present in surveillance art, which implicates its viewers in patterns of recognition (evoking empathy for the watched) and spectacle (elevating quotidian images or data to a special, even sacred status). Much surveillance art plays with the different degrees of reciprocity between watcher and watched in each mode of visibility. For example, the Surveillance Camera Players, based in New York, devise short plays to perform in front of surveillance cameras, rendering their purpose absurd, in the manner of the court jester or fool, and turning the tables on the watchers who, if they notice the play, necessarily pass from the mode of control to viewers of a spectacle (Genosko 2006, Monahan 2006). Reciprocity raises questions about the ethics and legitimacy of surveillance art, which can be compelling precisely because it shows images that are usually not seen in public, thereby implicating its audience in an asymmetrical dynamic whereby they, as unseen watchers, also have power over the watched (McKay 2013).

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The second idea of location refers to the ways that surveillance art fractures and compresses time and space. Surveillance extracts images or other data from one time and place and reproduces them at another, extending, expanding or displacing the field of vision and scope of knowledge of the surveillers. Crucially, it also disrupts the boundaries between public and private spaces or spheres. Indeed, since the tension between public and private is at the heart of debates about the expansion and regulation of surveillance, we could understand all surveillance art to be public art, if we define the latter as ‘public’ not by its siting, but by ‘its engagement with the congested, cacophonous intersections of personal interests, collective values, social issues, political events, and wider cultural patterns that mark out our civic life’ (Phillips 2004 [1989]: 192). Surveillance art puts the viewer in unexpected locations and dislocations.

Third, not surprisingly, technology is a crucial element of surveillance art. Cutting-edge surveillance technologies appeal especially to media artists, not only as tools they themselves can use to obtain desirable images or effects, but also as instruments – usually in the hands of the powerful – that can or should be hacked, dismantled, reassembled and subverted. Several artists use technological intervention to resist surveillance; for instance, artist-engineer Steve Mann makes wearable cameras that ‘shoot back’ at surveilled spaces (Genosko 2006, Monahan 2006). Artists’ appropriations of surveillance technologies can open up promising cracks in systems that are usually regarded as monolithic, persistent and pervasive; they remind us to think about surveillance

not as a merely technical process focused exclusively on recording images, tracking data flows and processing acquired and stored data, but also as a somewhat “artful” set of techniques, which may be more creative and, with Lévi-Strauss, more similar to bricolage than usually assumed.

(Brighenti 2010: 175)

Surveillance as bricolage points to the fourth concept: participation. Albrechtslund and Lauritsen (2013) use Actor Network Theory to explain surveillance systems as networks that entail participation from heterogeneous actors, both human and non-human. Their starting point is that rather than being omnipotent and all-seeing, surveillance can instead monitor very small slices of life very thoroughly. This variability in scope raises the question of exactly how actors are ‘enrolled’ in surveillance networks: a GPS-enabled sports watch enrols participants into one sort of surveillance system, a CCTV camera into another. Therefore,

participation must be studied specifically; how is participation established and maintained? What kind of resistance is present in the surveillance situation? Such a study might provoke criticism, as it is not possible to point out a priori powerful a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Praise
• Public Art Encounters
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Power
• Part II Affect
• Part III Diversity
• Afterword
• Appendix: Response Piece – Everyday Lived Experience
• Index