Broken Channel


Noises of Dissent and Visions through the Shattered Lens of CCTV and Surveillance

Broken Channel looks at the contemporary experience of surveillance, seeking to decode the transmissions and explore the disembodied aesthetics of individuals reduced to spectres flickering across screens, or to highlight how control mechanisms can be disrupted or appropriated.

Surveillance is no longer the exceptional fate of the few, a state sanction requiring an extensive network of agents, or requiring the covert installation of costly and sophisticated, specialist instruments. It is now a mundane aspect of everyday existence, operating through every credit card transaction and border crossing, every time a store card is used or a mobile phone switched on. In the place of a single controlling gaze, famously described in George Orwell's 1984, surveillance is becoming lateral, a function of the way data flows between multiple points, and control distributed, as hard to pin down as it is to oppose. And people now happily sell their privacy for a penny in the pound when they sign up to a new store card, while the popularity of webcams and reality TV suggest that fear and suspicion of surveillance is giving way to a desire to observe and be observed. Rolling back the curtain of privacy is no longer an option, instead we need new visions of how surveillance shapes perception, new strategies for how to intervene.

Vigilare by Kaffe Matthews (Annette Works) and Riz Maslen (Big Orange Cat Music/www.neotropic.net) explores how CCTV footage can be reclaimed, disrupting the linear flow of information to open up alternative perceptual spaces. The silent video was shaped and moulded along with a heap of sonic improvisations to look again at public space and to reveal the personal and private spaces we think we find within them. From harsh impersonal images, a hidden chest of life and humour was revealed.

Thee I is our mirror v0.5, work-in-progress by Coldcut and Outer Bongolia, looks at the police's monitoring of protest and protestors, and the Non Violent Direct Action movement's responses to video surveillance. The piece focuses on actions and reactions from disparate members of the Surveilled Society, clips from forced evictions, free street parties plus an improv performance given by the New York-based Surveillance Camera Players.

Imperial Beach (Sistema de valor No. 8) by Los Angeles artist/activist collective Ultra-red (FatCat/mille plateaux) is a portrait of the April 2001 protests against the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City and the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). It explores the surveillance of the multitude, as well as how the video and internet become powerful tools for grass-roots organisation and autonomous global communication, in this case between Quebec and demonstrators who came out in solidarity on both sides of the US/Mexico border in Tijuana (the site of some of the most extreme surveillance in the world).

Elliot Perkins (phonem/Morr Music) has investigated the way that surveillance, an in particular the application of the Eurodac database and Schengen Convention, is used to monitor immigrants and asylum-seekers. In Non-EU he explores the intimate spaces that the surveillance does not capture and the traces of invisible people, using field recordings to examine the incidental noises and long silences that mark the journey of the migrant, sounds processed and layered to expose the alienation of the migrant condition.

Aprotic by Battery Operated + Made (C0C0S0L1DC1T1/Skam) uses self recorded sound and video footage taken in heavily surveilled architectures such as casinos, hotels and superstores to make new audio and video environments. The project is the second part of Battery Operated's exploration into the way in which muzak is used in these types of spaces to influence psychological states and movements.

TaystesROOM by New York-based artist Jenny Marketou prizes open observational technologies to reveal erotic fantasies of control, hacking into surveillance cams drawing you into a world of voyeurism where the watchers are watched and the trackers tracked, with a sonic component which is dynamically generated as the application extracts and generates sounds (in real time) while it is searching for taysty tid bits of information in the surveillance databody, not unlike a detective, sifting through the body of evidence.

Broken Channel was commissioned by futuresonic. TaystesROOM was supported by Cornerhouse and Hull Time Based Arts.

www.futuresonic.com

Drew Hemment
December 2003