Art and Aesthetics of Visibility

Summary

With the emergence of the digital surveillance society, and especially since the turn of the 21st century, artistic explorations of key questions of visibility, observation, and surveillance have multiplied into what can be identified as a genre of its own, “surveillance art.” As surveillance has become increasingly central to societal developments and crept into everyday life, it has been the subject of important critical inquiries by both artists and theorists. Surveillance art encompasses a wide range of artworks and practices that address and interrogate issues of surveillance, watching, and being watched through a variety of different artistic strategies and media, including photography, video, installation, performance, web-based, drone, computer-generated image, and mixed-media works. As early as the 1960s, Andy Warhol used closed-circuit video to explore the power and pleasure of the mediated gaze. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Sophie Calle mixed performance, photography, and writing to explore core themes and techniques of surveillance that would become increasingly important in both artistic and scholarly discussions in the following decades, including voyeurism, exhibitionism, identity, privacy, the blurring of the boundaries between the private and the public, the veracity of the photographic image, and the contextual nature of information.

The increasing range of artistic explorations and scholarly inquiries of surveillance in the first decade of the 21st century can be broadly characterized as dominated by problematics related to state surveillance, panoptic discipline, control, power, policing, privacy, national security, and CCTV video surveillance of urban space on the one hand, and reality TV culture, participatory everyday surveillance, Web 2.0, camera phones, and the pleasures and pitfalls of watching and being watched on the other. While these themes continued into the second and third decades of the new millennium, the plethora of artistic practices and scholarly discussions also expanded to include a focus on drone warfare, machine vision, facial recognition systems, digital biometric surveillance technologies, obfuscation strategies, digital platform capitalism, datafication, hidden infrastructures of state and military surveillance, racialized surveillance, AI systems, and pervasive intimate and algorithmic surveillance.