Voyeuristic Spaces: Materialising the Desire of the Gaze
Symposium:
Session Title:
- Surveillant Spaces: From Autonomous Surveillance to Machine Voyeurism
Presentation Title:
- Voyeuristic Spaces: Materialising the Desire of the Gaze
Presenter(s):
Venue(s):
Abstract:
Panel: Surveillant Spaces: From Autonomous Surveillance to Machine Voyeurism
Surveillance and its ubiquitous technological lens is often thought of as a detached gaze, an abstract, remote and impersonal form of watching. It separates watching from witnessing, and, increasingly, even the watching, analysing and interpreting is automated. Yet even though detached, the surveillant gaze is by no means passive and without agency; it is always directed and motivated by human desires. Tate Modern’s recent exhibition Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera has put the alliance between surveillance and voyeurism on display. The curator, Sandra Philips, argues that “surveillance pictures are voyeuristic in anticipation, seeking deviance from what is there: … evidence of incriminating behaviour, such as spying, crossing borders illegally, or accepting bribes” (2010). Remote and apparently disembodied, the gaze as social force also has a haptic presence, “the gesture that seizes” (Brighenti 2010), reaching towards the gazed upon.
The robotic installation Zwischenräume (Interstitial Spaces) physically manifests the force of the gaze to produce an investigative lens into the politics of surveillance. The work, a collaboration with Rob Saunders, embeds a group of autonomous robots into the architectural fabric of a gallery; they punch holes through the walls to inspect what’s outside, signal each other, and conspire. The machine augmented environment examines the stealthy invasion of digital surveillance through the physical lens of urban combat tactics. In contrast to the disembodied, disguised gaze of our everyday surveillant spaces, here the agency of the machinic gaze materializes and marks and wounds our environment. Zwischenräume’s gazing robotic agents are self-motivated, curious to study their environment and its inhabitants. Rather than serving as the eye for a human agent, they are voyeurs, only watching for their own ‘pleasure’. Interestingly, it is the machines’ desire to detect deviance from the ‘norm’ that intimately links surveillance (the norm) to voyeurism (the deviant). Zwischenräume, whose way of seeing is motivated by what it sees, expects, and doesn’t see, does not only perform but becomes an audience to the audience’s performance.
