Society. Spaces. Screens

Abstract

My proposed paper is an articulation of my current research exploring the discourses surrounding the politics of space, environmentalism, digital globalization and surveillance. In what can equate to a commodification of surveillance, I have, for the last 10 years, been traversing the globe through open source CCTV images, accessed through apps on my iPhone. Images captured through these live feeds transform the phone into a panoptic device, enabling me to explore the homogenization and alterity of cultures and their environments. Through it, I become global digital voyager of physical and geopolitical spaces via a device a large section of the world’s population has access to and carry around in their pocket. This democratization of surveillance rather than being a ‘dark machine of [state] control’, as Wendy Chun has termed it, becomes a digital ambassador for exploration, forging the concept of a new ‘freedom frontier’. The cameras I access daily and ritually from my smart phone act as static distant observers. My methodology is to focus on communities geographically disparate in their spread: American cities and small towns; the cultivation of an orchard in Japan; a housing complex in Tehran; rivers and harbours. These aerial positions, provide an apolitical overview of human occupation, expansion and topographical context. The pan optics of digital surveillance utilizes technologies that are autonomous in their availability, a digital democracy Kat Lecky describes as ‘a space within which dwell ever-increasing numbers of individuals from diverse classes, educational backgrounds, races, nationalities’. An egalitarian occupation of digital space.