Week 6: Visual Surveillance

<aside> 💡 One of the biggest takeaways I got from this week’s readings was that the world of visual surveillance takes up multidimensional space and it can decide whether to be overt or covert or somewhere inbetween. Paglen’s “Operational Images” uses Farocki’s Eye/Machine III from the early 2000s as an example of the militarization of visual technology. Watching his work reminded me of spy movies like Mission Impossible with their radar or drone displays which, it turns out, isn’t so far fetched of an idea. “One C.I.A. director’s interest in the technology grew from a James Bond movie — he asked his staff to investigate facial recognition after seeing it used in the 1985 film ‘A View to Kill,’ Chinoy notes in “The Racist History Behind Facial Recognition”.

If examples like drones and cruise missiles represent surveillance from above, then Ring’s cameras represent surveillance at the ground level. What makes Gizmodo’s Ring exposé by Cameron and Mehrotra especially concerning is the cooperation of private conglomerates with local or regional enforcement agencies, further fortifying the panopticism.

Drilling down further into a deeper layer of the multidimensional surveillance space is our own phones. Perhaps this represents surveillance at an individual level as Hanrahan questions the ethics of GPS-powered mapping services like Google Maps in “You Are Here”. While there were many insightful thoughts in her piece, her example about “when a guy on Tinder searched my somewhat unusual first name on Google Maps” really struck me. Growing up as an only daughter, my parents have always been anxious whenever I’ve commuted or traveled. There have been many times when they’ve asked me to turn my location on so they know I’m safe. Now it makes me wonder if the same technology could simultaneously keep me safe and make me vulnerable to predators?

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