Sociology Lens

by kiddingthecity

What happens if some people decided to take control, in different ways, of their own images taken in public space by the millions of CCTV, by becoming conscientious actors and protagonists of the never ending film of the city (in London, there are more that half million of CCTV, 1 every 14 citizens)? What if some people started reclaiming, under the Data Protection Act, their own ‘performances’? To the extent, for instance, of making a music video, or an art installation? Or even a youth community project in alternative media practices thanks to ‘video sniffing’, that is, the hacking of loose digital videos from unencrypted cameras and their remixing. With a bit of poetry, we might even think to drifting through the policed city following the unpredictable waves of ethereal signals (a la Surrealists).

Media commentators are quick at condemning the increasing practice as illegal, but this is at very least a gray area: who does my picture, captured in public space, belong to? Whatever the techniques, it seems clear to me that what is at stake here is the narrative of CCTV as uncomplicated and self-evident. On the other hand, media and criminologists (alongside the expanding industry of the digital surveillance systems) make no mistake on the goals of this unprecedented mapping coverage of the urban population: the ideological and politicized program of urban restructuring must go on in the name of a “safer” public space.

Mike Raco on gentrification (psu.edu free pdf)

Hille Koskela on video-surveillance (psu.edu free pdf)

by kiddingthecity (on bank holiday weekend)

Lately, I performed a browser’s search for “surgical mask”, and I came up with many (more than I expected) interesting fictions. For instance, I learned that in parts of Asia, especially in Japan, it is quite a common thing, and it makes you a good citizen, the preoccupation not to infect your neighbour if you ever feel poor. Or that surgical mask happens to be a designer’s stuff, a fashionable item, with a lot of cool features and relative price tags. And, as you can expect, it is a cool fetish in the erotic imaginary. But in the Western News Culture it is the symbol of panic, fear of unknown germs, mixing and mingling of migrant people from faraway and exotic countries, rhetoric of crowdedness and traffic, busy professionals on the front line of the latest threat.

In other worlds, the recurrent photographies of the surgical mask on the front pages are constructed as powerful chain of signifiers, despite the reassurance of professionals and politicians of the inadequacy of that measure in order to limit the risk of contagion. And by no mean least importantly, as their exchange-value increases due to relative scarcity, wearing of surgical masks has become a class issue (see The Independent).

I can rework, quite literally here, the famous ditto by Barthes: ‘The mask is the meaning’.

Marianne Hirsh on Barthes and the gaze

by kiddingthecity

It sounds more and more likely that the Police have something to do with the death of a newsagent at the rally in the City of London. Many witnesses have come forward and most importantly there is The Picture: the evidence, the forensic clue, the probatio, the real stuff judges love and on which the surveillance culture of the streets in this country has been built upon. Mr Tomlinson is on the floor, surrounded by police officers, his hands near his head as he had been struck on the head. He looks dazed in the photograph as if suffering from concussion. Besides, at the same time that the man collapsed, police had begun an unprovoked assault upon a crowd that wanted to go home after being penned without facilities for over 7 hours, and it seems more than likely to me that Mr Tomlinson may have received some kind of push or blow. The police instead claim that the man was a passer-by who suffered a sudden heart attack, and that they tried to intervene in order to save him, despite the launch of ‘missiles’ from the protesters.

I understand that photos and videos can deceive, and that they rarely hold the truth. On the other hand, inevitably, they carry some sort of attachment to the real: the man was there, the police were armed in anti-riot gear, and they were pushing demonstrators back at that time. Suspicion, at very least, is a legitimate stance.

But this post is not about what happened at Bishopsgate on Wednesday evening. Nor it is a discussion about the meanings of documentary photography. Instead, it hopes to show how awful is the pretension in place in the UK since 16th February 2009: to take a photo of a policeman or police woman without their permission is a new offence, section 58A of the Terrorism Act 2000, inserted by section 76 of the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008.

The one above is a beautiful example of just why the Police and Politicians want it to be a criminal offence to photograph and video police on the street.

In addition, throughout the day of the anticapitalist demonstrations, police photographers pointed camcorders and cameras with powerful zoom lenses at us: the CCTV-man was protected and instructed by two officers around him all the time. This was a clear attempt to intimidate people and the implied threat being that you were being watched (remember the Panopticon?), and that your attendance was itself a criminal act worthy of surveillance.

Visual Research Ethics at the Crossroad (paper)

Video-surveillance and changing nature of urban space

by kiddingthecity

The financial system is ‘ill’, capitalism is on the verge of ‘collapsing’, a drastic ‘cure’ has to be found quickly, ‘toxic’ funds need to be ‘eradicated’, and so on. Terms from the vocabulary of medicine and biology have been largely used to describe the systemic crisis of the latest capital, often comparing it to the body in pain. Probably, in an attempt to localize and make more understandable the phantasmagoria of the trillions to Mr. and Mrs. Smiths, the taxpayers, the backbone of the economy.

On the other hand, people protesting their dissent at the 20 ‘surgeons’, who gathered in London for the world summit, were confined, squeezed, made literally prisoners in public space by a well established police tactic, in Wednesday’s protest in the City of London. For seven hours, they have been left without basic services, water, food, or a chance to move away, compressed in a tight space by the police, armed in full anti-riot gear. A colleague of mine, a PhD research student, so described to me in a private email the scene: “…most people around us were totally calm and peaceful till the police penned in thousands upon thousands of people without giving reasons for their actions, without access to food or water or toilets. Disgusting!”. A journalist from the Times (Murdoch’s paper) so comments: ” The police wilfully criminalised and alienated 4,000 innocent people. If I were to design a system to provoke and alienate, I could not do better”.

What would have Foucault thought of this, I wonder?

An Intro to Biopolitics (K. Schlosser)

For a theory of urban warfare tactics (E. Weizman)

by kiddingthecity

Lovely sunny day in London for April 1, Financial Fools Day. Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are leading, as I type, carnival parades from four cardinal points to the Bank of England, in the City of London. They are Red (War), Green (Climate Chaos), Silver (Money Crimes), and Black (Land-grabbers). On Facebook it has also appeared an invitation to flash-mobbing the City Exchange with tents and sleeping bags for an Eco-camp, but the “secret” was leaked by this BBC news article a couple of days ago. Would the Police have read the article, too? And, if so, how are they going to react? There is a lot of suspense and excitement for the G20 summit, and a lot of money (far too much) has been spent on security and parties for untouchable world leaders: would they allow a day of inversion, legitimate dissent, and genuine fun in the heart of the financial district? Do they celebrate April Fool’s Day?

More images of the Apocalypse during last Saturday’s rally (London)

by kiddingthecity

… Is s/he British? Is this person happy? Intelligent? These are some of the strong questions participants were asked to cast their vote about when faced with the anonymous picture of a stranger in latest Christian Nold‘s provocative installation. Over 14,000 people in one month cast their vote in the ‘Community Metrics’ in  Nottingham (UK) and decide ‘live’ who of the volunteers should be deported: a sort of ‘friendly fascism’, a dystopian version of Facebook, a tease out of many reality TV shows.

The installation prompted me to read again (that’s what is good about radical art!) Emmanuel Levinas’ ideas on ethics: for the French philosopher, whose family was wiped out by the Holocaust, ethics begins with the direct encounter with the face of the Other. This action is ethical because, rather than knowing, and hence objectifying the other, by way of static representation, in the face-to-face encounter, ‘The face of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves in me…the Other signals but does not present themselves’.

This opens a big problem for representation, especially visual, to the extent that the object of representation ‘always falls under the power of thought’. There is a sense in which, by making an image of this overflowing, by reducing the Other to a set of conventions, a-priori categories, and image-repertoire, we might be perpetrating a form of violence, which hence deny the alterity expressed by the face of the Other.

Watch Nottingham ‘Community Metrics’

Read Calhoun’s critique of Online Communities

by kiddingthecity

Transsexual people are willing to become invisible, international acclaimed photographer and researcher Sara Davidmann maintains, in order to be accepted in the social norm, which wants a strict binary distinction between genders.  The issue of safety in public space here, I guess, is crucial – hence, the urge to comply to the visual stereotype of the male or of the female. As it is the issue of ‘medicalization’, that is, the tendency of western culture to push ‘deviance’ to the safe border of psy-disciplines as well as towards surgery: the idea being of fixing the ‘wrong’ bodies.

On the other hand, the insistence on the inadequacy of our language categories (most notably written texts) to describe and hence make acceptable situations at the border, or in-between binary constructions, seems to me quite inadequate. I borrow an expression from Thrift (2008), according to whom: ‘Practices are property of the practises themselves, not of the actors’.

Let’s look at the problem of the public toilets, for instance: two signs on the door of the cinema or the pub, no other chance. This action, which most of us takes for granted, might become a big issue for some people. Pace Judith Butler, the social construction of gender seems a lived practical experience, which involves all sort of conflicts, misunderstanding, resistance, defences, and so on. Davidmann’s critical photography seems to me to do more and better.

Border Trouble: photography, strategies, and transsexual identities by Sara Davidmann [CONTAINS NUDITY]

by kiddingthecity

To what extent, I have been thinking recently, can we feel, understand, and represent the suffering of other people? Is it reasonable to argue that the continuous exposure to images of the atrocity of the war – most notably children – has rendered those atrocities a media spectacle and “Us” a privileged passive audience? Would this prevalent opinion make any difference to the crude ‘reality’ of the conflicts? Or, on the other hand, if we maintain that “We” cannot ever understand those who experience(d) the drama of the war (as the latest Susan Sontag suggested), then, what kind of pacifism is possible?

To try to address some of these issues, I started being interested less in the grand ‘political questions’ and more in the everyday practice of the war, focusing on the daily bodily reactions or adaptations to it.

Raising Yousuf and Noor: Diary of a Palestinian Mother

Tales to Tell: from Gaza 2008

by kiddingthecity

Jeff Wall is famous for grand tableaux, which he shoots in sections over several months before stitching together the final image using computer montage. He has been known to spend almost two years on a single picture, with actors and crew to shoot scenes of the everyday. He teases out the myth of reality outside perception to the point that he is able to re-create in studio the ‘decisive moment’ of Cartier-Besson, in which the elements of an external world join together at a decontextualized point, outside time. “There’s a fine line between fact and fiction, between a moment and a perfect representation of that moment” – he said. Jeff Wall’s best work comes from never having to choose.
I want to use his work here to criticize the idea of performative aspects of identity as expression of never ending exercise of will, disconnected from the web of social practices, context and history, in which they are embedded. In other words, I maintain, practices are not propriety of actors but of the practices themselves. On the other hand, though, there is a sense in which the studio or the laboratory provides a very poor metaphor to be able to capture the complexity of the world: so to say, the body cannot contain all. There is always an emergent element of free-play, a ‘personal authorship’ (Thrift, TwoThousandEight) that comes out from the ongoing creation of affects, through encounters: ‘A non-representational outlook depends upon understanding and working with the everyday as a set of skills, which are highly performative’ (ibidem). In this sense the metaphor of the mime is a pertinent one: the actors are going out in a specific place, they cannot use any words, just facial expression, their bodies and of course objects. We don’t know what and how they are going to perform. And especially what kind of audience they are going to meet: we can only guess.

Adkins on reflexivity

Watch Jeff Wall on BBC4 documentary