Surveillance Studies and Visual Art: An Examination of Jill Magid's Evidence Locker

Abstract

It is now commonplace to refer to the contemporary world as a surveillance society. The tremendous proliferation of surveillance over the late 20 th and early 21 st centuries has been met by a continually expanding body of scholarly work on the topic. However, such work remains largely based in the social sciences, specifically in the fields of sociology and criminology. While this work has been invaluable in many ways, it tends to emphasize empirical investigations of surveillance programs. By contrast, a growing body of work by artists and activists on surveillance questions the larger, more abstract issues associated with life in a surveillance society. The article examines Jill Magid's Evidence Locker to argue that analyzing works of visual art not only complements the existing academic literature on surveillance, but that it raises distinctly new questions about citizens' own roles and responsibilities in a surveillance society.

The Work of Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: What Artists Can Teach Us About the Ethics of Data Practice

“…These genres have included architecture (Steiner and Veel 2011), film (Kammerer 2004;Muir 2015;Zimmer 2015), literature (Rosen and Santesso 2013), popular music (Marx 2009), and digital games (Whitson and Simon 2014). Others have focused more closely on surveillance and artistic practice (Finn 2012), including both photography (Feldman 2005;Barnard-Wills and Barnard-Wills 2012) and new media or digital art (Gonzalez 2009;Ahnert 2017). Surveillance art, a genre which both predates and includes examples from the contemporary era of social media and large-scale data analytics, holds within its tradition familiar ambiguities about power, audience, the status of artists, and their role in social life (Remes and Skelton 2010).…”