CTRL[SPACE], Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother

edited by Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Frohne and Peter Weibel.
ZKM, Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe & MIT, Cambridge, MA, 2002
655 pp., illus. Trade,
ISBN: 0-262-62165-7.

Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Hogeschool Gent,
Jan Delvinlaan 115, 9000 Gent,
Belgium

stefaan.vanryssen@pandora.be

Beware! Someone is watching you while you are reading this review.

At times, it is difficult for this humble reviewer to avoid the kind of inflated prose that usually fills the back covers of pulpish bestsellers, but in this case I am afraid I have to use them myself. Phrases like 'truly magnificent' or 'must read' generally put me on guard, and most of the time I wearily put a book back on the shelf or table when I see the exclamating superlatives trip over each other. Now let the reader be warned: Ctrl[Space] shall not be put back on the shelf!!! I will not allow you to do so! Because it is a truly magnificent book! And you must read it.

Ctrl[Space] is at once a catalogue and a reader. It accompanied an exhibition (2001-2002) at the famous Center for Art and Media at Karlsruhe, Germany, on the theme of surveillance, the ubiquitous use of technologies for overlooking and watching, controlling and monitoring in modern society. The work of no less than seventy artists or artist groups was brought together under eight subthemes and, in the book, each of these themes is introduced or accompanied by three to five key essays by artists, philosophers, curators or historians. I would exceed the space alloted to this review if I were to name all the artists and contributors, so, at the risk of being accused of subjectivity, I select one article and one artist from each subtheme. For a full list see http://ctrlspace.zkm.de/e/

'Phenomenologies of Surveillance' has a clever and very readable essay by Christial Katti entitled "Systematically" Observing Surveillance: Paradoxes of Observation according to Niklas Luhmann's Systems Theory. The title says it all and it is a must read because it opens the sometimes difficult theoretical architecture of Luhmann's sociology to a broader readership. My favourite artwork in this section is Michael Klier's The Giant, a 82 minutes video work from 1982/83 compiled from thousands of images from public and private surveillance systems.

Read Harun Farocki's essay Controlling Observation under the 'Surveillance and Punishment' theme, dealing with control in penitentiary establishments and next look at Rem Koolhaas' post-anti-benthamian reconstruction of a Panopticon Prison in Arnhem, The Netherlands.

Historian Robert Darnton wrote a sad and hilarious essay on The Stasi Files - the kilometers of documents collected by the political secret service of the now defunct German Democratic Republic. And read Duncan Campbell's essay on Echelon too, both included in the 'Politics of Observation' section.

Editor Ursula Frohne contributed to the Surveillant Pleasures theme with "Screen Tests": Media Narcissism, Theatricality, and the Internal Observer. You will never want to be on television again. Pierre Huyghe's remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window is the absolute must-see in this section. (And you will look differently at the original as well).

Under 'Controlled Space', the editors chose a text by Gilles Deleuze: Postscript on Control Societies. For once a clear, readable and straightforward piece by the godfather of postmodern media theory and a wildly disturbing source of reflection for anyone working in an organisation, whether it be a university, a company or the army. The subversive New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU)'s camera project nicely illustrates this topic.

Theme six is 'Tracking Systems'. McKenzie Wark delights and gives one a lot to think about when using the old GPS system in one's car in his essay To the Vector the Spoils. His central idea is that "surveillance is only one element of an integrated form of power, vectoral power. Its other elements are the capacity to receive and transmit information, the capacity to archive and analyze information and the capacity to move resources to and from given detinations in a timely and accurate fashion." It unifies the analysis of economic and military power. Surprising artist selection: John Lennon/Yoko Ono's video clip 'Film No 6. Rape' in which the invading camera is the rapist and the privacy rather than the physical integrity of a woman is violated.

It is hardly possible to overlook the work of Ann-Sofi Sidén when thinking about surveillance. She is included in the exhibition with Station 10 and Back Again, a mixed-media installation from 2001 featuring a fire station in Norrkoping, Sweden. It is probably the best example of an activity that unintentionally turns into a means of control. The same happened/happens to photography in general. As an involuntary vector of surveillance, it is explored in Geoffrey Batchen's Guilty Pleasures. This is one of three essays on 'Control, Surveillance, and Everyday Life'.

The last theme, 'Recastings: Surveillant Subversions', discusses and shows the subversive uses of surveillance technologies, e.g. to protect human rights, to support the citizen against the state or to denounce crimes of war. Read editor Thomas Levin's essay Rhetoric of the Temporal Index: Surveillant Narration and the Cinema of "Real Time" for an excellent discussion of the use of real time footage in fictional movies and enjoy the works of the Institute for Applied Autonomy and the Bureau of Inverse Technology - what's in a name?

Believe me, it's almost too much, but if you want to scare the wits out of your dinner party and to make sure that they will think twice before using their credit card ever again, anywhere, anytime, this is the book to mine for a few good theories and examples.