User:Lbattich/notes/how little we know of our neighbours
(unedited notes on class session 29 Oct 2014)
rebecca baron - how little we know of our neighbours
-images of survaillance. camera movements panning and zooming (survaillance) and gish eye distortion. images of passers-by in the city. srteets
switch to other forms of filming: low-fi digital devices shots of peaople with cameras in museums. making photos to artworkd (and themselves, etc)
photo of a woman on a bed, black and white: Francis asleep in her bed.
Voice over:
rise early, creep u to her room and photograph her, during a few months.
---theme: unaware --- being caputerd by the camera unaware ----
camera: btw the seer and the seen -gives no sacred aura to personal things -depersonalizes stops half way. Gives new value captures a deeper truth than what we see??? "it snatches the event in time"
Vintage 1977?
vintage footage 70s Britain.
An antropology of ourselves: "The Mass Ovseration movement" Earsdropping and making notes of wat ppl are ssaying. Info on ppl behaviour -record the everyday life in the streets. ANTHROPOLOGICAL DISTANCE ---- <<<
>>> Plan of Campaign
humprehy Gennings John Marrison Filmmakers and anthropologists: ggroup: the ovservers.
Send a official ovbersvers under direction of tom harrison. detailed examination of life in bolton. Observation OF the public, rather than By the public. photo journalism. Instruction (by Harrison): hey lets go posh for today, find a posh restaurant and photograph hats, how many lumps of suger they put on hte ir tea, etc. etc. etc. Observers: counting reactions of the public rather than the quantities of what they consime:
>>>> Michel de Certau: the practice of everyday life <<<<----
Idealistic persuit of knowledge for its own sake. Belief that thigns wuld become pure. Methodology?? influence of surrealism?? "Mass observation" uncovers the innerstates of daily life, by using images/signposts/etc/and so on. Belief tat the recording of facts can change things. a progressive belief. H(ats) Camera: manifest the traces of the collective unconscious not visible to the human eye.
Not want ppl to know that they are being photgraphed. Recall Vertov annotance at filming crowds in Moscow.
Importance of concealing hte camera.Technology was difficult and slow, compared to today.
(relate to today's daily life where cameras are ubiquituous)(
contemporary shots: images of ppl in the side walk. A man reading a book on a public bench. More ppl on benches.
Colin Harding: museum of film and tv looking at kodak cmeras 888 first kodak camera.
The change tha hand-held cameras introduce: to the audience (the slooked at subject). 1903: photographs of school girls. Assign them pet names, field notes on each morning. "Creatures of nature" "Zoological studies" photos of animals srinkled among photos of gilrs. hand cemras: termed "detective cameras" waiting to photograph ppl unawares. cameras become Waistcoat cameras.
A new style, ofr a new aesthetic photography. Candide photography.
contemporary images of school girls. Filmed unuwares?
Issue of the gaze. how does one react to the gaze of the cqmera.
internalize the gaze of the other.
yet with mass obseervation, we dont know whether there is a busjective other in the other side of the camera gaze. The camera other.
Not about representtion but about the performace of a particular discourse.
(Discourse for Foucault: a whole apparatus, a material pracrice, a collection of utterances, and material practices, etc... and so on)
>>> Foucault <<<<<<<<<<----------------
Keywrods: the contruction of the individual. -surveillance Jeremy Bentham: utilitarian, enlightment, invented the notion of the panocticon. The subject internalizes the fact of being observed. We acts as if we are being observer constantly, whether we really are or not. -Instead of violent control: disciplinary control. Discipline works by internalizing the discourse. -to reform -the discipline the body. Panopticon: paradigm for power and disciplined behaviour.
-We regulate our behaviour when we think we are being watched. Bentham: social psychology. A discorse of Reforming: to get them to want to be what you ant them to be.
>>>>>>>>>>>
-17th to 18th c: the body is a subject of power thorugh punishment modern age: body is trained, transformed and improved in particular spcaes: prison, school, factory, barracks, supermarkets, etc.
The aim is efficiency. And the more compliant the body (docile) the more efficient that body will be. Technology of self: procedures by which we become subjects to ourselves. gives rise to INDIVIDUALITY, this modern concept now rampaged by consumer discourse and capitalist strategies. -now the body becomes part of utility. A body can be useful: economically, etc. EFFICIENCY becomes important through the codifiction of spce and time. -time code gives individual a ranking. -space code gives individual a space.
>>>>>>continue with film notes <<<<<<<-----------
jwnings : montage of impressions subjected tonthe surreality of the everyday.
Tom was in search of intensive information. Map and collect information on the manner an institution works. The manner a discourse works. Repeating the practices of proffesional anthropoly, or classical anthropology toward primitive ppls, as an ouside observer. Photography as a tool for anthropology. Taxonomy of human species: common features to persis. Create categories, on rce, behaviour, etc. Photography power of authenticication. the mute tetimony of the picture. The quantity of data overwhelms their usefulness. Crimial identification on a topography of phyisical characteristics. Anthropometry. Antropometrc system to police department. The frontal and profile mug shots. Until 1960 camera now provices a survaillance sysytem, rather than post-event record. Mass observation team in Blackpool to investigate sex and behaviour. How they look when they are suppossed to be enjoying themselves. LEISURE Leisure under capitalism spectacle society. Acussatoin of being eavesdropper. Acussation by the goverment!! The goverment may have priviledged power for survaillance, and not hte civilians. (when a civilian group surveillance civilians....)etc 2nd war world: Investigation focuses on the pubic reactoin to the war events, propaganda, etc. Humprey Jennings creates propaganda for the war effort.
Harrison made a deal with the ministry of information intelligence body.
Observer where civilians acting in proxy for the goverment. Think of the roles of google in contemporary politics, acting as proxy intellicece for the US foreign department. Mass ovservation limited: market research fund.The practice of marketing collection data: mapping the activities of "consumers" Civilians and everyday life are now looked as "consumers.' The roloes of classic antropologist and (primitive) subject are now btw marketing researchers and consumers.
photos of contemporary surveillance cameras. What happens when they are taken out of their closed circuit and say "broadcast" (published) To publish: to make public. to make a public.
research on participatory response and diaries.
>>>>>>>>> on foucault <<<<<<<<-----------------
normalizing Technology of the self: 3 weeks to change their lifestyle predict accurately what their future would be like: examination.
timecode, normalizing judgements. get ppl into self-improvement.
do yo
discourse: do you feel responsible??
the photograph becomes something objective: it tells the predicted test results.
"Performing evidence"
Issues of welfare become part of the media.
Jason Mittell from the University of Wisconsin- Madison wrote to me and suggested this:"Technologies of the self are the specific practices by which subjects constitute themselves within and through systems of power, and which often seem to be either 'natural' or imposed from above". And Jennifer Webb of Queensland Art Gallery sent me this: "Technologies of the self are a series of techniques that allow individuals to work on themselves by regulating their bodies, their thoughts and their conduct".
>>>>>>>> notes on a text by Steve Rushton <<<<<<<<<<---------
Shift from representation to performance. Extension from using closure that chracterize disciplinary societies.
Society of control: about modulation, not about containment.
Lotikan: superstructure, reality tv sho: one phase of the neo-lberal performance subjects. Everybody who generates information and generates connectivity. The base is represented by our day to day, abiut being visible.
Performance of the economy and the performance of being (presented) in the economy. Perform oneself as a unique commodity person. In a specctacular culture, everybody is a performer, constantly.
Mark PPoster: from panopticon to super-panopticon. A system of survaillance that operates from the codes embeded in non-scoping survaillance devices: bank card, library card, etc, etc... Informational intersections, in order to get what i need. Non-scoping forms of surveillance are attendant to scoping forms of survaillance. In a control society i can move, yet there is a limit, which is encoded in the system, of how far i my mobility is allowed.
- Consumers become participants in the creation and mantainance of a super-panopticon and control society.
The discourse of the database: not an industrial discourse but based on informational data, and its control.
Digital encoding imposes a binary structure, a grid and straited space. the way the database is contructed: digitally, grid-like, stratied, organized, etc - is relevant in the manner individual are constructed. (through interfaces and underlying codes...)
Deleuze: in control society: we are controled by codes. DS: presets, rules and formulae that guide the action. CS codes: the code is allowing to move. the place is deterritorialized, but the code is in place. Command Control Centre
Now there is no centre to the panopticon, but a network of nodes wher.
In SC the I is desituated - Cliche: information wants to be free" neo-liberal capitalis: things have to flow, capital has to flow, etc, etc. Labour is liquid, money is liquid.
Modulation. The body is deterritorialized in a line of informational nodes.