by Jon Lackman | 2 December 2010 | Uncategorized
The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published an amusing article, “To Monitor Office Behavior, Colleges Add Windows to Professors’ Doors. And faculty members, to regain their privacy, hang curtains or tape up paperwork.” Surveillance seems omnipresent today in life and in academic scholarship, and our field is no exception. In the September 2010 Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, David Lyon reviews Anna Verner Andrzejewski’s Building Power: Architecture and Surveillance in Victorian America:
All too frequently mass media and the popular press suppose that [pervasive surveillance] is all new, the product of recent technological innovation … But behind the burgeoning industry of post-9/11 security devices intended to scrutinize the public for potential terrorists is a culture of surveillance, born in antiqutiy and nurtured to adulthood in modernity … The narrative begins with prisons [and extends to] the domestic environment of middle-class homes with servants. Here, too, she find many examples of architectural efforts to facilitate surveillance, as well as “everyday resistance” to it … Modern architecture, in Andrzejewski’s examples, is persuasively interpreted in terms of its sometimes dominant and always defining surveillant aspects.
In the Summer 2010 Representations appears Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli’s “Shadowed by Images: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and the Art of Surveillance”:
Lozano-Hemmer reminds us that our reactions, interactions, and playful engagement with surveillance technologies are not necessarily subordinated to preprogramming … Possible new weapons [against surveillance] may be found in the proliferation of responses, relations, interactions, indeterminate or plainly dubious activities … This is, admittedly, a strategy of extreme risk.
