Kathleen Ritter, Hidden Camera, 2006, Collection of the artist.

Exhibitions

Sorting Daemons:
Art, Surveillance Regimes and Social Control

Contemporary Feature and Davies Foundation Galleries, Etherington House Study and the Union Gallery Project Room
16 January - 18 April

Information-gathering systems increasingly affect our lives, tracking our movement and consumer preferences. Such "sorting daemons" reinforce existing streams of influence and quietly create new ones. The artists in this exhibition take measure of our relationship to surveillance by addressing its social, political and aesthetic dimensions. Photographer David Kemp’s Data Collection project, for instance, probes attitudes towards the circulation of personal information in a stunning array of identity card "portraits," while David Rokeby’s haunting Sorting Daemon stages real-time capture and processing of the harvested images of passers-by.

The exhibition features works in a range of media-including painting, photography, video, installation and responsive electronic art-by artists Brenda Goldstein, Antonia Hirsch, David Kemp, Tran T. Kim-Trang, Germaine Koh and Ian Verchere, Arnold Koroshegyi, Ruthann Lee, Michael Lewis, Jill Magid, Walid Ra’ad; Kathleen Ritter, David Rokeby, Tom Sherman, Cheryl Sourkes and John Watt. Setting a context for current concerns, the video program draws on artists’ tapes produced over the past two decades. This exhibition extends off-site with presentation of Kathleen Ritter’s Hidden Camera at the Union Gallery in Queen’s University’s Stauffer Library until March 9.

An illustrated multi-authored publication with critical essays on artists and the culture of surveillance, social sorting and data-aesthetics by Jan Allen, Kirsty Robertson and Sarah E.K. Smith will be available.

Curated by Jan Allen with Sarah E.K. Smith, Sorting Daemons complements the multi-faceted research project The New Transparency, a SSHRCC-funded Major Collaborative Research Initiative (MCRI) under the leadership of Dr David Lyon, Queen’s University.

Jan Allen

Sorting Daemons is curated by Jan Allen and Sarah E.K. Smith. This exhibition and its associated programs and publication are supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council (an agency of the Government of Ontario), the City of Kingston and the Kingston Arts Council through the City of Kingston Arts Fund, The New Transparency SSHRC Major Collaborative Research Initiative and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, the George Taylor Richardson Memorial Fund, Queen’s University, the Rita Friendly Kaufman Lecture Fund and the Department of Art.

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Symposium

Symposium: Sorting Daemons

Friday 15 January - Sunday 17 January

A Symposium bringing together leading artists and thinkers on surveillance in contemporary society will be held at the launch of the exhibition Sorting Daemons. The keynote lecture will be followed on Saturday by round table discussions examining artistic practices and modes of "seeing," and plumbing the methods and implications of surveillance technologies. The symposium will conclude with a video screening.

Free. No registration required. Except where otherwise noted, all events are scheduled at Ellis Hall Auditorium at 58 University Avenue.

Friday 15 January

7-8:30 pm, The Rita Friendly Kaufman Lecture
Jordan Crandall, media artist and theorist University of California at San Diego
"Reconsidering Surveillance, from Panopticon to Program,Tracking to Formulating, 'Closed World' Control to Open-Sourced Security, Apparatus to Assemblage"
8:30-10 pm: Reception, Art Centre Atrium

Saturday 16 January

1-2:30 pm:
Data Harvests and the Theatre of the Self
Moderator: David Murakami Wood
David Kemp "Data Collection: Every Card Is A Database"
Kathleen Ritter "Now You See It, Now You Don't"
Cheryl Sourkes "Live Free Webcams"

2:30-2:45pm: break

2:45-4:45 pm:
The Construction of Public Spaces/Public Spheres
Moderator: Kirsty Robertson
Antonia Hirsch "A Plurality of Solitudes"
David Rokeby "Camera as Projector: The Automated Gaze in Public Space"
Martin Zeilinger "Us, As Seen Through the Eye of the Beholder – Appropriated Surveillance Footage in Contemporary Media Art and Activism"
Jonathan Finn "Seeing Surveillantly: Surveillance as Social Practice"

Sunday 17 January

2-3:45pm:
Screening

Defiant Gazes artists’ videos on surveillance by the Bureau of Inverse Technology, Tran T. Kim-Trang, Walid Ra’ad, Shelly Silver and Ryan Stec, introduced by Sarah E.K. Smith, with a post-screening dialogue with Sarah E.K. Smith and Susan Lord.

 

The symposium for Sorting Daemons: Art, Surveillance Regimes and Social Control is held in conjunction with: Camera Surveillance in Canada: A Research Workshop January 14-16, 2010, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Interested participants can attend sessions highlighted in orange on their website. Attendance is free.

Sponsored by the 2009-2010 Contributions Program of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC), Ottawa and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC) and hosted by The Surveillance Studies Centre, in affiliation with the Surveillance Camera Awareness Network and The New Transparency Project