Symposium

Sorting Daemons Symposium

Program Information

Martin Zeilinger is a Lecturer at Victoria College's Literary Studies Program at the University of Toronto, and an experimental filmmaker. He recently completed a Ph.D. at the University of Toronto, and is currently preparing his dissertation for publication. His dissertation project, entitled "Art and Politics of Appropriation," is a comparative study of the creative and critical re-use of already-authored cultural matter in the visual arts, experimental film, sampling music and digital art.

 

"Us, As Seen Through the Eye of the Beholder - Appropriated Surveillance Footage in Contemporary Media Art and Activism"

In 2007, London-based media artist Manu Luksch completed a 50-minute manifesto-driven fiction film entitled Faceless. The film, critically acclaimed after a series of screenings at international festivals, is constructed entirely from visual material that was captured by London's ultra-dense network of surveillance cameras, and later appropriated by the filmmaker under the UK Data Protection Act (DPA), which grants individuals the right to request surveillance materials if they can convincingly demonstrate that their personal image has been captured. Probing this law and quite literally turning it on its head, Luksch used the public sphere as a stage upon which she acted out a disturbing science fiction narrative that the public surveillance apparatus couldn't help but capture, and which critically explores the ethical implications of this same apparatus both in its form and in its content. Narrated by Tilda Swinton, the film is reminiscent of famous dystopic conspiracy narratives such as Chris Marker's La Jetée. By hijacking the surveillance machine as an unwitting accomplice, Luksch posits the creative repurposing of the surveillance gaze as a complex and immensely provocative political act that goes beyond simple rejection of surveillance as such, and that, instead, self-reflectively tests its own potential as critically productive rather than as a merely antagonistic practice. Based on my work on politically charged practices of appropriation in the field of new media, this paper closely discusses the critical implications of Luksch' work, and embeds it in a broader survey of activism and performance art that revolves around similar practices of "video sniffing." In my presentation, I consider critical and public perception of such phenomena, and complement them with a discussion of the (often quite sustained) theoretical visions of the artists and activists in question.