CTRL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother Edited by Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Frohne, and Peter Weibel MIT Press/ZKM Center for Art and Media (hardbound, 655 pp.) Review by Dave Mandl (first published on rhizome.org, Sep. 2002) There's a certain thrill in having the odd rule to break, the occasional shitty product to ostentatiously not waste your money on. In 2002, dumping your TV set or eating food that hasn't had the taste and nutrients removed is practically an act of sedition--making dinnertime that much more fun. Hakim Bey's now-classic "Temporary Autonomous Zone" (originally subtitled "The Pleasures of Disappearance") was an ode to the joys of building a utopia in the System's own cracks, which were still easy enough to find back in 1991. But what happens when food that hasn't been genetically modified simply doesn't exist, when every hole in the landscape has armed guards and an airport-style scanner stationed nearby? While the infrastructure of the modern surveillance state has been building up steadily since the dawn of the state itself, there's no doubt that the curve has turned sharply upward in the past decade, with the biggest spike of all coming in the short time since the events of 9/11. Power's gaze now reaches--often quite openly--into virtually every corner of the populated world, not only public streets and living rooms, but our own bodies and beyond. Is disappearance even remotely possible anymore? Will privacy exist in any form ten years from now? With uncanny timing, the exhibition "CTRL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother," an overview of decades of artistic discourse about "the merits, uses, and limits of surveillance," opened at the Center for Art and Technology in Karlsruhe, Germany, in October 2001. The exhibition's massive and beautifully produced catalog, published this year, supplements the work from the show with contributions by more than two dozen prominent theoreticians, historians, social critics, and investigative reporters. Together, these art works and essays form what is surely one of the most wide-ranging looks at surveillance, its pleasures, and its horrors ever undertaken. Not surprisingly, much of the material here is unremittingly bleak. Filmmaker Harun Farocki, who has made extensive use of footage taken from prison surveillance cameras, talks about the total control and dehumanization achieved by the technological systems employed in modern prisons (which no longer even pretend to aim for "rehabilitation"). Prisoners' contact with humans is kept to an absolute minimum, with iris-scanners checking their identities and electronic chairs subduing them when necessary. Fights between prisoners are sometimes staged by the guards, who bet on the outcome. Timothy Druckrey's "Secreted Agents, Security Leaks, Immune Systems, Spore Wars" details the nearly unlimited powers that the U.S. government has granted itself in the wake of 9/11, and the new generation of monitoring systems that are being developed or considered as a result: face-scanning software (already used covertly on every attendee of the last Super Bowl); National Identity cards; "DNA identification"; "tissue-based biodetectors"; etc. Journalist Duncan Campbell provides a history and taxonomy of Echelon, the NSA's global spy system, which is already capable of intercepting most of the world's satellite coommunication, and will be able to do much more in a few years. On a more positive note, every oppressive regime inspires a resistance movement, and contemporary surveillance technology is no exception. Druckrey relates how two marines became "genetic conscientious objectors" by refusing to provide DNA samples to the Department of Defense. Outdoor surveillance cameras are a favorite target of resisters: Photographer Frank Thiel's series *City TV* reveals 101 "hidden" cameras on the streets of Berlin; the New York Civil Liberties Union has blown the cover on most of New York's surveillance cameras (2,397 of them) with an extensive map; and the Institute for Applied Autonomy, also in New York, has created a web-based app, iSee, that will create a "path of least surveillance" for you given the starting end ending point of your journey. But will there *be* such a path when the city is completely blanketed with cameras? Even worse, will jaded pedestrians eventually find the cameras unremarkable? (Compare your reaction the first time you saw an advertisement in a movie theater to your reaction now.) Other works in *CTRL [SPACE]* explore the possibilites of using the machinery of surveillance for one's own ends, or simply rejoicing in the liberatory "detournement" of oppressive technologies. Webcams naturally make several appearances--the legendary JenniCam, Josh Harris's ill-fated "We Live in Public"--as does Andy Warhol's obsessive video-voyeurism. But Paul Virilio, who acknowledges the benefits of a decentralized, worldwide network of web cameras, wonders whether this network won't also allow for massive monitoring of the population (in effect, inviting Big Brother into our own homes), not to mention "universal advertising." Subverting oppressive technologies is fun, healthy, and necessary under extreme conditions--as any former citizen of the Soviet Union can attest. A life of gloom-and-doom is no life. But resistance at the source is equally important, especially in the post-9/11 world. While *CTRL [SPACE]* makes no pretence of being an activist tool, it would be nice to see more works in the collection by the Luddites of today (not in the inaccurate sense of "anti-technology," but in the sense of "anti-*oppressive*-technology"). Hacktivism, the Critical Art Ensemble's Digital Resistance, the ultra-hard-line digital-privacy activism of the Cypherpunks, and thousands of nameless "crackers" all have an important place in this story. [URL for the show: http://ctrlspace.zkm.de/e/] -- Dave Mandl dmandl@panix.com davem@wfmu.org http://www.wfmu.org/~davem