The Webcam As An Emerging Cinematic Medium - Paula Albuquerque
The Webcam As An Emerging Cinematic Medium - Paula Albuquerque
The Webcam As An Emerging Cinematic Medium - Paula Albuquerque
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the webcam
as an emerging
cinematic
medium
the webcam as an emerging
cinematic medium
ACADEMISCH PROEFSCHRIFT
ten overstaan van een door het College voor Promoties ingestelde commissie,
Overige leden:
9
12 Acknowledgements Attention Economy and Post-
Panopticism
Introduction 96
19
22 Chapter 3
Artistic Research
The Cinematic as Mode of Existence
25 The Global Media Network From Cinematographic to Cinematic
27 The Cinematic Technology Apparatus
30 Dissertation Overview 97 3.1 The Classical Cinematographic
Apparatus
10
Webcams and the Archive
156 5.1 Referentiality
156 5.1.1 Archiving Time Index, as Trace
and Deixis
162 5.1.2 The Indexicality of the Digital
168 5.2 Materiality
168 5.2.1 The Computer as Archive: A
Matter of Code
170 5.2.2 Fragile Memory
175 5.3 Narrative
175 5.3.1 Code as Logos Anticipating and
Programming Future Flows
178 5.4 The Fragmented Historicity of the
Digital Flux
180 5.5 The Database Logic of New Media
Objects
189
Chapter 6
Appropriating the Cinematic Apparatus
190 6.1 On Appropriation
199 6.2 The Significance of the Precarious
Aesthetic
200 6.2.1 Hito Steyerl: the Poor Image
208 6.2.2 Harun Farocki: The Contamination
of Surveillance
216 6.2.3 Walid Raad: The Atlas Group
Archive
219 6.3 Afterword
221
Conclusion
233 Bibliography
240 List of Images
242 Summary
243 Artistic Research
247 Samenvatting
248 Artistic Research
253 Appendix Exhibition Plan
11
Acknowledgements
12
This artistic research project has been made possible by support
received from supervisors, institutions, colleagues, fellow artists, family and
friends. I would not have been able to complete this research without their
active participation in my life, both on a professional and personal level.
I therefore want to thank Patricia Pisters for supervising this research and
offering me so many opportunities to share my work with others within
academia. Patricia has been much more than a supervisor to me. She
generously supported my decisions during difficult periods when my domestic
and professional lives collided. I equally want to thank Jeroen Boomgaard
who, as co-supervisor, provided indispensable insight into the relation
between my artwork and the theory I encountered and developed. Jeroen
was incredibly supportive in helping me acquire the resources for developing
and presenting my research. I would also like to thank the artist and curator
Antonis Pittas who helped me understand how my work could best be
exhibited. His communication was very transparent and I could always count
on him as a true friend.
The Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation provided a very
generous fellowship without which I would not have been able to complete
this research within four years (if at all). I will forever be grateful for the
Foundations financial support of my research as a visual artist and filmmaker.
The Gerrit Rietveld Academy has contributed to the success of my
project in several ways including guidance and theoretical support during
the research and the financial backing for the final presentation in the form
of an exhibition. I would especially like to thank Jeroen Boomgaard and Het
Lectoraat, Tijmen van Grootheest and Ben Zegers.
The Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis of the University of
Amsterdam was a very welcoming community where I have met a high
number of very interesting people who I would now like to thank for the
innumerous discussions we held together and during which I learned so
much. These were mainly people involved in the Film-Philosophy Seminars of
the past four years or in other seminars I attended: Adam Chambers, Pedram
Dibazar, Enis Dinc, Blandine Joret, Dana Linssen, Julian Kiverstein, Halbe
Kuipers, Nina Kll, Christoph Lindner, Chi Nguyen, Nur Ozgenalp, Tony
Pape, Eva Sancho Rodriguez, Nergiz Aiksoz Senem, Philipp Schmerheim,
Asli Ozgen Tuncer, Lonnie van Brummelen, and so many others. I would
like to thank the organizers of the Seminars as well: Josef Frchtl and Patricia
13
Acknowledgements
Pisters. I thank also Eloe Kingma and Christoph Lindner for their support
in dealing with all manners of logistics involved in engaging in a doctoral
degree. Hotze Mulder, thank you for your constant help in conforming my
dissertation to the required norms and protocols. Finally, Pepita Hesselberth,
thank you for providing me with so many tips and various bits of information
about funding for printing costs, giving me access to your writings and, in
general, for your kindness and availability.
During the entire duration of the PhD I was part of the Making
Things Public research group at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy where artists
share their working experiences on dissertations through the practice-based
process of Artistic Research. I would like to thank Sher Doruff for her
inexhaustible capacity to engage with each one of us and our very specific
needs as artists and scholars. I would also like to thank my fellow researchers
with whom I have exchanged ideas and who have supported me throughout
the past four years. They are Brbara Alves, Kristina Andersen, Yvonne Drge
Wendel, Hermann Gabler, Janice McNab, Daniela de Paulis and Ilse van Rijn.
When it comes to the final text of my dissertation, I would like to
thank my main editor Stephen Clark who helped make my ideas legible and
clear. I would also like to thank the others who contributed to the editing
process: Sher Doruff, Robin Haueter, Maartje Fliervoet and Eva Sancho
Rodriguez. When it comes to proofreading the absolute final version, my
thanks go to Isabel Cordeiro for her help. Egl Petrakait deserves a round of
applause for doing the graphic design and layout of this book. Thank you all
for being so talented, understanding and accommodating.
As I was teaching classes parallel to my PhD research, I also thank
my colleague Maartje Fliervoet and my coordinator Cato Cramer, as well as
my Honours Programme ART and RESEARCH students, who have helped
by being creative and energetic, always bringing in brilliant ideas and a great
sense of humor. I cannot name all of you for lack of space, but you know who
you are.
While working on the dissertation, I showed my artwork on a few
occasions. I therefore would like to thank Gert Wijlage and Adrie Krijgsman
from DefKa Campis, Stedelijk Museum Assen, for inviting me to take part
in the Investigations III Research and Visualization group exhibition;
Christine van den Bergh and Hester Jenkins from Bradwolff Projects for
welcoming my show with Daniela de Paulis Precarious Aesthetics: From
14
Webcams to the Moon; and, finally, Jelle Bouwhuis and Joram Kraaiveld
from the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam for hosting the final
presentation of my PhD research.
A huge standing ovation goes to my family: my husband Bas
Coenegracht for his love and trust in my decisions; my daughter Alice for
being so sweet and making me laugh every day; my grandfather Carlos
Andrade, who just reached 94 years old, still drives his car, retains a curiosity
for world politics and loves the arts; and my much missed deceased Palmira
Andrade. My grandparents brought me up and always provided me with
chances to develop my abilities, believing in my potential and loving me
unconditionally. Both have taught me the inherent value of culture and
knowledge, taking me every week to the see art house films, concerts and
dance performances. They also introduced me to the wonders of literature by
allowing me to choose from their five thousand book library which covered
the four walls of a room in our Lisbon apartment. Thank you both for your
careful guidance growing up.
Thank you, Maartje Fliervoet and Eva Sancho Rodriguez, for
accepting to stand by my side as paranymphs during the public defense of my
dissertation. The knowledge of your support means the world to me.
I would like to thank the members of the doctoral committee for
accepting to evaluate my dissertation. Thank you so much Jonathan Beller,
Josef Frchtl, Christa-Maria Lerm-Hayes, Christoph Lindner and Aisling
OBeirn.
My friend Daniel Bodner deserves my gratitude for his supportive
attitude towards my artwork, but also for letting me use his studio space for
the past ten years. I now have my own studio in the same building, just at the
other end of the hall, thanks to him.
Finally, I would like to add that I have been very fortunate to be
surrounded by such a supportive environment. This made the last four years
unforgettable and provided me with professional relationships and friendships
I will carry with me into the future.
15
Introduction
16
It was at a very young age that I intuitively knew I was living in
a cinematic world. The sensation of constant observation has guided me
throughout my career as an experimental filmmaker. After exploring the thin
boundaries between fiction and documentary, I turned to archival materials
and found footage. For the past fifteen years I have been observing and
recording webcam streams.
This dissertation results from my artistic research project where I
use webcam-generated footage as sole source material for the making of
experimental films and installations. My study is an analysis of the possibility
to create a new mode of filmmaking that is broadly accessible and networked,
one that creates archives for future categorization of audiovisual materials
documenting city life. Central to the dissemination and pervasiveness
of this new cinematic medium is affect, which is present in the relation
between individuals and the cameras, and which influences processes of
subjectification. My art project has its roots in 1999, when I became aware of
the growing number of cameras that streamed in real time over the Internet,
apparently for no reason and in an unregulated manner. I realized by then
that cameras normally used for surveillance were being sold as webcams to any
household that could afford them. I wondered about the reasons that made
ordinary people position cameras at their windows with the sole purpose of
streaming imagery from the public space of their street to Internet viewers.
Around that time, I got in touch with activists who were designing city maps
to identify routes where surveillance cameras could not capture images of
individuals.1 When performing a squatting action, for example, one could
avoid being filmed if one followed the cartographic indications, or prevent
recognition by wearing a hooded jacket if the cameras were too pervasive
in the area.2 Fascinated by the high degree of influence the awareness of
the cameras existence had on the activists street routines, but also by the
increasing purchase of webcams by ordinary households, I started regularly
observing the publicly accessible streams.
My first film using this footage was made in 2001. Siesta is a short
film set in Amsterdam in which I searched for images streamed from different
time zones and captured them in real time, approximately at noon. The
resulting imagery includes streams offered by webcams in various countries,
starting in the United States in the morning and ending in Japan at night.
1 Several years ago I worked for a couple of non-governmental organizations, mostly doing
journalistic writing about environmental issues and, specifically, climate change. This has
brought me in contact with environmentalists and social justice activists who I prefer not to
name as source. Recent versions of these maps can easily be found through Google.
2 Squatting refers to the political action of occupying a building, mainly to resist real estate
speculation. 17
Introduction
18
online.
Before I began the present film-based research, I assumed that people
were unaware of the cameras constantly filming them and simultaneously
streaming their imagery. After a few years of intensive observation, I wondered
if they had forgotten about the cameras presence. Finally, I realized that the
pervasive presence of video surveillance had been internalized, leading me
to conclude that there had ceased to be an outside to the citys cinematic
realm. Networked cameras had formed a closed circuit in which everyone was
involved, either by pointing the camera at the streets, by observing its image
streams, or by being filmed.
Artistic Research
When I was four years old and grew fully conscious of my own
physical image, I had the feeling that, wherever I was, there would be an
invisible camera filming me at all times. This may be due to the fact that
I come from a family of engineers, where cameras had been a constant
presence since the beginning of the 1900s, producing a history of domestic
portraiture in photography and film. I had intuitively grown aware of living
in a cinematic world and believed that someday my own life would be played
back to me as an unedited collection of raw, uncut footage. This awareness
has always stood at the forefront of my film experiments and still profoundly
affects my artistic practice and theoretical studies.
As an experimental filmmaker attempting to grasp the underlying
philosophical issues of a phenomenon to which I belong, I embarked on
the present PhD project. In order to follow up on questions related to the
ways in which a subject is affected, or even created, by the constant presence
of cameras in urban spaces, I became involved with film philosophy, media
theory and critical analysis. Once I began my research, it became clear I would
need to establish a relation between surveillance and the cinematographic
apparatus that would lead to a deeper understanding of the specific medium
of the webcams. Surprisingly, interactions between concepts like film, factory,
prison and city have arisen during my study, which further directed me in
the research to build coherent conceptual constellations that would suit my
analysis.
19
Introduction
20
particular case, I find that my doctoral program has enriched my art practice
with a theoretical body of knowledge that allows my film-based artworks
to achieve other layers of signification. Conversely, my experiments with
webcam material have further directed my studies through the pursuit of
particular insights that theory fails to offer, namely, insights that occur as
I experiment with the actual material and explore the potential that the
medium affords. For example, I have made extensive use of critical analysis
during this research, which produces knowledge after the fact and could be
enriched by the scholarly endeavors of artists. Having said that, it is equally
important to emphasize how determinant critical analysis has always been for
the emergence of new fields of knowledge, but also for the making of new art,
and how influential this process has been for the present research. Hito Steyerl
summarizes this point when she highlights the fact that, on the one hand,
specific scientific methods lead to shared knowledge, while singular (artistic)
methods create individual forms of logic. According to this artist and scholar,
artistic research moves among and affects both methodological approaches.3
Henk Borgdorff similarly draws attention to the fact that artistic practices can
never really be independent of their context of production. As such, they are
always part of a social history and artistic discourse.4 This means the artistic
practices emerge from existing fields of knowledge while simultaneously
influencing them in return, not only in terms of adding to their artistic
content but also, I would add, by altering their modes of operation.
Those who pursue a doctoral degree in artistic research require a
specific place within academia, one that is anchored in the specific ability
to relate theories in paradigms derived from first-hand experience with the
materiality of the artistic medium and object. As is known to those working
in the field, artists possess an intimate knowledge of processes that are mostly
unseen and unfelt by those who only experience the final result. This personal
knowledge could be shared through artistic research projects developed within
existing academic contexts that are customized to suit the artists aims and
requirements. Doctors in the arts may add valuable contributions to the
scientific fields the artist engages with during such projects. As far as my own
research is concerned, I hope it will add a qualitative contribution to film
philosophy and those streams of film and (new) media theory that focus on
the way subjectification is influenced by cameras and screens. I equally hope
that this dissertation will contribute to further investigation and realization of
3 Hito Steyerl, Aesthetics of Resistance? Artistic Research as Discipline and Conflict, 2010,
accessed August 11, 2014, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0311/steyerl/en.
4 Henk Borgdorff, The debate on Research in the Arts, 2006, accessed July 29, 2015,
http://www.pol.gu.se/digitalAssets/1322/1322713_the_debate_on_research_in_the_arts.pdf. 21
Introduction
22
When one speaks normally about the mode of existence of some group
or individual, one refers to their customs, their mode of being, their
ethology, their habitat in some way, their feeling for a place. In this
inquiry, we are keeping all the connotations of the phrase, but we
are giving the two terms mode and existence stronger meanings
that dont direct attention towards human groups or individuals, but
towards the beings about which humans are interrogating themselves.
The word being should not be unsettling: it is another way of
replying to the question, What, for example, is the law, or religion, or
science? What is important to you? and How can I talk about this
properly with you?5
5 Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, accessed June 22, 2015,
http://www.modesofexistence.org/. 23
Introduction
this mode of existence: the people in the street being filmed also contribute
to its creation and preservation. Anyone who collects webcam imagery along
with everyone who allows for the mass-archive of audiovisual documentation
of the self contributes to the growth and maintenance of the integrated circuit
at the core of this mode of existence.
The profusion of media that record and transmit imagery over the
Internet characterizes the contemporary cinematic mode of existence, where
audiovisual media are a constant and pervasive presence. It is useful to look
at the writings of anthropologist Arjun Appadurai when attempting to
delineate and conceptualize the cinematic mode of existence in relation to
mass media.6 He argues that the phenomenon of globalization, both unifying
and fragmenting, has given rise to a series of global scapes: ethnoscapes,
technoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes, and ideoscapes. Of particular
interest for the present dissertation are the content-based mediascapes, which
give form to the information provided to the public. In Appadurais words,
these tend to be image-centered narrative-based accounts of strips of reality.7
This definition indicates that the knowledge of reality in contemporary society
is provided and constituted by mediated visions. Webcams, being generators
of this form of processed information, produce their share of strips of reality
when they offer a seemingly transparent documentation of urban activity
through live streaming. In fact, Appadurai generalizes mediascapes as those
images of the world created by [] media. In a similar process of mediation
and production, webcams may create representations and simulations. In
general, the media fabricate these visions, but their presence may already
contribute to altering or adjusting the actions being documented. Within
the context of a controlled environment, such as the public space of the city
framed by webcams, a potentially predetermined action will occur and a
vision of reality may be fabricated, shaping a mediascape disguised as objective
representation of reality.
Another concept that is relevant to the understanding of the
operational model of the cinematic mode of existence is Steven Shaviros
interpretation of the mediasphere as an environment that has become one
with contemporary reality: an all-encompassing single unit or network.8
The mediasphere is here understood as the embodiment of networked mass
media, which is extensive and pervasive to the extent that it can be regarded
as a Latourian mode of existence. Shaviro considers the mediated reality of
24 8 Steven Shaviro, Connected, Or What It Means to Live in the Network Society (Minnesota:
University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
peoples actual environment, which they accept as part of their lives, as defined
by the pervasiveness of smartphones, tablets and laptops, to which people have
become attached and completely depend on for work and entertainment.9
For example, beyond online business meetings, people nowadays routinely
communicate with their family members across the globe through Skype,
Viber, WhatsApp and other chat systems. This results in personal relations
that become mediated to the point that they acquire an existence outside of
the material world and thus become virtual. This (hyper)-mediation of the
mediasphere is furthermore exemplified by users that routinely connect to
self-replicating automated virtual beings, known as bots, when involved in
social media. Seemingly endless bot armies swarm the Internet, and people
engage with them as they would with other humans.10 Emulating human
emotions and contributing to online debates, the cyber character of the bot
has been accepted as just another form of end user. Shaviro actually goes so far
as to affirm that the mediasphere has become nature to humans, and that it
shapes their identities as subjects.
In order to further analyze and define the networked mediasphere
that produce mediascapes as a cinematic mode of existence, it is important to
distinguish its two most determining instances: the global media network of
the Internet and the cinematic technology of webcams.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid., 3. 25
Introduction
26 13 Ibid., 4.
14 Ibid.
document reality.15 This is due to a technical opacity that desensitizes the end
user. Most people are ignorant of the technical aspects of the Internet, and yet
they remain completely dependent upon it in order to receive and produce
content. The far-reaching consequences of each technological discovery on
moral and ethical levels, for example, when it comes to identity formation,
is generally disregarded in order to promote the function attributed to the
medium. Even then, webcams, being the tools used by the network to collect
live action as audiovisual data, have had a considerable impact on the ways in
which people perceive themselves and others through on screens. As this fact
appears to remain unquestioned by the very people who buy these devices and
install them in their streets to film others, it becomes increasingly apparent
that the mediasphere, which is at the core of the cinematic mode of existence,
has become internalized. People move through the Internet online and offline,
apparently without inquiring about the levels of intentionality behind its
high-tech tools (including visual media) or even on the level of the politicized
code (profoundly race- and gender-determined).16 This apparent lack of
questioning further calls for an analysis of the cameras inherent to this media-
based mode of existence that is cinematic in essence. What follows is a short
introduction to the relevance of the networked surveillance of webcams for
the cinematic mode of existence.
15 Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth
and Georges Collins (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1998), 21.
Bernard Stiegler also comments on the apparent seamlessness of technology, when he affirms
that today, we need to understand the process of technical evolution given that we are
experiencing the deep opacity of contemporary technics; we do not immediately understand
what is being played out in technics, nor what is being profoundly transformed therein, even
though we unceasingly have to make decisions regarding technics, the consequences of
which are felt to escape us more and more. And in day-to-day technical reality, we cannot
spontaneously distinguish the long-term processes of transformation from spectacular but
fleeting technical innovations.
16 Jonathan Beller, From The Cinematic Mode of Production to Computational Capital: An
Interview with Jonathan Beller for Kulturpunkt, by Ante Jeric and Diana Meheik, January
31, 2014, Kulturpunkt,
http://socialtextjournal.org/from-the-cinematic-mode-of-production-to-computational-
capital-an-interview-with-jonathan-beller-for-kulturpunkt/. 27
Introduction
17 Bruno Latour, Morality and Technology, The End of the Means. Theory, Culture and Society,
no. 19 (2002): 247-260.
28 18 Ibid., 248.
19 Ibid., 249.
reality and perception. According to Latours logic, the initial instigators of
the surveillance society could not have foreseen the resulting technological
regime, which creates new realities that may oppose the primary function of
its tools. For example, the cinematic aspects brought about by a renewal of
public spaces are further being influenced by peoples growing conscience of
constantly being filmed (and this exceeds, by far, the initial crime prevention
entailed by surveillance).
One could argue that webcams are a direct result of a preexisting
cinematic mode of existence that promotes the dissemination of networked
audiovisual media. Producing imagery of the world for Internet users to
access seems to be a legitimate result of this mode of existence that promotes
self-surveillance in the form of data collection and entertainment. However,
as everyone produces their own means of self-regulation, people adapt their
behaviors, since they are aware that their image may be constantly observed
and stored for future viewings. Being a tool in Latours terminology, the
medium of the webcam should thus not be reduced to an extension of the
human eye, because it in fact transforms the eye, e.g. by forcing it to focus
on the flat surface of the screen when observing a moving image with a deep
depth of field. Furthermore, as an archival tool collecting live recordings from
the street, the webcam network and its storage system should not be regarded
as memory prosthesis, because this tool most definitely affects memory. In
conclusion, rather than merely fulfilling the use for which they were primarily
conceived, webcams as optical devices and producers of archival materials
have created a realm that did not pre-exist their birth, and which was from
that moment on formally unforeseeable. Even if they emerge from a proto-
cinematic mode of existence, webcams are creating a new phase in the
cinematic dimensionality of contemporary urban life with moral and ethical
implications. It is interesting to return to Latours status of the tool, when he
notes that:
20 Ibid., 252. 29
Introduction
Dissertation Overview
My research project aims at analyzing the webcam as an emerging
cinematic medium: its construction, as well as its impact on the contemporary
urban mode of existence. As such, I will focus on specific actants, in
a Latourian sense that together form the apparatus of this new mode of
networked filmmaking that affects both the online and the offline world.23
These actants are the affected cameras (in relation to what is in front or behind
them), surveillance and panopticism, the film apparatus, a specific form of
(chronotopic) temporality, archival modes, and, finally, the filmmakers and
artists working with the aesthetic potentialities of these media.
Since this study starts with the premise that there is at the basis of
21 William Bogard, The Simulation of Surveillance: Hypercontrol in Telematic Societies (New York:
Cambridge University Press 2010).
22 Lifecasting (video stream). Accessed September 15, 2014,
whttp://medlibrary.org/medwiki/Lifecasting_(video_stream).
23 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford,
New York: Oxford University Press: 2007).
30 The Actor-Network-Theory explores the relations between actants within the network. These
actants consist of human and non-human actors.
webcam pervasiveness an affective relation to the medium, the steps I take in
this dissertation originate on a more personal level. As such, the first chapter
entitled Video Surveillance Versus the Affected Personal Cam, aims at
approaching the ownership of the webcams by analyzing the different degrees
of affect they possess. By studying works on affect theory, more precisely
Brian Massumis writings on the topic, I maintain a differentiation between
surveillance cameras, CCTV and publicly accessible webcams, in order to
define the level of attachment a company or an individual may have towards a
camera, as well as the affects thereby produced. This differentiation offers itself
as a theoretical framework for studying the specific affected ownership of the
camera and the purpose of positioning a streaming video device in an urban
area. I will not only analyze the produced content and its forms, but also the
role of the observer and the ways in which this role can at times be inverted.
Stepping back from the intimate realm of individuals relations
with their cameras, I will in the second chapter, Post-Panopticism and the
Attention Economy, analyze the contemporary state of surveillance, which is
situated in the social realm, the collective experience of a world pervaded by
audiovisual documentation collection and distribution. This chapter engages
with the primary function of video-surveillance and post-panopticism in order
to understand the impact these cameras have on the reorganization of time
and space, and consequently on peoples behavioral patterns in the street. In
order to do so, I will study the transition from the Panopticon, as theorized by
Michel Foucault, to the post-panopticon of maximum surveillance, according
to which human beings have become identified with the data they produce.
A central character in this scenario is the data double, which stands for the
shadow of an individual that inhabits the virtual world, imbued with a large
degree of credibility while categorizing of all the activities that form a digital
footprint.24 The data double is constructed by metadata that include the actual
image of an individual constantly recorded by video surveillance. The chapter
will further delve into the position of webcams within the attention economy,
by comparing their audiovisual production to that of classical cinema and the
expanded forms thereof. Drawing on Jonathan Bellers book The Cinematic
Mode of Production (2006), which analyzes the contemporary heightened
form of capitalism that has monopolized eyes and colonized synapses, the
present study will further emphasize the webcams contribution to present-day
systems of capital production with their continuous captures and streams.
32 Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press,
1986).
Peirces notion of the index as trace and as deixis by applying it to both analog
and digital footage. Furthermore, I analyze theories that consider digital
platforms as immaterial, and regard data as unchanged when traveling across
storage media, to oppose views that attest to the materiality of the digital.
Wendy Chuns writings on code as matter as well as Matthew Kirschenbaums
ascertainment that data can be retrieved beyond erasure help demonstrate that
the digital also possesses an inherent traceable material constitution.26 This
materiality allows for the construction of an ever-growing archive, in which
digital signals are stored and can be retraced in the future. However, this
archive has lost some of its classical linear narrative and, instead, has adopted
a database logic. In the chapter, I will further analyze the way in which this
logic may still be dictated by authorities that own the archive, but which have
had its narrative linearity replaced by the seemingly endless possibilities of
algorithmic recollection of data stored in all corners of the network. These vast
amounts of personal data that leave traces on every visited platform are stored
in millions of dormant, yet pulsating hard drives inside gigantic cooled data
centers, waiting to be accessed.
In the sixth chapter I look at the aesthetics of webcam footage within
the context of precarious archival imagery sources that is appropriated in
politically engaged art. The visual material generated by various forms of
mass media may acquire myriad combinations, such as in the work of Hito
Steyerl. It may also serve to attest to the construction of cinematic spaces as
in the works of artist Harun Farocki, or it may exist to make us understand
the intangibility of the experience of war, as seen in Walid Raads work with
the Atlas Group Archive. Differing in kind and in statement, what these three
approaches share is the choice for the precarious visual material they use. This
mainly consists of low-resolution imagery that has often been produced by
deficient optics, repeatedly copied or inadequately archived, resulting in poor
images full of glitches and noise.27 This visual material displays a precarious
aesthetic where the mode of operation of the medium itself is inscribed in
the materiality of the imagery and is, therefore, inherent to it.28 The chapter
further emphasizes how the choice to use such footage constitutes a political
standpoint within a cinematic mode of existence pervaded by the audiovisual
input and output of archival materials.
26 Wendy Chun, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (Cambridge, Massachusetts and
London, England: The MIT Press, 2011).
Matthew Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008).
27 Hito Steyerl, In Defense of the Poor Image e-flux journal no. 10 (2009),
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/.
28 Arild Fetveit, Medium-Specific Noise, in Thinking Media Aesthetics: Media Studies, Film
Studies and the Arts, ed. Liv Hausken (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2013). 33
Introduction
34
Chapter 1
Video Surveillance
versus the Affected
Personal Cam
35
Chapter 1
36
Video Surveillance versus the Affected Personal Cam
Fig. 1 Two stills from a critique of intrusive media in Rape (Yoko Ono 1969).
37
Chapter 1
38 This interview with Jennifer took place two and a half years after she started to stream footage
from her apartment twenty-four seven.
Video Surveillance versus the Affected Personal Cam
5 William Webster, CCTV policy in the UK: reconsidering the evidence base. Surveillance &
Society 2, no. 2/3, (2004): 10-22,
40 6
http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/3400/3363.
Earthcam, accessed April 23, 2012, http://www.earthcam.com.
Video Surveillance versus the Affected Personal Cam
7 Hella Koskela, Cam Era the Contemporary Urban Panopticon, Surveillance & Society
1, no. 3 (2003): 292-313,
http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/3342/3304.
8 Lyon, Surveillance Society. 41
Chapter 1
42 Earthcam itself owns a very small portion of these webcams, since the majority of its imagery
is actually generated by other companies and private individuals that pay a hosting fee.
Video Surveillance versus the Affected Personal Cam
43
Chapter 1
which shows views of the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam in images that are very
filmic in kind.11 Within its frame, people can be observed walking up and
down the bridge over the canal, along with several bicycles and cars passing
by. The act of watching this video stream triggers questions pertaining to the
motivation behind the placement of the camera: what drove Don to do it, and
why did he choose to divert the camera from himself or his building? One
could speculate that Don may be proud of the place where he lives, on one
of Amsterdams four main canals, and that he wishes to share this with the
world by streaming raw uncut footage. He may even wish his single shots be
considered as cinematographic materials. Another hypothesis is that he may
have already anticipated that other people, for example artists, would use his
camera for creating aesthetic objects and staging live performances. Should
this possibility reflect his intentions, Don could be considered some sort of
art facilitator, a self-made curator, or even a collector, considering that he has
been saving his streams, which he now presents in a time-lapse loop on the
website. In any case, it appears that Don desires to be acknowledged by and
through the camera, which he affirms by simply owning one and pointing it
at a part of his world.
The case of the DonnieCam highlights the difference between the
degrees of emotional attachment a private owner might feel towards his own
webcam and that of companies and governments in relation to their cameras.
This emotional attachment charges the footage with affect, which influences
the intensity of the imagery. Dons act of pointing his webcam at the street
offers users the chance to look through his eyes and watch life unfold every
day in a single shot, in the same way that he himself perceives it when staring
out of his window. When I used to watch these streams, it felt as though I
was peeping into a piece of Dons most intimate world: seeing a proto-film
through his cameras lens as through his eyes. One can find information on
Google, sometimes contradictory, about the DonnieCams inception. The
following description, provided by an alleged friend of Dons who apparently
used to visit Amsterdam, best suits my experience:
44 they thought the location of the camera would be and waiting to wave at whomever may be
observing the streams.
Video Surveillance versus the Affected Personal Cam
position of the camera, thereby carefully defining its line of sight and how
it frames the object. According to Luksch with CCTV a film only happens
after the appropriation of the material, whereas with an Affected Personal
Cam the viewer is already watching a proto-film, as the affects are inherent to
the feed streamed by the camera. In conclusion, the Affected Personal Cam
films reality with minimum intervention as in cinma vrit but its stream is
strongly imbued with meaning and affect before the editing process begins.
and death. But in the live stream of the webcam, there seems to be no
predictability. This produces a layer of intensity that imbues the material with
affect. The time-span of bird life unravels in real time, implying daily visits
to the stream in order to follow the pure drama as it unfolds before ones
eyes. There is neither certitude nor logic that can apply to what is seen on
the computer monitor. Furthermore, there appears to be no intrinsic sense to
the events in the observed imagery, making the relation between the viewer
and the birds practically unmediated, as it lacks narrative conscience. What
makes the viewer regularly return to watch the stream is the pure affect that
is originated by the action of the collective to place the camera to track every
action of the eagles they aim to protect.
If we carry on trying to find matching film genres, the closest
docu-fiction format to this stream would be that of a reality soap opera,
watched on a daily basis for months by its makers, i.e. owners of the webcam,
but with only one storyline instead of the usual variety of several characters.
Yet this initial attempt at categorizing the Osprey Cameras live feeds as
real-time-bird-soap nevertheless fails to encompass the relations that are
forged between the simultaneous owner and viewer and the camera. While
observing such a live stream, the viewer may be filled with emotion, watching
the birds survive dreadful storms as they hatch their eggs. When they feed
their newborn babies, the parents are unaware of the emotional states they
simultaneously evoke in the followers of their animal family saga, which have
been multiplied by the Internet streaming of these images.
There are other levels of affect that are produced during the
simultaneous stages in webcam streaming and perception. The second
occurs when cameras capture and stream images from people in the streets.
Many people may not yet be aware of constant surveillance; however, some
definitely are and act upon it. People in the streets, in this case the objects of
observation, may actually choose to intervene in the perception of their image.
From performative acts to merely wearing specific clothing that interferes with
camera vision, the affects generated at this point add a second layer to the first
level created by the owner of the camera.
In a third moment, when it comes to the viewer observing the filmed
material, one participates in the production of affects by attributing meaning
to the image. The viewer perceives these two levels of affect already present
in the imagery. This person may be a security guard, a ordinary citizen, or an
49
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51
Chapter 1
52
Video Surveillance versus the Affected Personal Cam
53
Chapter 1
21 Jos Van Dijk, Reshaping Public Space in a Culture of Connectivity, Keynote Speech,
Media in Transition 8 Conference, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
54 I am here loosely paraphrasing Prof. dr. Jos van Dijk when she mentioned the performing
abilities of individuals who adjust to instances of surveillance.
Video Surveillance versus the Affected Personal Cam
This citation already evokes the topic of the Panopticon, which I will further
develop in the following chapter, but it is helpful at this point to understand
the acceptance of surveillance in terms of substituting for a protecting external
entity in a godless world. In Schmidt-Burkhardts view, the eye of God
returns through the omnipresence and pervasiveness of cameras. It provides
cohesion to the world that is being observed. Moreover, she reminds us that
the gaze of the cameras is immortal. In a society where no God watches over
the world, these cameras ensure visibility and collective inclusion. In urban
environments, people have their image recorded in numerous locations
on a daily basis. According to the quote, the view of the cameras could be,
like Gods eye, immortal, since these images of people may be recorded,
categorized, and stored. Despite the fact that it remains at this point an
arguable view that is hard to prove empirically, it is plausible that the streams
of both CCTV and webcams are being stored systematically for future use,
for example with face recognition software or other tracking algorithm-based
tools, to which I will turn in the second and fifth chapters.
Besides offering proof of peoples existence in the world through
visibility and enabling them to see others, webcams also allow people to see
themselves. This can be achieved by stepping into the frame of a recording
stream as I did in Split Recognition or as lifecasters perform during their
feeds. By keeping a persons image in self-generating audiovisual archives,
forms of identity are being built according to the forms of existence that are
acknowledged by the cameras. Beyond issues that relate specifically to the
selfie already implied in filming ones own image, it is the affective potential
in broadcasting such imagery that makes active participation all the more
valuable.23 In the case of the previously mentioned JenniCAM (Fig. 2), the
fact that so many people saw Jenni through her system of webcams made her
life interesting. In this manner, the cameras potential for extreme visibility
turned her existence from seemingly ordinary into an Internet broadcast
phenomenon. Thus, the Internet at large as a pool of potential observers
furnishes webcams with a comforting dual role: providing evidence of
existence and offering widespread visibility.
The camera is an affected object, since it has become more than a
mediating agent. According to the example of the lifecasters, people are aware
of the potential of streaming cameras. When sighted, surveillance cameras
provoke emotions from whoever encounters them: people may welcome
or despise webcams and CCTV, but they acknowledge their presence. This
entails that the individual being filmed is aware of potential observation and
may choose to influence the image he or she wishes the cameras to capture.
The pervasiveness of cameras gradually becomes more acknowledged, which
stirs up feelings of responsibility towards ones future image, as this could, if
it is stored, in all probability be observed at some point. Beyond lifecasting
projects, people in public spaces create doubles of themselves for simultaneous
or future observation.
Christian Katti performed a relevant analysis of the relation between
observer and observed in his essay Systematically observing Surveillance:
Paradoxes of Observation according to Niklas Luhmans System Theory
(2002). He explains in detail the notion of second-order observation, which
occurs the moment one observes the observer: in the virtual gaze of the viewed
subject. While deciding which role to play and which image to provide of the
self, the person in the street may try to imagine who may be observing and,
thus, observe the observer. This mechanism is important when researching
webcams, as it contributes to the emergence of the subject and affects action
in public spaces. The person being observed becomes the observer of whoever
actually sits behind the screen. For example, people on the street who are
aware of being filmed might wonder who this observer could be, or even how
many of them there could be: a guard, a family, millions of Internet users, etc.
The American artist Bruce Nauman is considered the first artist to have
built installations around the theme of surveillance, with a particular focus on
the expectations towards the position of the observer. Drte Zbikowski writes
that:
23 The term Selfie here corresponds to the self-portraits people take with their smartphones
56 and that have increased exponentially since the introduction of the front camera in these
devices.
Video Surveillance versus the Affected Personal Cam
Fig. 5 Mapping the studio I (Fat chance John Cage) (Bruce Nauman 2001)
24 Drte Zbikowski, Bruce Nauman: Live/Taped Video Corridor (1969-70) & Video Surveillance
Piece: Public Room, Private Room (1969/70), in Ctrl[space]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from
Bentham to Big Brother, ed. Thomas Levin, Peter Weibel and Ursula Frohne (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2002), 67. 57
Chapter 1
25 iek, Slavoj, Big Brother, or, the Triumph of the Gaze over the Eye, in Ctrl[space]: Rhetorics
of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, ed. Thomas Levin, Peter Weibel and Ursula
60
Video Surveillance versus the Affected Personal Cam
In this case, the notion of virtual does not specifically relate to cyberspace,
but rather to that which is carried by the object and nevertheless escapes
empirical perception. Affects are organized in an abstract and non-material
way, yet they are as present as the body. This means that the body is both its
corporeality as well as its less physical aspects. The pressing potential of the
body, to which Massumi refers, thus corresponds with the affects it carries and
which can be experienced on the level of abstraction, more precisely on the
previously mentioned pre-individual level as defined by Deleuze and Guattari.
If one aligns Massumis body with the cameras body, then one can
argue that the presence of these optic devices immediately interacts by affect
with whoever acknowledges this presence. This encounter takes place out of
space and out of time: when one sees a camera, there is an immanent plane
of intensities that comes into existence a plane of intensities that is meta-
physical, and exists as pure sensation. Massumi would classify it within the
order of the virtual since [t]he autonomy of affect is its participation in
the virtual and [a]ffect is autonomous to the degree to which it escapes
confinement in the particular body whose vitality, or potential for interaction,
it is.29 The affects of a webcam extend beyond the body of the camera into
the products of its system, i.e. the streams. These affects do not only reside
in the streamed images, they are equally embedded in the materiality of the
device itself. This is why the sight of a camera, or the acknowledgement of
its presence, immediately provokes an affective reaction. When one spots a
surveillance camera in the street, this public space is immediately perceived as
a networked circuit of audiovisual data exchange.
More specifically, the relevance of this notion of affect being inherent
to the bodies of the cameras increases when one attempts to define the
cameras potential political impact. When artists appropriate webcam footage
in creating artworks, they are not simply using these cameras as a tool for
composing a film or an installation with a political message. They are in
28 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 2002), 31.
29 Ibid., 35. 61
Chapter 1
fact incorporating affects that are embedded within the images captured by
the camera, its prime matter, as well as the affects manifested prior to the
viewing of these, those that have been in and on the body of the camera
from the moment of its inception. As Massumi notes, [a]ffect, like thought
and reflection, could be extended to any or every level, providing that the
uniqueness of its functioning on that level is taken into account.30 To apply
Massumis views to the present object of study entails that the potential of
affect generated and acquired at every level of the encounter with the webcams
should be taken into account. This cannot be reduced to the functionality
attributed to these cameras, either as instruments for surveillance or as
harmless entertainment. Rather, webcams can be understood as affected
bodies in the sense that their potential exceeds their initial purpose, i.e.
surveillance. Artists relate to the affective dimension of these cameras, which
extends the potential of webcams from mere mediator into a cinematic
medium with political significance. In whichever way the artist uses this
medium, it retains the presence of its affects. As an example, even a pile of
trash showcasing decommissioned surveillance cameras, for example, retains
the same meta-level of affects as a new and active capturing device.
62 30 Ibid., 37.
Video Surveillance versus the Affected Personal Cam
JenniCAM, one might wonder: how does the data double incorporate the
changing issues of privacy, which are so often called into the equation, and
what are the consequences this process entails for the individuals identity?
The process of storing these images produced by cameras implies databanks
harboring incalculable amounts of yottabytes (1024 bytes) of algorithmic-based
flecks of identity, i.e. bits of personal data randomly accessed by data mining
to build online profiles.31 According to Wolfgang Ernst, the notion of the
individual is inherently linked to that of privacy: if storage in databases, for
instance, intrudes upon privacy, then there exists the danger that individuality
will be lost.32 In this post-privacy environment, when individuality is
translated into a fragmented data version of itself, identity morphs into
small bits of information that are constantly re-arranged by ever emerging
algorithms. The result of this is an identity that is no longer individual but
merely archival: it belongs to and is generated by the individual, yet it diverges
from the individual on many levels. The contemporary audiovisual archive
is a fragmentary mirror that provides a digital mapping of reality. Instead
of singling out the individual, the digital modes of archiving data cause its
former identity to disappear behind homogenizing categorizing paradigms.
The subject is doubled into an array of codes and instructions that pushes
it further into predetermined categories for data classification, rather than
exalting the individuals characteristics as a private person.
A focus on privacy, furthermore, emphasizes the importance of
identifying continuities and distinctions between, on the one hand, the
traditions of data collection that was initially linked to juridical systems, and,
on the other hand, the present panorama of self-updating databases, which
are constantly generating new personal data intended for digital profiling. In
conclusion, and in anticipation of the second chapter in which I will focus on
forms of panopticism and capital production, let us now briefly summarize
the previous arguments. I have established a distinction between CCTV and
webcams to study in particular the levels of affect that are intrinsic to the
Affected Personal Cam and potentiate it as cinematic medium. To sum up,
these affects derive from several moments, each constituting different levels:
production, which includes ownership and the decisions of positioning the
camera for image capture and transmission; being filmed, either moving
through public or semi-public spaces; viewing by the observer, who may be
31 Matthew Fuller, Media ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture (Cambridge:
The MIT Press, 2007).
In this book the author provides the notion of flecks of identity, which defines how our online
profiles are constructed.
32 Wolfgang Ernst, Stirrings in the Archives: Order from Disorder, trans. Adam Siegel (Maryland-
London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015). 63
Chapter 1
the owner, a simple user or the artist; appropriation of the images by the
artist; and, finally, the encounter of the public with the artwork created from
such materials. In addition, and pervading all the previously mentioned
levels, I have identified a meta-level of affect inherent to the body of the
camera. These levels of affect may contribute to transforming the appearance
of our surroundings and perhaps change our behavior when filmed by these
networked audiovisual devices.
Since the city is the place where most footage is collected, cameras
like the DonnieCam play a major role in constructing the subject and
simultaneously adjusting urban space. The principles of surveillance and
their relation to architecture and urban planning have their roots in the way
the original Panopticon was built to supervise the activity of prisoners in
penitentiary facilities and then extended to schools and factories. In what
follows, I will argue that this system has evolved into the contemporary
network of webcams. The next chapter will support this claim by focusing on
the relation between the webcams, contemporary forms of panopticism, and
the attention economy. I thereby demonstrate that the surveillance dispositif
has evolved, alongside a regulatory system that supports information exchange
and entertainment production, into a cinematic apparatus: it both documents
human activities and helps maintaining a mode of production that is based on
visibility.
64
Chapter 2
Post-Panopticism
and the Attention
Economy
65
Chapter 2
1 It is interesting to note that this is also the moment Bollex cameras and the like become more
widely available, and, as a consequence experimental filmmakers in the United States as
well as movements like Situationism in Europe affirm the emancipation of cinema from state
66 ideological concerns. Moreover, super 8 film cameras are profusely being used in domestic
environments greatly distributing the tools and the outcomes of audiovisual production.
Post-Panopticism and the Attention Economy
2 Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan
Pedatella (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2009), 2-3.
3 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New
York: Vintage, 1995). 67
Chapter 2
The term apparatus designates that which, and through which, one
realizes a pure activity of governance devoid of any foundation in
being. This is the reason why apparatuses must always imply a process
of subjectification, that is to say, they must produce their subject.5
68 home, his life, and the world he created he is, rather, triple.
5 Ibid., 11.
Post-Panopticism and the Attention Economy
The fact is that according to all indications, apparatuses are not a mere
accident in which humans are caught by chance, but rather are rooted
in the very process of humanization that made humans out of the
animals we classify under the rubric Homo sapiens.()At the root of
each apparatus lies an all-too-human desire for happiness. The capture
and subjectification of this desire in a separate sphere constitutes the
specific power of the apparatus.7
It can be inferred from the quote above that, for Agamben, apparatuses
have always constituted a marking sign of the divide between humans
and other animals. It can also be inferred that the evolution of the human
person alongside its pursuit of the desire for a better life is closely tied to
the creation and development of apparatuses or forms of governance. These
underlie the structures that allow individuals to organize the world through
functioning hierarchical social political paradigms.
As Agamben writes, these tools of the oikonomia directly result from
human desire. Yet, it may be argued that they also thwart desire by imposing
boundaries when creating the subject. The subject, it may be inferred, is as
free as the laws restricting its behavior and setting limitations to the pursuit
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid., 16. 69
Chapter 2
If the ordinary man lives in a prison as big as the city and the means of
70 8 Ibid.
9 Ibid., 23.
Post-Panopticism and the Attention Economy
surveilling these urban spaces are networked so as to wire in the whole world,
then the potential criminals framed by video cameras could equal the ordinary
citizens of every nation. According to Agamben, the counter movements of
subjectification come from within the oikonomia of the apparatus. These
happen at the hands of the ungovernables, people who understand the
premises underlying the panoptic and its contemporary exponents who
propose and identify potential forms of subverting it.
As Foucault states, rather than hiding the prisoners in the darkness where they
cannot be seen, the form of the Panopticon, with its darkened watchtower
in the center, is a far more effective means of surveilling the inmates. All
that is required of the workforce is a guard who supervises all the exposed,
lighted cells. This is a cost-efficient way to collect knowledge of everyone
being watched. Rather than having several guards walking into each room
at regular intervals, the central tower ensures maximum visibility of the
prisoners. But this efficiency is even more sophisticated and competent in
another aspect. As there may be no one in the tower, the Panopticon may
work simply due to its architecture. As the central tower hides from sight the
supervising guard, inmates are ignorant as to whether or not they are being
observed. The possibility that someone may be looking directly at them
is considered to be deterrent enough to restrain them from illicit action.
Bentham laid out the principle that power should be visible and
unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes
the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon.
Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked
at at any moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so.13
For the architect of the Panopticon the guards watchful eye from the middle
tower personifies power, be it political, judicial, or economic. In the mind
of the inmate, someone hidden behind blinds is always present. While this
prisoner can never be sure of being watched, he is nevertheless constantly
aware of this possibility. The Panopticon model is also extensively used in
factories and schools where surveillance is equated with supervision.
It must be noted that the webcam is not an architectural device
like the watchtower, even if the camera is determinant for urban planning.
Thus, where formal aspects are concerned, the disposition of the webcam in
a space differs from the original intention of the Panopticon. In primarily
urban spaces where video surveillance is ever expanding, there is no central
watchtower from which to film the entire town or city. In its place, a
multitude of cameras are tactically distributed in order to monitor the
routines of those in the streets. Still, even if the more formal aspects of data
collection and device distribution differ from case to case, the principles
governing the webcam as a tool for surveillance are comparable to those
underscoring the Panopticon. As an example, Foucault further states that the
principle of panopticism he identifies is based on the systematic functioning
of the apparatus, which is mostly dependent on its mechanical aspects. In fact
the Panopticon is an architectural system that can function regardless of who
72 12 Ibid., 201.
13 Ibid., 201.
Post-Panopticism and the Attention Economy
may be operating it. Similar to the case of the webcams, the machinery is built
to work on its own and may be activated by anyone, regardless of function
or profession. Virtually any person is able to purchase a camera, position it
outside of the window and start filming the public space. Foucault notes
that, when it comes to the one operating the Panopticon:
[I]t does not matter what motive animates him: the curiosity of
the indiscreet, the malice of a child, the thirst for knowledge of a
philosopher who wishes to visit this museum of human nature, or the
perversity of those who take pleasure in spying and punishing.14
14 Ibid., 202. 73
Chapter 2
74 15 Ibid.
16 Ibid., 203.
Post-Panopticism and the Attention Economy
75
Chapter 2
76
Post-Panopticism and the Attention Economy
17 Ibid.
18 There are innumerous stickers indicating the presence of surveillance cameras in certain areas
that increase peoples awareness of their existence.
19 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 206. 77
Chapter 2
In the case of the webcams, this quote is illuminating. The existence of these
particular cameras derives from a power system intended for social control and
productivity enhancement. As Foucault notes the purpose and the functioning
of panopticism are aimed at self-multiplication. It can thus be inferred that
webcams are the contemporary result of the amplification of the Panopticon.
Moreover, by allowing anyone to buy, install and stream with such a camera,
authorities are promoting this form of decentralized surveillance, in which
the world has become its own observer by taking on a self-disciplining, active
role. According to Foucault, Benthams premonitory thoughts on a possible
panoptic network envisioned a self-replicating surveillance system, which
is in essence not unlike the functioning of webcams. As Foucault explains,
Bentham envisioned a network of mechanisms that would be everywhere
78 20 Ibid., 207.
Post-Panopticism and the Attention Economy
21 Ibid., 207.
22 Ibid., 209.
23 Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control, October 59, Winter (1992): 3-7,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/778828.
24 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 217.
25 Ibid., 217. 79
Chapter 2
2.3 Post-Panopticism
As I will demonstrate in this section, the term post-panopticism does
not entail the end of the Panopticon as such, but encompasses everything that
originated with this original architectural structure and that followed in its
wake. The superpanopticon, as used by Mark Poster, and other terms, such
as hyper-surveillance by William Bogard, are examples of notions that I
consider necessary when conceptualizing post-panopticism.26 As stated before,
I do not distinguish a clean break between the Panopticon and contemporary
video surveillance, but instead approach them as stages on an evolutionary
path that can be traced back to Foucaults analysis of panopticism, regardless
of substantial changes that occurred in the social realm in the process.
In Postscript on the Societies of Control, Gilles Deleuze praised
Foucaults efforts for analyzing the so-called disciplinary societies. However,
as he remarks, these societies are based on a set of enclosures or institutions,
such as family or schools that are presently in constant change. Moreover, they
have ceased to be identified with a place, since they are everywhere. As the
philosopher writes:
26 Mark Poster, The Second Media Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997).
William Bogard, The Simulation of Surveillance: Hypercontrol in Telematic Societies (New York:
Cambridge University Press 2010).
27 Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control, 4.
28 George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Penguin Books, 2013.
In this book, originally written in 1949, Orwells dystopian view of the future world describes a
80 society that is constantly surveilled by a fictional character called Big Brother. This omnipresent
figure stands for all forms of law-enforcement authority.
Post-Panopticism and the Attention Economy
The old monetary mole is the animal of the spaces of enclosure, but
the serpent is that of the societies of control. We have passed from one
animal to the other, from the mole to the serpent, in the system under
which we live, but also in our manner of living and in our relations
with others. The disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of
energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous
network. Everywhere surfing has already replaced the older sports.32
In an analogy with animal life, Deleuze compares the discipline mole with
the control serpent. From this point of view, the virtual world inhabited
by the man of control is defined by a network through which a flow of
The classically oriented theories have in common a search for the social
and especially the institutional roots of surveillance processes as
they have developed, especially in the twentieth century. Thus military
competition between nations states, the rationalization expressed
in bureaucracy and the class imperatives of capitalism are viewed
variously as the origins and the providers of the essential dynamics
for modern surveillance. Each emphasizes aspects of surveillance that
In this citation, David Lyon points to the main social causes sought out by
theorists to explain the emergence of surveillance. As he states, classically
oriented theories mainly relate these causes to the magnification of
institutional powers that support them: nation states, capitalist bureaucracy
and class distinction. But, as Lyon notes, the latter are organized according
to outdated notions of structural systems, or what Deleuze referred to as
the enclosures. These enclosures roughly correspond to those places where
Foucault invariably identifies the presence of the Panopticon: the prison,
the factory, the school, etc. As previously argued, these enclosures belong
to the disciplinary society, for Foucault, and constantly shift forms with the
emergence of the control society, in Deleuze.
As Steven Shaviro argues when he analyzes networked forms of
surveillance, the post-panoptic abandons the central point of view and cannot
logically be limited to any form of enclosure:
the camera as monad becomes a useful notion for this study, particularly
when focusing on its cinematic abilities that derive from the degrees of affects
they may carry. Each camera can stand for the whole of video surveillance,
as it contains in itself the panoptic principle. However, the image stream the
camera sends out is unique and bound to possess diverging degrees of affect.
As Shaviro notes, the policys change of focus during the transition
from discipline to control moves beyond the simple act of recording events, in
order to prioritize the prevention of these same events:
decoys.38 Bogard argues that surveillance cameras spread around the city may
not be switched on, which implies that possibly most of them have never
been connected to a centralized monitoring system. It is their sheer presence
that fulfills the role of preemptiveness. The Panopticons strongest aspect,
the incertitude of visibility that regulates behavior, has been exacerbated into
full-fledged simulation.39 In fact, self-regulation is now based on a certainty
of constant observation, which translates into the simulation thereof. This
simulation relies on the promise of contemporary technology through
algorithmic controlled networked telematics as if it had already taken place,
as if the future follows a reliable programmability that ensures its a priori
preemptiveness. This simulation entails a reversal in the order of causality.
Following a traditional chronology, for example, a potential deviation could
lead to an actual crime. However, in the simulation, this crime has already
happened. In his own words:
Bogard points to the fact that these decoys, which correspond to empty
watchtowers, have become the basis for strategic social control. The notion
of crime prevention then becomes a vicious cycle, since the multiplicity of
scenarios implies that basically anyone is a suspect, and that the possibility of
committing a crime is inherent to ones existence and thus taken for granted.
As he notes, simply positioning a camera in anticipation of an event implies
that all the possible scenarios have already been played over and over, since
the contingent, the moments of emptiness, is full of criminal potential. This
86 41 Ibid., 30.
Post-Panopticism and the Attention Economy
42 Ibid. 87
Chapter 2
This social and economic paradigm that comprises the simulation of video
surveillance as a form of capital could be included within Jonathan Bellers
account of the attention economy at the center of his book The Cinematic
Mode of Production (2006).43
the Imaginary []46 Thus, the material world on film, combined with
imagination as a form of attention, have created a hybrid production process
of capital. Beller explains it as follows:
From the above quote, I deduce that cinematic vision can be interpreted
both as the vision that watches a film, as well as the creation of visions of the
world. In the first case, it refers to the eyes of the spectator and the way these
engage with the unconscious to form a mental image of what is actually seen.
In the second case, it refers to the creators of images and the ways in which
their craft can shape subjectivities and affect the material world by entering
the unconscious of the viewers. These two processes go hand in hand, and
thereby further improve the productivity of a capitalist system based on the
cinematization of the world.
As I maintained at the beginning of this chapter, the success of an
apparatus, according to Agamben, depends on the concealment of its inner
workings, as is the case with cinema. Disguised as a form of entertainment,
even when one is aware of its commercial enterprise, cinema actually gives
form to previously unknown forms of labor, which have only recently
recognized. Cinema gave rise to the attention economy, in which ones eyes
provide access to the production of capital, which insidiously takes place
in someones mind. By devoting their time to the pleasure of watching a
film, people enable its production mode, and contribute their attention
span to it. As Beller further remarks [] the circulation of capital in and
as consciousness is cinema.48 Taking this view as his point of departure, the
author affirms that cinema now circulates through our nervous pathways,
in the same way that capital used to travel through space. Capital as cinema
has by now taken over the sensorium, both as marketplace and as a site of
production. As such, the labor necessary for the capitalist model to thrive
is extracted directly from peoples brains, even when these are supposedly
in a state of relaxation. Beller further advances the hypothesis that the
image-commodity bypasses the direct mediation of money as wage in the
extraction of necessary labor and pays the viewer in a combination of pleasure
and techn.49 This mediation model consists of a concerted approach that
includes all visual communication platforms, from cinema to the Internet,
from televisions to smartphones, to ensure a maximum amount of people is
constantly wired in and contributing to the attention economy.50 Labor thus
extends to all spaces and instances in everyday life, as people can be seen at
work on the sidewalk when they receive phone calls from work, or in the
cinema wearing 3D glasses.
Whether commuting to work or window-shopping, one is constantly
experiencing visual stimuli. Our contemporary society hosts a visuality that is
constituted not only by the actual screens in everyones smartphones, tablets,
etc. that add to the screens in the bus, on the metro, the tram and on many
buildings, but also by the awareness of ones visual impact.51 Perception of
audiovisual materials has become the most sought after human potential
and is actually given away for free in peoples free time. Moreover, it is
common practice to work for wages that are spent on acquiring the necessary
equipment that allows for dedicating everyones attention to the imagery that
is generated for them to capture and observe. By acting this way, people are
actually contributing to the further production of this imagery.
Beller notes that [th]e Cinematicization of the visual, the fusion of
the visual with a set of socio-technical institutions and apparatuses, gives
rise to the advanced forms of networked expropriation characteristic of the
present period.52 These forms of networked expropriation that Beller hints
at can be interpreted as the previously mentioned attention devoted to filmic
products (including social media), but can also be applied to the creation of
a cinematized space in cities, pervaded by video-surveillance devices. I argue
that webcams are central to this cinematic apparatus that Beller calls capital.
In fact, by their sheer presence in every dependency of life, webcams provide
an excellent example of networked expropriation. Their presence is entirely
justified by safety and preemptive action, i.e. Agambens oikonomia, which
veils their true function as organizing and regulating social practices and
conducts. Furthermore, webcams can be considered as an emerging cinematic
apparatus, since they contribute not only to monopolizing the time spent by
49 Ibid., 57.
50 Beller, Paying Attention.
many behind the computer monitor while observing their streams, but also
to the regulation of the city space in a manner similar to film plateaus where
controlled and potentially dramatic action takes place. This networked system
represents an ideal scenario for authorities that seek to enforce the regulation
of social relations and practices in the public and the private sphere. Under
the illusion of safety and direct access to unlimited amounts of information,
one is caught up in a bubble of constructed data through simulated
surveillance that works as a shield against real-life interpersonal relations.
From this perspective, it appears that people are regularly isolated under the
influence of pixelated pulsating material, and cut off from the material world.
This happens, however, providing that no one attempts to deconstruct the
apparatus and engage with others in the process, thereby affecting relations in
the material world.
91
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Today, it is more a matter of finding ways to jack the worker in, make
him or her just one more switch or relay in a growing cybernetic
assemblage. This signals a dramatic intensification of the control of
labor at the end of the twentieth century, a grand extension of the
practice of synchronizing human labor to the rhythms of machines.
As labor slides into its simulation in the post-industrial era, so do all
the disciplinary methods that were once used to exploit it the close
supervision and inspection of work, meticulous, detailed organization
of worktime and workspace, ranking and serializing productive tasks,
the alignment and integration of laboring bodies into workforces.53
The forms of supervising the workforce, Bogard notes, are increasingly less
disciplinary and more of a simulated nature. As those who own a smartphone
know, its signal as well as its routine use can be tracked. The cameras and
microphones in many mobile devices can be remotely switched on. With
this, however, I do not wish to imply that there is a great conspiracy at
work to record everything everyone ever says, in the manner of NSA data
collection. But to point out that the simulation of surveillance, though it
may in principle never actualize, might nonetheless trigger restrictive action
should the workforce not comply with its expected productivity. The goal is
to ensure that the networked workforce never ceases productivity. As Bogard
writes: worktimes, in this dreamland of hyper production, become any-
time-whatevers (days/nights, weekends, holidays, vacations), workspaces
any-place-whatevers (factories, homes, offices, cars, planes, sidewalks the
cellular revolution).54
However, in a perfected system of maximum visibility, where
everything and everyone seems apathetic to constant control, one hardly ever
thinks of those who fall out of the frame. Many people fall off the grid of
visibility, and become invisible through such surveillance processes. This is the
reverse of the coin, of which Beller highlights that:
what passes for civil society would legitimate the current world. We,
who believe we count, cannot feel the pain of the world. This terrible
incapacity isnt the result of any individual effort; this insensitivity and
invisibility is the result of a systemic disappearance.55
55 Jonathan Beller, cited from Interview: Jonathan Beller, by Gavin Mueller, September 30,
2013, Edges, http://edges.gmu.edu/interview-jonathan-beller/. 93
Chapter 2
world beyond its other narrative and expressive functions. According to these
authors, cinema is a form of art that exceeds representation and actually
produces reality.56 More than any art form before it, cinema influences
peoples perception of their self and that which surrounds them: it simulates
and thus transforms the world. As such, knowledge of cinematic devices can
be put to good use by policy-makers in order to affect subjectification in
the urban realm. In relation to the transformation of the city according to
cinematic techniques, Lipovetsky and Serroy point out that:
The relocation of the cinematic from the film theatre into the streets implies
that cities are treated like film sets: they are lit like plateaus in order to perfect
a mise-en-scne that conforms to control strategies and capital production
reinforcement techniques. These are prepared in such a way that they provide
a controlled visibility of the city: a vision that will be captured by webcams
and spread on the Internet. Lipovetsky and Serroy conclude on a positive
note, perhaps a hopeful appeal to peoples sensibility when handling matters
that pertain to surveillance and the attention economy:
Even though my argument tends to be less hopeful and more critical than
what Lipovetsky and Serroy aim for, it is indeed interesting to observe
56 Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy, Lcran Global: du Cinma au Smartphone (Paris: ditions
du Seuil, 2011).
57 Ibid., 340.
My translation of the original: Un peu partout, les centres-ville sont de plus en plus traits
la manire de dcors, clairs par des jeux de projecteurs, faonns par des urbanistes-
scnographes, dessins par des designers-dcorateurs, mis en scne selon une dramaturgie
vise touristique qui, cadrant le regard, impose une cinvision. On les visite comme on
regarde un film.
58 Ibid., 343.
My translation of the original: Ce que lunivers cranique a apport lhomme hypermoderne,
94 cest moins, comme on laffirme trop souvent, le rgne de lalination totale quune puissance
nouvelle de recul critique, de dtachement ironique, de jugement et de dsirs esthtiques.
Post-Panopticism and the Attention Economy
and analyze the ways in which the available visual materiality can be used
creatively so as to navigate and transform contemporary urbanity.
Over the course of this chapter, I have analyzed contemporary
forms of the Panopticon and compared them with the original architectural
device created by Bentham. In order to do so, I made use of the writings of
Agamben and Foucault to identify and examine the continuities between
the apparatuses within panopticism and post-panopticism, thereby taking
the webcam as a surveillance device the central matter of concern. From the
perspective of contemporary forms of surveillance, I have analyzed the aspect
of the simulation of surveillance, theorized by Bogard, when the webcams
play out all possible scenarios. As I have established, webcams occupy a central
role in contributing to the multiplication of the subject, because their mode
of production is anchored in the laboratorial aspect of the Panopticon and its
consequent self-replication. To define the mode of production of the webcams
I have analyzed Bellers theories on the cinematic production of capital that
extends to all contemporary forms of visuality, including the Internet. When
applied to the webcams, knowledge of the inner workings of the apparatus
allows for a production of imagery that affects everyone involved, as I
demonstrated with Farockis and Palms examples.
In conclusion, the attention economy depends on a passive subject
who interacts within the boundaries of the code that restricts access according
to his or her online profile. To go back to Lipovetsky and Serroys optimism
when it comes to the creative potential of these visual technologies, one
should critically engage with film techniques in order to understand how they
influence and simulate peoples encounters with urban life. This happens not
only when the city centers are beautified for pleasing visiting tourists, but also
when allegedly innocent webcams are put to use to film a specific street from
a particular angle. Moreover, it is useful to further explore the way in which
visual narrative productions have evolved with the advent of networked digital
video surveillance. In the following chapter, I will conduct a comparative
analysis between the classical cinematographic apparatus of mainstream film
production and the emerging cinematic medium of the webcams.
95
Chapter 3
From
Cinematographic to
Cinematic Apparatus
96
The present chapter analyzes the notion of the apparatus beyond
Agambens study of Foucaults terminology as discussed in the previous
chapter. The notion of the apparatus now applies to the dispositif of the
film medium. This theoretical approach changes focus from the surveillance
apparatus of the Panopticon, in Foucaldians terms, to the structure of
the classical cinematographic apparatus as defined by French film theorist
Jean-Louis Baudry in Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic
Apparatus.1 Baudrys theories will serve as a basis to compare the
influence on subjectification by classical forms of film production and my
conceptualization of the emerging cinematic apparatus of the webcams. What
follows is a technical analysis of traditional cinema and the medium-specific
characteristics I have identified when making films with webcams.
It can be inferred from this quote that the production of film by the
cinematographic apparatus makes it an ideal medium for passing ideological
matter onto the spectator. Although I disagree with Baudrys apparent
2
1986).
Ibid., 286. 97
Chapter 3
98 3 Ibid.
4 Douglas Collins, The Story of Kodak (New York: Abrams, 1990).
From Cinematographic to Cinematic Apparatus
Roberto Rosselini and Jean-Luc Godard who took it apart, with the purpose
of allowing the spectator to experience liberation from an a priori determined
spectatorial position. These filmmakers experimented by disentangling
themselves from the constraints imposed by traditional practices mostly
dictated by Hollywood. Through such experimental practices, they exposed
the medium and contributed to changing the position of both the spectator
and the maker. Freed from ideological constraints, the medium could be used
freely to express ideological concerns challenging the status quo. The spectator
could achieve some sort of liberation when allowed space for recollecting and
interpreting the imagery in a personal fashion. The example of the long take
that was introduced at the time is known as a means of giving the spectator
the choice of where to lay the eyes, hereby drawing individual conclusions.
Several experimental practices with the apparatus, even as it became
gradually more mobile and transitioned to digital, have contributed to a
further understanding of inner workings that could be manipulated in order
to subvert expected outcomes from more classical and traditional approaches.
In-depth analysis of the apparatus of webcams may help us understand
how the medium works and identify the initial aims and notions associated
with its surveillance principle. Additionally, it may problematize the roles of
the owner, the viewer, those who are filmed, the makers appropriating the
material, and the public encountering its artistic results. By focusing both on
the role of production and spectatorship, this chapter will proceed to analyze
the different elements identified by Baudry as constituting the film apparatus
(camera, projector and screen with dcoupage, or pre-editing, and
montage, or editing proper, as intermediate stages). The complex medium
of the webcam will be compared to the classical cinematographic apparatus
by having each of its mechanical/digital elements analyzed in parallel fashion.
Further, I will study the elements Baudry leaves out of his analysis mise-
en-scne, acting and authorship and compare the notions as they apply in
classical cinema and in the case of the webcams. Through such a method I aim
to construct a notion where the webcam emerges as cinematic apparatus.
99
Chapter 3
Apparatus (1986), Baudry begins with the camera as the first element
subjected to analysis. He discusses the analog film camera as a camera obscura
and a motor moving the celluloid strip at even tempo. This is a camera that
photographically captures the real life action that develops in front of the lens.
When observing the webcams, we are aware of the development in technology
that involves the transformation of molecular materiality into a digital signal,
a convergence process through which light becomes data. The implications
of this provoke several debates around the creation and the postproduction
of images. In What Cinema Is!, Dudley Andrew writes that [i]n audiovisual
entertainment, cameras are at best conveniences, potentially dispensable as
computer technology improves.5 Referring to the disappearing indexicality of
the analog celluloid filmstrip, Andrew focuses on the potential of Computer
Generated Graphics (CGI) to create images from non-existing material objects
or in the absence of such objects. He points out the fact that cameras may no
longer be regarded as required to record visual stimuli since imagery becomes
increasingly computer-generated.
It may be argued that Andrew is right to point out the obsolesce of
cameras in the age of CGI, where characters do not necessarily correspond
to pre-existing bodies in the material world. However, as acknowledged in
the previous chapters, the trend is not to reduce the amount of cameras but
instead to multiply them, at least when our observation is directed at the
dissemination of video surveillances devices. What Andrew is questioning here
is the stake of the documental value of CGI imagery (or any other for that
matter) when the referent attached to the materiality of analog images seems
to have gotten lost. According to him, beyond the creation of referential or
non-referential imagery in film, digital indexicality and documental value is
frequently debated as of late:
100 5
6
Dudley Andrew, What Cinema Is! West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, 2.
Ibid., 3.
From Cinematographic to Cinematic Apparatus
nonexistent beings and realities, the role of the camera has not been
diminished but instead awarded greater emphasis. Leaving the in-depth study
of analog/digital referentiality debate for chapter five, I will focus at present
on how and why cameras in general have become increasingly pervasive,
rather than tending toward disappearance or substitution by CGI. This
includes not only surveillance cameras but also those embedded in most
computer devices generally used, whether mobile or stationary. Regarding the
increasing domestication of camera use, Andrew enumerates several instances
that demonstrate how cameras have in the last several decades become an
indissociable part of the social fabric. For generations, they have accompanied
and recorded every major moment of family-related existence: birth, first
steps, graduation, marriage, and so forth:
The camera is not only indispensable for domestic life, but the
very fetish of family identity and solidarity. Reality TV names an
entertainment obsession that is equally dependent on the camera far
more than in the days of celluloid, todays cities are monitored by
cameras.7
Thus, in Andrews words, the camera has become far more than a vestige of
a fading cinema culture since it occupies a central place in documenting the
existence of human life and establishing a relation between people and the
world.8 The latter is constantly mediated by recording devices, and is therefore
based upon a perception dictated by these same devices. Our knowledge of the
world would be a different one if not mediated by cameras and our relation of
affect with these devices.
As Andrew claims, when analyzing Andr Bazins writings about the
camera, Bazin, less interested in the freedom of the imagination, focuses on
the power of the photograph to amplify our perception, teaching us what
our eyes alone would not have noticed.9 It can be inferred here that the
medium of the camera is central to the perception of what surrounds us, since
it allows the human being to experience a reality beyond the empirical modes
restricted by limited bodily senses. The photographic, filmic, or televisual
camera amplifies the eyes ability to see and, therefore, enlarges the scope
of what the brain assimilates as visual information. As mentioned in the
introduction, when employing Bruno Latours ideas about tool making and
7 Ibid., 3.
8
9
Ibid., 4.
Ibid., 4. 101
Chapter 3
impact upon the world (see Introduction), these cameras amplify our vision
while simultaneously transforming it in the process. This necessarily impacts
on thought processes of knowledge formation about the world. Bazin provides
a good example of the magnitude of this impact when he describes the live
event transmitted by television as the moment when the documentary
becomes contemporary with the spectator 10. When watching the live
transmission, the spectator is thus directly involved in the event. Here vision
becomes equated with involvement with experience.
If Bazins example is applied to webcams, the event at the center of
live TV can be whatever street action may occur while cameras stream live
on the Internet. As a matter of fact, live streaming can be considered the
contemporary correspondent to 1960s live TV a standard that has not
exponentially changed since Bazin experienced it. In any case, if the spectators
involvement in the live event is central to the documentary value of live TV,
webcams may have the same effect when users observe in real time a stream
from a street. Applying Bazins observations to the study of the webcam, one
notes that the camera amplifies the perception of the event by implicating the
viewer, and does so by exposing the close relations between the viewer and
what is viewed. If we conclude that the camera, as part of the cinematographic
apparatus and later, that of live TV, has evolved into the webcam, these
relations extend to both the people in the street and to those who observe
them in a live documentary image transmission. The simultaneity and
multiplicity creates a cinematic space connecting the people, the events and
the cameras.
To reiterate, the camera entered the digital age by multiplying into
several devices that operate beyond the scope of filmmaking. Their referent is
no longer analog, meaning images can be created digitally, but the fact that
webcams supposedly stream in real time imparts them with a documental
value connecting the viewer to the event being filmed. To further shed light
on this specific creation of visions and relations between subjects and objects,
I will presently focus on how they occur. The cinematic space, which has
moved beyond the film set (production) and the film theatre (spectatorship),
is created according to mechanical and digital processes, of which I will now
describe specific elements in relation to the camera. In order to establish a
thorough study of the more technical aspects of principal photography, I
will draw from the analytical writings of Baudry and Christian Metz and
Cinematography 3.1.1
Concerning cinematography and specific principles that are inherent .1
to film language, in the classical cinematographic apparatus the position of
the spectator in relation to the filmed object is provided by the camera and
obeys strict rules. According to Baudry, these have been determined by Italian
Renaissance perspective conventions; they intend to provide the viewer with
an illusion of truth, i.e. the image of an organized environment or universe,
according to a harmonious hierarchization of subjects and values.12 They have
been applied to the point of view that the camera is supposed to reproduce
when it captures the so-called objective reality: a normal point of view, free
from perceptible visual distortions. As Baudry explains:
11 This approach does not entail that the cinematic did not pre-exist webcams, but rather that
it has extended filmmaking and its instances of production to all levels of life.
12 Baudry, Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus.
13 Ibid., 289.
14 Jean-Louis Comolli, Technique and Ideology: Camera, Perspective, Depth of Field [Parts
3 and 4], in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1986). 103
Chapter 3
guideline for choosing optical equipment and the placement thereof. If one
questions why most webcams have a similar point of view, one could deduce
that it is not only related to technical limitations. In fact, there might be a
distinct reason behind a careful positioning by the maker, or the owner, with
spectatorial consequences. As is known, the majority of webcams are placed
above the subjects eye-level, in most cases in piqu or even birds-eye view,
revealing a frame that suggests an omnipresence of the eye that watches all
from above and subjugate whoever is filmed. This accentuates the cinematic
aspects of public space,instilling an awareness that there may be someone
watching or recording at all times, and that the location in which one moves
has become a film set with cameras perched in high spots that cover vast areas
of visual space.
In order to further analyze how these images are formed following
codes of cinematography both with film cameras and webcams, I make use of
simplified technical explanations present in Bordwell and Thompsons Film
Art: An Introduction (2010). According to this book, there are three ways to
choose to film a specific action, which include the photography, the frame
and the duration. The first aspect can further be divided into the range of
tonalities, the speed of motion and the perspective. All of these are logical
choices made by the director and the cinematographer according to the
desired visual effect and its preponderance for the narrative. In this manner,
when it comes to controlling the photography of the shot, the filmmaker
can choose to produce footage that is exposed for a determined purpose: an
evenly bright high-key lighting will contribute to a softer and more reassuring
atmosphere compared to other gloomier cinematography choices.15
If one considers webcams and their technology, it can be argued that
their limited technological capacity may stand in the way of the potential
to control expressive abilities of the medium. For instance, if the image is in
black and white and there is no adjustable contrast, then the image quality
may not be controllable to meet a desirable degree of expertise. Beyond
the issue of whether or not these limitations are presently politically or
economically determined, it is plausible to predict a near future in which
webcams have reached the standards of film cameras (high definition). Once
the technical constraints have been overcome by technological progress, the
owner will be able to control the photographic aspects and the atmosphere
that will be attributed to the framed reality. In any case, in the current state of
104 15 David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction (New York: McGraw Hill,
2010).
From Cinematographic to Cinematic Apparatus
affairs, and taking into account most of the deficient optics in place, several
effects are achieved automatically: as cameras provide a vision dependent on
their optical quality, the majority of dark streets will appear even darker and
bleaker on screen. Sunny days will, on the contrary, be recorded as imagery
burnt by throbbing white blotches of sunlight and saturated colors, providing
it with a happy look. When it comes to perspective, this is defined by the
lens used in the camera, which will have an impact on the size of the object
being filmed and the depth of field.
The particular usage of a focal lens also influences the experience of
the spectator, regardless of its state of the art. For example, wide-angles and
telephoto lenses may create distance between the subject and the background
or flatten the image. Most webcams use a wide angle, but rarely fish-eye
lenses, thereby allowing the viewer to have access to a vast portion of visible
space, which is made possible by the coverage of the lens but with minimum
distortion. Some webcams also offer possibilities like the zoom to allow the
viewer to change the focal length in real time by remote control: this way, one
can watch over a beach and then zoom in on a particular sunbather, according
to ones interests. As far as focus abilities are concerned, the webcams, being
ordinary video cameras, are equipped with standard deep focus, mainly due to
the fact that this is a characteristic of light processing in video cameras chips.
My film Bucuti 2121212 (2012) (Fig. 8) consists of an experiment
in which I explore mechanical abilities of webcams, showing a long zoom-
out that slowly discloses a beach in Aruba. In this short film, I push the
aesthetics of the medium to its limits by exaggerating and forcing its zooming
capabilities. The camera, owned by a hotel, has a very low resolution and
106 16 The standard of medium focus was, and still is, 50 mm in photography and 80 mm in film
cameras, depending on the distance between the lens and the shutter window.
From Cinematographic to Cinematic Apparatus
and rhythm.21 A camera movement happens in duration and thus affects the
viewers sense of anticipation: should the camera movement be fast or slow,
a different reaction will be elicited in whomever is observing the camera. As
I mentioned before, a webcam can be accessed remotely, which means that,
in some cases, the end user can control the camera reach. Another person,
whose identity is normally undisclosed, might simultaneously control the
camera elsewhere in the world. I have experienced that observing someone
elses manipulation of the camera, his or her choices for framing, influences
the mobility of the frame, thereby creating or destroying my own viewing
expectations.
As an example, my film piece PAN (see Fig. 9) shows the resulting
imagery of a webcam slowly panning over a park. Observing this single
camera movement has caused a chain of conflicting emotions from myself
as passive observer as I chose not to actively manipulate the camera. As a
spectator, I remember interrogating myself about why the camera was so
intensively panning over all the park benches, as if it was looking for a specific
object or searching for someone. Eventually, the pan ends on the water and
performs a short zoom in before crashing. I decided to save this footage and
use it in an installation because of the fascinating and somewhat unexpected
narrative density conveyed by a single camera movement. This narrative is all
the more poignant, since it was filmed with equipment that conveys footage
with documentary value, which I recognized, being a spectator knowledgeable
of filmmaking codes (like most people, I instinctively apply these codes to any
moving image I encounter). The documentary stance of this imagery, which
includes the potential of filming an event, left me with the unanswerable
question: what could I have been witnessing had the transmission not been
interrupted? The moving frame of the webcam, which captures events in real
time, implies a continuous take, a single shot that may take days or months if
the transmission is stable enough. And when it lasts, it may register all sorts of
occurrences; or, precisely, nothing at all, as in the case of my film PAN (2013)
(Fig. 9).
Until they are interrupted by a technical failure, webcams film and
create footage in a continuous single shot, filming for long stretches of time,
provided that the Internet connection is strong and stable enough. In early
cinema, films frequently consisted of uncut footage, with the duration in
minutes matching the length of the reel. Soon, editing practices started to
21 Ibid. 109
Chapter 3
combine shots and build the visual language of cinema. This was mainly
due to the fact that reels had such limited lengths, as directors could not
film feature length movies with analog cameras. As is well known, Alfred
Hitchcock simulated a single long take with Rope (1948) by hiding the cuts in
fleeting images with dark shadows during camera movements. It is only with
the advent of the video camera that the single long shot became possible. The
example of Alexander Sokurovs Russian Ark (2002) is emblematic, for which
the director chose to hire the cinematographer of Tom Tykwers Run Lola
Run (1998), and employ this Steadycam expert to shoot an uninterrupted
action of 90 minutes. One could argue that most webcams are stationary,
and thus that the action capture cannot be equated to the opulent potential
of the Russian masters film. However, should one take into account the fact
that there are webcams streaming live from four-wheel drives on websites that
offer cyber-safaris, their standard endless shots grow into potential action-
110
From Cinematographic to Cinematic Apparatus
filled live streams. In such cases, when mobile webcams are car-mounted on
Jeeps, wildlife can be documented around the clock and the camera offers a
subjective point of view on the contingent of African bestiality producing an
exciting real time immersive experience.
As I demonstrated so far, the specific operating and production
mode of webcams are mostly in continuity with techniques that have been
developed by the cinematographic apparatus. The differences that set them
apart are characteristic of each respective media. This implies that the
consistent, apparently less creative use is specific to webcams, and could be
the reason for the reduced artistic involvement with their aesthetic potential
(even though it is increasing at present). To recapitulate, there are technical
differences between these processes that influence the output of the cameras.
For instance, instead of the standard use of one camera in classical principal
photography, in which all the filming conditions are created in a controlled
film set, there are many webcams scattered apparently at random all over the
urban space. Their position is mainly piqu, and most of them are immobile,
whereas in traditional filmmaking a single camera will be used to shoot from
several angles, moved around in order to film the desired point of view. But
the single most salient characteristic of webcams, which sets them apart from
the film camera of the classical cinematographic apparatus, is the fact that
the visual data being captured, are immediately streamed to and seen by the
viewer as an uninterrupted shot.
Even if analog film cameras have built-in systems that allow a video
signal to be monitored while the actual footage is being generated, the
final result will only be seen after the filmstrip is developed. In the case
of high definition cinema, it is possible to watch the material while it is
being recorded, but each shot still requires editing in most standard film
productions. The technical process of watching has changed exponentially
compared to the times of traditional cinema, when rushes had to be
projected onto a silver screen in order to be watched by the filmmaker,
the cinematographer and producer before the images would ever reach the
public. With webcams, this process of image production and consumption
is compressed, which causes the projector to disappear and the computer
screen to become the virtual viewfinder of the camera, in a process similar
to the already mentioned live TV. Moreover, some of these webcams can
be controlled remotely so that the user is able to adjust the frame, perform
111
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pans and tilts, but also zoom in. In such cases, and this sets them apart from
live TV, webcams provide an extra layer of controllability. No longer a mere
passive observer, the user can interact with the capture process of a webcam
image, as an additional cinematographer. This has enormous repercussions
for the status of the spectator as well as for authorship. Before analyzing these
aspects, however, it is important to further compare the viewing modes of the
cinematographic apparatus and those of webcams, by examining the role of
the disappearing projector and the changing status of spectatorship.
To briefly summarize, I have in this section identified continuities and
differences between the traditional cinematographic apparatus of conventional
cinema and that of the cinematic apparatus of the webcams in relation to
the actual technical device of the camera. Even if the visual-based language
of the analog film camera serves as a basis for understanding webcams as
media of image production, there are three main identifiable technological
developments that differentiate it from the first. To begin with live streaming,
webcams simultaneously show the viewer what they are filming, which implies
that the one recording the image, the camera operator, does not need to be on
the site, as is the case in traditional filmmaking. This, for instance, allows for
the anonymity of whoever may be viewing the image, collecting it, as well as
detaining the rights for using the recorded audiovisual material, which used
to be granted to the producer in classical filmmaking. Secondly, webcams are
networked, generally multiple and surround the object, rather than being
singular and requiring to be moved around the set. They may also be mobile,
as in the aforementioned case of the jeep-mounted safari cam, but their main
characteristic is that they are spread out, stationary and frame their premises.
Finally, webcams film in a single shot, thereby producing potentially endless
footage, except when there is a transmission or compression problem. All of
the above medium-specific features contribute to enhancing the webcams
cinematic potential by creating an immediacy of contact with the imagery of
the reality being filmed, as well as changing the public space where they are
located, thus creating an urgent sense of photogenic awareness.
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From Cinematographic to Cinematic Apparatus
Viewers who used to huddle together under the big screen now put the
film at their mercy, watching it how and when they like, often alone or
with family and friends, pausing, rewinding, even reworking it if they
choose.24
correct editing between the frames, and its perfectly corresponding projection
give us the illusion of a seamless action. However, should the projected image
show glitches something people in the age of the Internet have become
accustomed to as part of transmission/compression noise the imagery would
achieve the (contemporary) feel of reality. Since the standards have changed
across time, a new medium like the webcam emerges and copies the languages
of its predecessors, but in doing so, it contributes to a retrospective evaluation
of preceding codes and rules. Following this logic, the noisy imagery with
intermittent transmission problems of webcams provokes a higher degree of
spectator immersion than perfectly edited and projected fiction films.
When analyzing the role of projection in filmmaking and
spectatorship, one cannot leave out the surface upon which the actual
projection is realized. The screen and the projection are interdependent in
the film theater since a projector always needs a screen (or a wall) to project
on. However, both in classical cinema and in webcam footage, there is also
a close relation between the screen and the camera. Since I have already
drawn attention to the fact that the projector becomes irrelevant in the age
of webcams, one needs to look into theoretical approaches to the role of the
screen in relation to the camera. Andr Bazin has written the following words
about the French filmmaker Jean Renoir in relation to this subject:
Renoir understands that the screen is not a simple rectangle but rather
the homothetic surface of his camera. It is the very opposite of a frame.
The screen is a mask whose function is no less to hide reality than it is
to reveal it. The significance of what the camera discloses is relative to
what it leaves hidden.28
28 Andr Bazin, Jean Renoir, ed. Franois Truffaut, trans. Simon and Schuster (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1973), 87.
29 Andrew What Cinema Is!, 70.
30 Ibid., 80. 115
Chapter 3
reality (of the film) that is experienced by the audience who engages with it,
when it moves through the threshold of the frame into this volume.31 The
volume, in this case, is the world of the film, the reality it reveals which exists
beyond the outer limits of the framed imagery displayed on the screen.
When screen forms and sizes proliferate, as manifested in places
beyond the film theatre (on the streets, on billboards, in the tram, in
someones pockets), it becomes problematized by particular instances of
production: namely, the expanded cinema presented in museum institutions
and its questioning of the display. For example, in a video installation, the
screen is then taken out of its original context of collective experience and
artificially placed within an exhibition construct that reinforces the isolation
of the individual who visits the art institution.32 This is in accordance with
the contemporary practices of the individual domestic consumption of
audiovisual packages on TV. Similarly, the computer has done the same for
private film viewing. In fact, when it comes to spectatorship and the ways
in which it has changed since the inception of individual monitors, films
are now watched like any other audiovisual stimulus among many media
that compete for the attention of the individual: one now watches movies
while engaging in social media activities that include twittering impressions
during the experience, answering work-related emails and spending money
in online shopping.33 As such, Andrew argues that [m]onitor and display
are more appropriate terms than screen to designate the visual experience of
computers.34
In this manner, the multiplicity of screens and their formats together
with the end of the projector constitute major differences between the
cinematographic apparatus and the cinematic apparatus. Since the screen
shows what the viewfinder simultaneously frames, the aspect of immediacy of
the cinematic is accentuated, hereby involving the viewer in the live event.
3.1.3 Spectatorship
As we again turn our attention to the cinematic experience of cinema
going, it is relevant to compare identification processes with what is shown
within the frame and to examine the origination of such processes by
concerning ourselves particularly with the optics of psychoanalytic theory.
31 Ibid., 80.
32 Ibid.
With classical cinema, the frame of the screen delimits a space that, with
the help of the darkened room of the film theater, gives the viewer the
impression of entering a limited but complete world, the universe of the
film being projected upon it. According to Baudry, it is these conditions,
coupled with the immobility of the spectator in the space and the fact that
the eyes are mainly the source of all perception, that contribute to a process
of identification in a Lacanian sense.35 Such an approach appears to imply the
passivity of the spectator.
In The Imaginary Signifier, Christian Metz draws attention to the ways
in which the spectator becomes involved in the film, and he draws out the
mutual effects both spectator and film have on one another. He writes that
it is man who makes the symbol when it is also clear that the symbol makes
man[.]36 According to Metz, film is more perceptual as it mobilizes more
senses than other art forms.37 The visual and auditory stimuli are combined
to create an imaginary signifier that is perceived by the spectator, due to the
fact that beyond the representation of subject-matter, cinema contains the
absence of the physical signifier. Additionally, the film itself shows the viewer
the absence of his or her body by reflecting the absence of the spectator from
the movie. In his description of the spectator in reference to the theories
of Jacques Lacan, Metz remarks: unlike the child in the mirror, he cannot
identify with himself as an object, but only with objects which are there
without him. In this sense the screen is not a mirror.38 Thus, the screen of
classical film is not a mirror, as the viewer is the one who perceives all that
is represented on it, the other, through the absence of the self. In relation to
Baudrys claim, Metz seems to support a more active participation from the
viewer in the making of the signifier even when it refers to the perception
of the absent individual. As Metz writes:
From Metz claim, it becomes apparent that cinema has a more direct
connection with the symbolic than the mirror does; and thus with cinema
118 40 Ibid.
41 Ibid., 260.
From Cinematographic to Cinematic Apparatus
the cinema, is a prop, the prop that disavows a lack and in doing so affirms it
without wishing to.42 The prop to which Metz is referring can be utilized as a
term to define the video surveillance device, a technology that is continuously
improving and whose capabilities are lauded by authorities. The presence of
surveillance implies that complete visibility will guarantee safety and eradicate
threatening situations. By being present even when there is no crime to
record the cameras reinforce this possibility. Like a fetish, they foreground the
eventuality of a deviant occurrence.
As I have argued in this section, the psychoanalytic theories of Baudrys
and Metz are applicable to the webcams if we limit our focus to the role
of the spectator who receives and perceives audiovisual content. However,
these theories cease to be valid when we consider that the user is not only a
spectator but simultaneously observes others and him or her self on multiple
mobile screens and can also interact with the cameras and produce content.
The relation between the spectator and the screen has thus changed: the
spectator uses the screen not only to consume audiovisual narratives but
also to look at the world. The screen is also a viewfinder that allows for the
webcam viewer to choose what to film by capturing webcam streams and also
produce content of his or her choice.
Editing 3.1.4
When the user decides to record a particular stream, he or she
may wish to edit the resulting footage and instill the imagery with poetic
meaning or a narrative line as with other forms of filmmaking. At this point
we will turn our attention to the practice of editing in a variety of filmic
media, looking at its implementation in formats ranging from cinema to
the webcam to compare the processes that the different approaches involve.
Surprisingly, even if relevant to apparatus theory in general, Baudry did not
write extensively about dcoupage and montage beyond mentioning them
as intermediate stages of film production.43 However, since I find editing
to be relevant to this dissertation, I will be examining both dcoupage and
montage in the case of webcam film production. In this section I will address
the specifics of traditional cinematic continuity editing, and will specifically
focus on outlining those potential forms of editing used for webcam footage.
42 Ibid., 271.
43 Apparatus theories about editing and montage mainly focus on the term suture (like the
work of Kaja Silverman, for example), which is used to name the instances of spectatorial
engagement with the narrative. 119
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This is a view I find quite interesting in considering webcams, since they are
constantly filming, and therefore potentially recording, with supposedly no
process of montage inherent to the production of their audiovisual output.
Apparently, they merely produce imagery with no human intervention. As
Andrew points out, Bazin showed an interest in the plastic potential of an
automatically captured reality, untouched by an editor in post-production. It
may appear irrelevant to dedicate a section to dcoupage and montage when
talking about the webcams, but it is nevertheless still interesting to consider
the modes in which the medium is already determining the possibilities of
meaning ahead of the artists appropriation of the footage. So, for example,
when considering the dcoupage phase, the maker has to consider the best
options for finding audiovisual material that will adequately fit the project
in the end. The film one wants to make entails prior research of pre-existing
material sources for appropriation. This consists of a process somewhat
equitable to that of conventional pre-production in film industry: scouting
for a location, the way in which the camera frames the action, etc. Needless to
say, there is only so much that can be controlled by the maker when he or she
looks for material to appropriate. As a matter of fact, the pre-production of
such a film would be similar to those that are made with archival material. In
this case, however, that material is being produced in real time at the moment
of choosing to record and collect the found footage.
When it comes to montage per se, most artists working with other
techniques of video editing might still be acquainted with the industrys
also educated the spectator who gradually grew accustomed to the fast-paced
editing of music clips and their fragmented non-continuity based narratives.
These include editing alternatives that rely on graphic and rhythmic
possibilities. Experiments with editing rules, such as the principle of the axis
of the camera, may also be corrupted by a creative montage: for Jacques Tati,
the space of the scene became a 360-degree where the camera could decide
to position itself anywhere, thereby breaking and challenging the spatial
continuity of the 180-degree rule.48 Experiments like these are particularly
interesting in the context of this study. The film set of webcams is indeed
defined by 360-degree spatiality potential since the cameras can be found
virtually everywhere and in any position and height, at any level and angle, in
every corner. Even if a webcam is expected to film what is in the 180-degrees
in front of it, it may pan to film what lurks behind it (if indeed possessing this
technical possibility), disclosing a circular spatiality.
It can then be argued that continuity editing may elicit a somewhat
dulled reaction from the viewer who does not need to engage in making an
effort to construct the story. The semiology that is used belongs to common
sense to such an extent that its underlying logic is expected to be taken for
granted on the side of the viewer, who is generally acquainted with film
language. However, when this continuity of technology-based representation
of events takes on an expressive and intrusive character, for example in Sergei
Eisensteins montage experiments, the mind is awakened by what it perceives
and meaning is constructed in the viewers consciousness and unconsciousness
in a more active manner.49 A similar approach could be applied to the
potential of editing footage generated by webcams, perhaps not so much by
focusing on the forced chronology of shot combination, nor by necessarily
producing elliptical pieces in a time-lapse fashion, but instead by combining a
set of cameras and editing the material in a discontinuous manner.
Although there could be countless ways in which to edit the material
(both online and offline) produced by webcams, there are two methods that
I have experimented with in my own artistic practice. To begin with, the
first editing method is similar to that of live television. From this example
we see that, a director or producer monitors a bank of screens in the editing
room that reveal what the cameras are capturing in the studio: the directors
instruct the camera operators as to which movements or zooming actions they
should perform and the editors with cues as to which cameras they should
cut to. In this way, the live television environment is similar to the immense
and widespread presence of webcams that cover expansive areas within a city.
Should an event take place that is worth watching, these cameras allow the
viewer to connect to several publicly accessible webcams in the observed area.
This form of montage might occur independently from the recording, and
it allows the viewer to follow an event as it develops in real time. The second
montage possibility relates to a more conventional approach and occurs when
artists edit the footage they decide to collect from webcam streams to make
film-based objects.
The abundance of webcams allows for the possibility to follow the
subject through the city space by engaging in casual camera-hopping. This
gives the viewer, or the online editor, the opportunity to perform an
immediate montage from these available visuals, such as a coherent narrative
that shows an individual moving from A to B and/or performing a given
action. In considering a future mode of news broadcasting based on webcams,
Paul Virilio highlights the potential of systematically accessing these online
materials and bypassing the offscreen space. In 2007 I have explored these
artistic potentialities of webcams by using a similar form of montage in
performative experiments. During these experiments, I connected to live
streams all over the world, using the ones with the best transmission rates,
and mixed them so as to provide narrative suggestions that I intuitively felt
were intrinsically connected to the images, even if the geographic raccords
(match cuts) were inexistent. When it comes to other possibilities for editing
these materials, I consider them as varied as with any audiovisual material, but
further multiplied by the specificities of the medium of the webcams. These
include the previously mentioned multiple points of view that can be accessed
and recorded when using different cameras, and visualizing the streams on
multiple screens, as well as the Internet-based audiovisual data transmission
issues of temporality and rhythm that can be explored aesthetically.
Baudrys focus on the camera, screen and projector leaves out the
theoretical ground concerning dcoupage and montage. In this section, after
briefly identifying webcam forms of dcoupage, I have chosen to establish a
parallel with emerging forms of editing from a more technical point of view,
and determined by my practice-based experience with the new apparatus of
webcams and therefore did not engage in extensive descriptions of apparatus
theories. From this perspective, I focused specifically on a comparison between
123
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125
Chapter 3
As the manifesto instructs, making use of these cameras that are constantly
spying on people is the artists right as a citizen, but it is also a form of
political action. There seems to be no point in generating any additional
footage, when images are already produced at unstoppable growing rates
around the clock. In the appropriation of these materials, a topic I further
develop in chapter six, one identifies these images as footage to be used by
an artist who may have quite different intentions than the camera owner. In
my own perspective, and as filmmaker who makes frequent use of webcam
footage, it is in the artists intention that authorship resides.
127
Chapter 3
53 Francesco Casetti, The Relocation of Cinema, Necsus European Journal of Media Studies,
The traits that define the form of our experience of cinema are those
that we have found cited in the early theories of cinema: a relationship
with images in movement, mechanically reproduced and projected
onto a screen; a sensory intensity, tied most closely with the visual; a
constriction of distance with the world; the opening up of a fantastical
universe which is just as concrete as the real one; and finally, the sense
of collective participation. These are the characteristics that allow other
situations to appear or to be understood as cinematographic. However,
these traits do not come to light only in theory we extract them from
our habits.58
55 Ibid., 8.
56 Ibid., 10.
57 Ibid.
58 Ibid., 18. 129
Chapter 3
According to this citation, we are aware of our relationship with cinema due
to past experiences, and due to the way it has influenced our imagination
something that has been taking place since the onset of cinema, roughly
one hundred and thirty years ago. As this author adds, these experiences,
deeply rooted in our culture, signal an essence and function as a scheme
of reference:59 a frame of reference that allows us to identify what we are
experiencing as cinema. This detaches it from the material reality and allows
us to relate to whatever it is we are living as cinematographic, or as I maintain
in this dissertation: cinematic. In relation to this differentiation, Casetti adds
that [t]his involves a reading of the present in light of a model of cinema
that we have inherited but it also involves a re-reading of the past in light of
what cinema has become in the meantime.60 This actually implies that when
we access the medium, we look at this frame of references in retrospect and
hereby reframe it an act different from that of applying prior knowledge to
new situations. To recapitulate, webcams recall an idea of the cinematic that
relates to that of the cinema experience. This cinema experience results from
the memory we have of what was created with the cinematographic apparatus.
However, due to its medium specificity, webcams are retrospectively changing
the very idea of cinema.
The networked aspect of the cinematic apparatus of webcams
differentiates it from the previous modes of filmmaking. To begin with, the
cameras are multiple and placed around the subject. This implies that the city
has become a film plateau, a zone where everything that takes place can be
considered as part of the action. This brings up several issues that confuse the
roles that are usually separated in the cinematographic apparatus. The owners
of the camera are enmeshed with the viewer and the actor in the street, since
they may play all these roles simultaneously. For example, my installation
to which I refer in the first chapter, Split Recognition (2010), points to this
potential fusion, as I film myself by accessing someone elses camera online to
observe my own image simultaneously (Fig. 4). Furthermore, I am recording
all of this, and appropriate its material that I transform into an authorial art
piece. When it comes to the projection and the screen, the first was considered
essential for the coherence of the narrative and the immersion of the spectator
in Baudrys writings, but it is no longer required for the film experience of
webcams; the screen has become a viewfinder and is, like the camera, multiple
and present in all levels of society. Another element that has changed in the
61 Matthew Fuller, Media ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture (Cambridge:
The MIT Press, 2007).
This term has already been mentioned in the second chapter to introduce the bits of data
making up peoples online profiles. 131
Chapter 3
this medium, more precisely the enmeshed cinematic time and network time,
to better understand the narrative potential that underlie and motivate the
replication of these emerging film tools.
132
Chapter 4
Cinematic
Chronotopes:
The Temporality
of the Cinematic
Mode of Existence
of the Webcams
133
Chapter 4
This flow is external to the viewer, since it goes on no matter whether the
desire to watch or availability to watch are present. So is the stream of the
webcams, an uninterrupted flow of images straight from the street portraying
everything inherent in public life, and apparently with no distinction among
subjects. The fact that the cameras film independently of an actual human
134 1 Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (New York: Routledge Classics,
2003), 94.
Cinematic Chronotopes: The Temporality of the Cinematic Mode of Existence of the Webcams
presence in front of them also implies that the images will be transmitted
regardless of who may be watching them (or recording them). This flow as
a mode of watching, in which people can decide to look at what is being
streamed at any point of the day, marks a new temporality, a subject which I
will be analyzing later on in this chapter. However, it also creates the presence
of a constant cinematic environment that affects the subjectification of
individuals living in mostly urban areas. I will now attempt to analyze the
notion of the cinematic proper and its present forms, while demonstrating
how the cinematic affects and is affected by the constant flow of the
audiovisual stimuli that is being produced.
2
3
Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media. Cambridge (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2001).
Ibid., 333. 135
Chapter 4
136 4
5
Ibid., 333.
Ibid., 333.
Cinematic Chronotopes: The Temporality of the Cinematic Mode of Existence of the Webcams
inhabit and that interferes with our lived bodies in complex and dynamic
ways.6 Combining these two conceptions, the cinematic may be regarded as
an environment that is common to all and where life unfolds through daily
interaction with new media. Taking the work of these authors as a point of
departure, Hesselberth develops her own definition of the cinematic:
6 Pepita Hesselberth, Cinematic Chronotopes: Here, Now, Me. (London, New York, New Delhi
and Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2014), 4.
7 Ibid., 5.
8 Vivian Sobchack, The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Cinematic and Electronic Presence,
Technology and Culture, the Film Reader, ed. Andrew Utterson, (Abingdon, New York: Routledge,
2005), 86.
9 Ibid., 86-87.
10 Ibid. 137
Chapter 4
on the way we currently see, sense, and make sense of ourselves as quite other
than we were before them.11 The cinematic has transformative properties
that are conveyed by the way in which such encounters take place. As
cinematic practices rely on creating temporalities that envelop the individual
in the underlying narrative, regardless of whether or not this narrative is
linear, it is important, as Hesselberth points out, to analyze the potential
of the cinematic to intensify our experience of times thickening,12 that is,
the property of the cinematic that expresses itself as an intensified form of
temporality. In her analysis of Sobchacks work on this matter, she points out
that:
11 Ibid., 86-87.
14 Robert Hassan and Ronald E. Purser, 24/7: Time and Temporality in the Network Society (Palo
Alto: Stanford University Press, 2007).
15 Barbara Adam, Timescapes of Modernity: The Environment & Invisible Hazards (New York:
Routledge, 1998).
16 In 2009 I was invited to work on a site-specific project for the exhibition Umbrella at the
Organhaus Art Space in Chongqing. When trying to access webcams I had stored in my archive
for some years, I was struck by the fact that none of them was online. My video installation
consisted of a live mix of images from a surveillance camera I had placed in the exhibition
space to film visitors, together with pre-recorded images from online webcams. For this
project I had to find a whole new set of webcams that mostly showed time-lapsed recordings. 139
Chapter 4
it plausible given what I have observed during the years within the duration
of the present research project. According to this line of thought, a delayed
transmission consists of a constructed and controlled real time that may be
considered a timescape, a temporal dimension that is felt internally and
experienced subjectively, while running parallel to several other temporalities
determined by the network and affecting the way its users connect and
perceive content. According to Robert Hassan and Ronald E. Purser, [i]n
many respects the network society is a vast, technologically sustained global
timescape that we create and share; and through it we transform the world
and ourselves.17 The shared time of the network is a new form of global
temporality that has replaced chronological linearity with chronoscopic
eventfulness. This has as a consequence the creation of an emergent form of
eternal present due to the demands of global markets. Since the temporal unit
of the day has decreased in importance and the networked society constantly
lives in the present, the global trade united by the Internet is allowed to
function twenty-four seven. As Jonathan Crary points out in 24/7: Late
Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep this implies a temporality causing the market
to trade around the clock and people to constantly be available as workers,
including on weekends and holidays.18 Echoing this trend, webcams film
constantly for days, weeks, months, and years on end.
When visiting the Earthcam website, one finds a wide variety of
cameras placed worldwide that can be watched throughout all time zones.
In watching these real time streams over the course of more than fourteen
years, I realized that one does not see the whole world and learn about it by
navigating through this Internet-based resource of imagery. Instead, the viewer
or user is entering a self-generating archive of audiovisual stimuli that provides
a constructed view of a controlled reality. By looking at the cameras, I have
been able to observe the difference in the financial investment in technology
in relation to where they are placed. Times Square, for example, showcases
many cameras in high-definition 3D quality with stereo sound that reveal to
the viewer that he or she is watching a tightly controlled area. Even if these
cameras are intended for entertainment, it is clear that many others present
at the location are used for surveillance, even when not indicated as such.
Moreover, it is possible to conclude that the area is being prepared for the
streams and that people can commute safely to work while others shop.19
The cameras placed in Times Square are more expensive than most of those
21 Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb, trans. Chris Turner (New York-London: Verso, 2005).
This mode of tele-surveillance has been briefly mentioned in the third chapter in relation to
24 Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time (Cambridge-London: Harvard University
Press, 2002).
She refers to cinematic time as the time of the classical cinematographic apparatus. Cinematic
144 is here thus of a different use to this dissertation and refers only to the specific time of cinema
(mainly in the case of the single shot in early cinema).
Cinematic Chronotopes: The Temporality of the Cinematic Mode of Existence of the Webcams
I will demonstrate how their synthesis might give rise to webcam time.
[i]n the technical language of filmmaking, the term real time refers to
the duration of a single shot (assuming the shot is neither fast nor slow
motion). If the physical film is not cut and projection speed equals its
shooting speed (usually somewhere between sixteen and twenty-four
frames per second), the movement on the screen will unfold in a time
that is isomorphic with pro-filmic time, or what is generally thought to
be our everyday life experience of time hence the term real. The time
of the apparatus matches, is married to, the time of the action or the
scene. This real time is marked by an apparent plenitude. No lack or
loss of time is visible to the eye or accessible to the spectator.25
Doane is here referring to the notion of cinematic real time, which is the
temporality originated during the single shot: a length of time where camera
time equals screen time. According to Doane, the seamless temporality of real
time can only occur when the break between the film frames is ignored. This
break, which in analog cinema is filled with empty darkness, might be equated
with the failures in update rate typical of Internet streams. These intervals
may at times be experienced not as dark instants the space in between the
frames but may instead give place to digital noise, augmented disordered
pixels, blurred colors, and erratic, rhythmic lines crossing the screen. Still, the
observer of a webcam, as when watching a traditional film and ignoring the
frame gaps, will automatically discard the intervals introduced by the noise
and acknowledge the movement of bodies crossing the frame. This perceived
movement allows the viewer to identify the people being filmed with their
representation on the screen, thus creating the reality effect of cinema.26 In
other words, by trusting the realness of the real time of the capture, which in
the case of webcams is considered to be the same moment of transmission and
25 Ibid., 172.
26 Ibid. 145
Chapter 4
146 27 Ibid.
28 Hassan and Purser, 24/7.
Cinematic Chronotopes: The Temporality of the Cinematic Mode of Existence of the Webcams
The network time argued for above is based on an accelerated form of clock
time, which implies that the real time of the Internet also continues to be
chronological.
The time-space compression occurring in webcam streams demands
another conceptualization of real time existing beyond forms of traditional
temporality. I propose to use the term realtime instead, in order not to
separate the word real from the word time. Due to the interdependence
of these concepts, the term seems better suited to the form of temporality
introduced by webcams. Realtime corresponds to the temporality of the
webcams single shot but includes, for instance, the possibility of the shot
getting censored by authorities before being streamed in real time or the ways
in which the transmission may fail and create distorted reports of real live
action.
While actively experimenting with the webcam as cinematic apparatus
through a self-reflexive practice, I have focused on studying visual effects
affecting the streams when intruded upon by the flaws of webcam-specific
temporality. The sculptural video installation Realtime Ellipsis (2012) analyzes
how the cinematic ellipsis may arise within this context (see Fig. 14). As an
experiment, the artwork incorporated the noise produced by top-of-the-line
3D high definition webcams, which had become incapable of delivering
smooth streams. The resulting images of Times Square in New York City
metamorphosed into an extravagant composition of throbbing red and blue
lines where human traces could be faintly perceived as fluid shadows crawling
across the screen. At this point scarce information was available within the
space of the frame that could be identified as documental or evidential. The
formal ellipsis emerged when the pixels visual logics could no longer be
assembled as meaningful, legible information, and its value as document
had been undermined. However, even if their image could not be properly
discerned due to technical disturbances, peoples digital imprint was definitely
present, their traces undoubtedly forever inscribed as metadata, just as a
conventional narrative continues to develop within the temporality of the
ellipsis in classical cinema. For the production of Realtime Ellipsis, only short
patches of footage resulting from discontinued realtime, i.e. the ellipses, were
collected and edited, resulting in a montage of precarious images exposing the
fabric of the medium and its temporality.
148
Cinematic Chronotopes: The Temporality of the Cinematic Mode of Existence of the Webcams
Realtime-generated 4.4
Cinematic Chronotopes
Because webcams film a space and the movement of bodies within a
single shot, generating a specific compression of space and time, realtime has
surpassed chronologic and chronoscopic forms of temporality. My primary
claim here is that the specific temporality of the webcams realtime has
become chronotopic.30 Mikhail Bakhtin first conceptualized the signifying
unit of the chronotope in literature, applying it specifically to the literary
novel, which he referred to as a unit of time-space. As he explains:
In the city, whatever the eyes and ears perceive is constantly changing since
the body of the viewer is in motion while embodying the experience in
passing. Embodiment is thus central to the possibility of perceiving image
and sound content. The movement in space contributes to the perception of
time, thereby forming a chronotopical instance of perception and existence
of the self.35 To understand Hesselberths theorization, it is important to note
32 Robert Stam, Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism and Film (Baltimore: John
Hopkins University Press, 1992).
33 Hesselberth, Cinematic Chronotopes.
36 Ibid., 112.
37 Ibid., 5.
38 Ibid. 151
Chapter 4
39 Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control, October 59, Winter (1992),
http://www.jstor.org/stable/778828.
40 Esther Peeren, Through the Lens of the Chronotope: Suggestions for a Spatio-Temporal
Perspective on Diaspora, Thamyris/Intersecting: Place, Sex and Race, no. 13 (2006), 68.
41 Ibid., 68.
logic. Consequently, the way they may be perceived or embodied will also
vary according to a multitude of potential articulations. Chronotopes may
be perceived as realistically portraying social or cultural phenomena due to
a more or less coherent social narrative. For example, reality is streamed by
webcams according to what is expected in a specific spatio-temporal frame.
A shopping street, as the tag indicates, corresponds to the chronotopical
notion of the-contemporary-space-of-an-urban-commercial-area-streamed-
in-realtime. Those included in it are subjects made by the space-time of the
image, the people who shop. This evidentiates the fact that chronotopes come
to stand not as individual creations but as an intersubjective or cultural form
of narrative that constitutes collective memory.44 As Peeren summarizes: On
the whole, both in art and in life, Bakhtins chronotope emerges as a socio-
cultural practice of time-space construction, constituted and maintained
through intersubjective interaction and cultural memory.45
The chronotope may serve as an ideological basis in order to justify
and incentivize behavior. As in the example above, the shopping street is
supposedly a public space, however, the networked nature of surveillance
and the awareness that anyone across the world might be watching implies
that, should particular elements exist that do not correspond to the narrative
function of the chronotope, this signifying unit may be adjusted. Beyond
the issues of surveillance, and as hinted at before, if a city wishes to promote
safe shopping in order to attract tourists, the live-streaming chronotope of
the perfect shopping street will probably not include beggars or groups of
people who are not active brand consumers. This chronotope will probably
be adjusted by agents of the law who will subtly remove unwanted elements
from the time and space of the intended narrative, allowing its meaning to be
restored to its inherent perfection and its intended effectiveness. This logic,
organizing a vision of the world comprised by chronotopes, may be applied
to the organization and categorization of a multitude of realities.46 To get in
touch with them, one may research a website offering many different points of
access to various expressions of the same chronotope: those various non-places
of the shopping street that are globally similar and practically undifferentiable.
In this case, its meaning is perfected by the absence of the undesirable,
the unexpected, enabling individuals to experience the embodiment of
standardized chronotopes that are frequently encountered. This allows for a
socialization that does not question the origin or the veracity of the signifying
44 Ibid., 69.
45 Ibid., 69.
46 Ibid. 153
Chapter 4
unit.
In sum, this chapter has focused on describing the way in which the
specific temporality of webcams is constructed. By identifying the continuities
with the pre-existing temporalities of cinematic time and network time, I have
demonstrated that the most adequate concept for defining the way in which
time is synthesized in the cinematic apparatus of webcams is realtime. This is a
combination of the two previously mentioned temporalities, which, due to its
characteristics and constraints, produces a conception of time that is beyond
chronology (real time in cinema) and chronoscopy (real time on the Internet)
but instead the resulting chronotopy. The narrative unit of the chronotope,
which consists of both time and space combined, is the measure that best
matches the structure of realtime; it is a temporality creating a cinematic time-
space that is socialized and accepted as the sights and sites where live events
take place. Due to urban planning, marketing strategies, and preemptive
action, to name a few cases, these chronotopes can be adjusted according to
the narrative envisioned to determine the time and space of the city from
which the streams originate. As I have previously mentioned, these doublings
of the public space imply a future ideal of the present translated into, for
example, safe and clean streets in perfectly kept cities.
Beyond the effect these future visions have on changing the face of
the city, at present webcam streams may be recorded. This implies there may
be a posterior use of the current constant generation of audiovisual content.
It is hard to know at present which material is actually making it into the
archives and how it will be categorized. The chronotopes, organized by tags
in the major websites, are already pre-categorized, making an algorithmically
determined future search easier to project. This enhances the possibility to
apply facial recognition and other tracking software to any visual material
and trace the activities of individuals captured in public and semi-public
spaces back in time. In order to further examine the inner workings of
such processes, the next chapter will focus on analyzing the storage and
organization of the data doubles of people. Moreover, it will cover which
forms of referent attest for the documental value in digital formats, how
memory has become equated with storage, and what forms of logic a cloud
archive of subjectivities may entail.
154
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Webcams and
the Archive
155
Chapter 5
5.1 Referentiality
The analog medium of film contains not only the temporality
discussed in the previous chapter but actually incorporates the referent that is
materially present in the celluloid. By comparing the processes of storing time
in both analog and digital filmmaking, I will now demonstrate how webcams
may potentially harbor a similarly materialized temporality regardless of their
specific platform.
156
Webcams and the Archive
The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the
conditions of time and space that govern it. No matter how fuzzy,
distorted, or discolored, no matter how lacking in documentary
value the image may be, it shares, by virtue of the very process of its
becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction; it is
the model.3
3
2004).
Ibid., 14. 157
Chapter 5
4 Charles Sanders Peirce, Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs, in Philosophical Writings
of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover Publications, 1955).
5 Ibid.
6 Jacques Derrida Derrida: What Comes Before The Question?, viewed May 1, 2014,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2bPTs8fspk.
7 Ibid.
8 Georges Didi-Huberman, The Index of the Absent Wound (Monograph on a Stain), October
ones.9
Another example of analog imagery containing nonrepresentational
deictic indexes is Bill Morrisons Decasia (2002) (Fig. 15). This film evokes
the Holocaust and the atomic bombings of Japan while omitting actual
footage of the events. Instead, it relies on an aesthetic that is associated with
the times and occurrences of the Holocaust, achieved through Morrisons
confrontational montage of aged film stock. Bernd Herzogenrath gives
insight into the means by which films materiality may be more expressive
than the actual narrative, since it contains a deictic, performative indexicality
that evokes other presences that are only pointed at. According to this film
theorist, [m]ateriality has significance independently of human action or
intervention.10 If objects can be considered to exist independently of human
consciousness, they may have a unique and specific temporality. In the case of
film, this temporality is inherent in its materiality the chemical components
that react with and against one another and attempt separation. This natural
chemical response results in material decay. Filmmakers like Morrison have
made use of this knowledge in order to experiment with the expressivity of
films material behavior. To develop a concept defining the specific materiality
of the film image the matter-image Herzogenrath builds on Deleuzian
film studies, situating Decasia as a case-study:
In this quote, Herzogenrath writes that Morrison has expressively used the
material aspects of the filmstrip as his predecessor, Brakhage, did when hand-
painting it. But the author argues that Morrison has taken a step further
by extracting and exposing the temporality that determines the images
materiality. Compiling archive material has allowed Morrison to experiment
9 Ibid.
10 Bernd Herzogenrath, Matter that Images: Bill Morrisons Decasia. in Media|Matter: The
Materiality of Media, Matter as Medium, ed. Bernd Herzogenrath (London, New York, New
Delhi and Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2015), 112.
11 Ibid., 113. 159
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Decasia does not see the signs of the time as flaws, as material defects
they rather transfer their own aesthetics onto the images. Morrison
has deliberately chosen sequences where the representation engages in
direct contact with the material carrier Flames are dancing over
the close-up face of a woman, wounding both celluloid and image.
The films|womans skin cracks and bubbles and seethes like molten
lava the womans face gets out of shape, melts. The subject|title of
12 Ibid.
13 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans.
Brian Massumi (London: The Athlone Press, 1988), 43-44.
Deleuze and Guattari define form of content as follows: Hjemslev was able to weave a net out
of the notions matter, content, and expression, form and substance. These were the strata,
said Hjemslev. Now this net has the advantage of breaking with the form-content duality, since
there was a form of content no less than a form of expression the first articulation concerns
content, the second expression. The distinction between the two articulations is not between
forms and substances but between content and expression, expression having just as much
It can be inferred from the above quote that Decasia contradicts the trend
towards film restoration in that it exposes, rather than tries to hide the effects
of time on the film surface. In fact, as these are exacerbated by the montage
and used as a stylistic device, they then acquire a determinative function in
the mise-en-scne of Decasia. According to Herzogenrath, in matter-image,
it is the matter that produces the image rather than reproducing it by
representation. The illusion of reality is literally replaced by the presence of the
matter of time.16 As a result of the struggle between the elements that fight for
separation due to chemical decay over time, the film portrays and embodies
the interplay of entropy and evolution, of the past and present, intention and
chance.17 There is constant communication between the narrative emerging
15 Ibid., 124.
16 Ibid., 125.
17 Ibid., 127. 161
Chapter 5
from the archival materials and the materials erratic effect on the imagery.
As such, a new film form, the matter-image, emerges where scenes in which
the amorphous mass threatens to swallow the diegetic life are on a par with
scenes in which the image precisely seems to emerge out of that blob.18 In
this way, Herzogenrath unveils the expressive potential of organic quality of a
chemical process that develops over time and is generally perceived as decay.
In considering the indexicality of the medium in relation to
Decasia, one finds there seems to be no tension between the two temporal
manifestations of the index trace and deixis. They are both embodiments
of the real, and in the example of Decasia can be experienced separately or
simultaneously. The first manifestation is representational and realistic, the
referent of the object. The second is performative: the blobs that point to the
non-present present by using the mediums temporality as image production.
A parallel can be drawn to webcams, which film the individual on the street
and yet depend upon a smooth transmission for the imagery to be awarded
documentary value. For example, the lines cutting across the screen in my
artwork Realtime Ellipsis presented in chapter four, reveal the films expressivity
in the same degree as the image originally filmed by the webcams on Times
Square (Fig. 14). The presence of time and the way it expresses itself through
the medium is central to the films meaning as it is manifested in the imagerys
aesthetics. This aesthetic is determined by the indexicality of time that embeds
digital materials.
I agree with Doanes observation that the digital constitutes a medium in its
own right and that the post-medium era is a myth based upon the erroneous
idea of the digital as immaterial. The author further claims that the presence
of the deictic indexicality in digital media could allow for time to be archived.
Surprising, though, is the position Doane apparently takes when hinting at
the idea that digital information remains immutable across platforms: that
data, because of numerical translation, remain stable and unchanged during
processes of reproduction and dissemination.20 This would imply that we are
witnessing the presence of the same unchanged indexes across all platforms,
and that these are unaffected by the medium during data exchange processes.
This line of thought suggests that it would be impossible for a medium-
specific indexicality of the digital to exist, based upon Peirces premise that
indexes, both as trace and deixis, are characterized by a certain singularity and
uniqueness; they always refer to individuals, single units, single collections of
units, or single continua.21 Doane claims that due to the reproducibility and
apparent unchangeability of digital images, the medium-specific indexicality
no longer produces Peirces singular forms of referentiality. For Doane, the
index is probably still present in the digital as deixis but not as trace, thus
implying that the disseminating platforms and storing the data would not
imprint the code with their own intrinsic temporal existence as celluloid did. I
will address shortly what I find problematic in this position.
Several of my film experiments have led me to realize that the digital
medium does in fact affect the images being captured, distributed, and
displayed by means of the webcams. Reviewing the example of Morrisons
analog film Decasia, we note it is not the content being displayed by the edit
of archival footage that evokes a particular reality, but the aging marks left
in the film stock. These marks of temporality lend Decasia a second layer of
meaning that provokes an anachronistic encounter between the spectator
and the horrific events taking place in European concentration camps and
in Nagasaki right after the atomic bomb. The encounter occurs during the
film projection when the viewer experiences the material form where Decasia
archives the time of the Second World War. In the example of Realtime Ellipsis
19 Mary Ann Doane, The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity, Differences: A
Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 18.1 (2007): 128-152, 148.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., 133. 163
Chapter 5
the time of filming is present during the observation of the noise that refresh
rates left on the code composing the images.
Another interesting example of material temporality found in analog
film is Peter Delpeuts Lyrical Nitrate (1991) (Fig. 16). When discussing the
archive of aging film stock, Andr Habib states that:
[A] new poetry of ruins arises from the history of the archive and
the preservation of films, but operates a major inversion: what creates
the emotion is not the objective history of film, but times presence,
which the archive fragmented, in ruin can re-present.22
164 22 Andr Habib, Ruin, Archive and the Time of Cinema: Peter Delpeuts Lyrical Nitrate, Substance,
35, no. 2 (2006): 120-39, 136.
Webcams and the Archive
He notes that there is an aesthetic of decay born out of the film archive that
highlights the temporality of film itself in terms of its materiality rather than
the precious images it may contain. What these archival films do is bring
to the front of the debate the form of content of film, what Habib calls an
intriguing dialectics between form and content23 with the result that an
object appears and says something of itself through its ruin.24 In this case
there seems to be a very strong presence of both the machinic and the organic
that pushes the director to take a back seat. The material is expressive on its
own and the final output of the montage apparently results in a random use
of the imagery. As Habib claims, Delpeuts intention seems to have been
to create the impression, on the level of the montage, that the film was an
unearthed mummy without further intervention and as if it had been made
in this way, which is an obvious fiction.25 Highlighting similar qualities as
Herzogenrath does in relation to Morrisons Decasia, Habib compares human
and film temporality that is manifested by its combustion something mostly
happening during projection.
23 Ibid., 129.
24 Ibid., 129.
25 Ibid., 132. 165
Chapter 5
Habib concentrates on human finitude and the parallel with analog timelines.
Film is dying throughout its life, just like humans. And, as with humans, it
carries the marks of the bodys aging.
My own self-reflexive film Errata (2001) (Fig. 17), pre-dating my work
with webcams, is a film about the Portuguese ex-colonies, focusing on the
finitude of organic matter and foregrounding forms of indexed temporality as
means of expression.27
In a montage of analog footage shot by my grandfather, my narrating
voice guides the viewer through what seems to be a confused journey into
memories lived in the 1950s and 1960s in Mozambique. The volatile super
8 film jumps out of the projectors sockets during scanning, seems to double
the frames at points, and horribly breaks into flames while, coincidentally,
showing recently deceased people close friends and family of my
grandparents. As my fascination with temporal materiality dates back to these
experiments, I chose to incorporate these accidents in my final film. More than
the events or intimate moments it depicts, the footage and montage stand
witness to the time of the filming: the colors alone testify to that era not
only by virtue of the way they have faded through the years, but also in terms
of the specific tonalities of blue and pink that have painted the memories of
life in the Portuguese ex-colonies. These memories are attached to the medium
that was used to capture them, super 8 cameras, which middle-class families
owned and pointed at their surrounding environments to document home,
family, friends and their adventures on the African continent. This is a form of
personal memory that is pervaded by medium-generated marks of time. The
post-independence generation remembers their grandparents as young people
smiling and waving in super 8 grain and tones, just as they remember their
parents with moustaches and blue eye makeup captured in small and yellowed
square-shaped Polaroid photos. It is possible to predict that future generations
may have memories that are influenced by the medium of the webcams: visual
26 Ibid., 135.
27 According to Raquel Schefer, this is the first self-reflexive film about the Portuguese ex-
colonies. At the time of writing, she was a PhD candidate in film studies under the supervision
of Philippe Dubois. These words were uttered during the public presentation of my film Errata
166 (2001) at the conference Cinema et Rvolution: LExample Portugais, organized by the
Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III) and held at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Paris, 2013.
Webcams and the Archive
28 Matthew Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008), 23. 167
Chapter 5
and Jay G. Heiser state, every rite leaves faint traces behind it, even when
media have overwritten numerous times.29
5.2 Materiality
Digital materiality seems to be acknowledged, even if belonging to
a different order, as traces being inscribed not in atom-based platforms but
electronic storage devices. These platforms are not transparent pathways
across which data travel unchanged. They also affect the data they store
by constraining the modes of inscription and perception. This is a subject
I consider relevant when examining archival modes and categorization of
webcam streams. Wendy Chun has written extensively about memory, storage,
and the specific matter of code in Programmed Visions: Software and Memory
(2011). In her book she notes that the digital forms of archiving abide by
different parameters ruled by a logic of programmability that affects memory
storage. The implications of such processes have far-reaching consequences
for archive-building formats, but also in terms of how data may be accessed in
the future. With webcams it is relevant to at least superficially approach this
issue since the cameras produce imagery that carries the marks of their time
together with data that in the future can retrospectively and retroactively be
subjected to interpretation. Access to this memory will determine not only
how the present is to be seen but also how it will affect the anticipation of
future events. As Chuns writings affirm, foresight becomes programmability.30
29 Warren J. Kruse II and Jay G. Heiser, Computer Forensics: Incident Response Essentials
(Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2002), 77.
168 30 Wendy Chun, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (Cambridge, Massachusetts and
London, England: The MIT Press, 2011).
Webcams and the Archive
It can be inferred from the above quote that the programming underlying the
software used by computers constitutes a specter, a ghost in the machine
that provides the outer limits of the users digital-based activities within the
computational realm. In the observation of webcams, regardless of how it may
seem to be the users choice as to which tag to choose, i.e. beach, church
or bar, one arrives at an impression of reality that is code-dependent. The
interface, the computer-generated coding, and the coded alternatives strictly
determine this impression. Even if every user chooses a different tag in a
webcam-dedicated site, the amount of entries as well as their form of access is
predetermined by the above-mentioned computational specter.
Beyond access to information, however, software and data are both
stored and treated similarly by the algorithm-based logic of the computer. As
Chun writes:
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid., xii.
33 Ibid., 97. 169
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Chun seems to point us in a direction that affirms how storing the past
should help predict the future: a temporality filled with more projections of
the futures future that arise from software and information stored away in
hard drives. Both the access to information and the information itself are
brought together by means of a single machine. This machine, the computer,
functions as archive when it acts as a storage device. The computer is made
of data and software that combine memory and the processing ability of
these components. Both the content and the tools to access and modify it are
stored in the computers memory. This implies that memory and storage have
become one whole-encapsulating concept, causing the computer, including
its hard drive, to arise as sole platform of the digital archive of personal data.
As Chun corroborates, by bringing memory and storage together, we bring
together the past and the future; we also bring together the machinic and the
biological into what we might call the archive.34 The footage generated by
webcams produces images of the individual that will be stored as computer
memory. These images will be determinant in the future when the viewer
is observing human behavior and the results of this behavior. Ascribing a
persons image with the same status as any other sort of data makes predictions
hard to dispute when a specific algorithmic pattern is discerned. As the
archive of webcam footage has consequences for the cinematic apparatus, an
understanding of memory as storage and as code allows the individual being
filmed to act, for example, according to particular expectations in order not to
trigger algorithmic predictors.
creates complex situations posing questions as to how to best store the ever-
multiplying storage devices and how to preserve them. To address the first
issue: digitizing the world does not transform a things materiality into the
immateriality of its digital double. The data double still needs to be stored in a
suitable platform, which in turn requires computer memory space and specific
conditions to outlive its material counterpart. The data constantly produced
by webcams and the collection of personal data at large demand increasing
the size of storage resources. A film traveling from celluloid to digital requires
a great amount of memory allocation hundreds of gigabytes in order
to retain matching quality. With high definition cinema, already digital in
kind, not only terabytes but petabytes are in order. If the vast amount of data
generated by webcams that capture sound and image around the clock is to
be considered, a new term for the required memory units should likely be
invented. This implies that digitalized content always require some sort of
material interface for storage. As an example, the round tin boxes housing
analog film reels metamorphosed into the rectangular prism of the hard drives.
Also to be taken into account are the growing storage capacity of
contemporary hard drives and the increasing amount of real estate facilities
that are built or refurbished in order to house neatly arranged towers of
led-pulsating memory drives. In response to the second item: hard drives
are known to be short-lived and highly reactive to external conditions. They
cannot withstand extreme temperature peaks and fluctuations nor humidity
or even low levels of radiation. The Internet is plagued by personal stories of
dying computers and memory backups, including those in the cloud, which
is simply a network of hard drives dependent on material storage devices. This
is a threatening scenario when considering that most production of content
of the last thirty years exists exclusively in digital form. Even if scientists and
technicians could devise storage materials to safeguard data for a million years,
their efficiency is hard to prove at present: magnetic hard drives are still the
standard, expiring around their tenth birthday along with the memory they
were made to protect.35 If to all these difficulties one adds the obsolescence of
formats, conversion methods, and operating systems, among others, the future
of a digitized cultural heritage seems in peril. In other words, as Chun writes,
[d]igital media, if it saves anything, does so by transforming storage into
memory, by making what decays slowly decay more quickly, by proliferating
what it reads.36 There are two aspects to be discerned from Chuns quote. The
37 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago and
London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998).
Fig. 18 People drawing messages in the street for Don in front of the DonnieCam
173
Chapter 5
capacity. I would argue that no matter how volatile magnetic hard drives
may be at the moment, technological advances should be capable of ensuring
proper storage conditions affordable to the ordinary individual. Storage
containers will probably be replaced over time by devices with increased
longevity. What may be cause for concern is, thus, not the erasure of storage,
but how the ordinary citizen will access this extensive intel.
Fig. 19 A corridor with thousands of pulsating hard drives stored in one of Googles data centers.
174
Webcams and the Archive
Narrative 5.3
In this section I will focus on the narrative of the archive, its inner
workings and the ways in which it can be influenced and altered. Specifically,
I will foreground the ability artists may have in providing the archive with
alternative versions of the official narratives.
40 Ibid., 172.
41 Derrida, Archive Fever. 175
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one who is favorable to it. The digital archive aims at providing an illusion
of transparency from the media used in storing memory; an example of
this would be the way that the relevance of hard drive format encoding is
purposefully hidden. However, as Chun argues, code influences access to
knowledge but it also creates it in the process. According to Chun, code
as logos enables it to stand for a form of knowledge that is equated with
automatically and unfailingly doing what it says.42 This means that both
programmers and users are employing apparently transparent software as
a form to gain knowledge but also to produce some meta-knowledge. In
relation to webcams, it is code that allows the viewer to access specific cameras
at specific moments. As pointed out before, the availability of tags allows the
viewer to choose a camera stream to watch.
The capacity and potential of programs present our free choice as
users and programmers when accessing and processing content; however,
this only happens by allowing the code to become both legislation and
execution.43 In this process, it spreads a neoliberal empowerment through
the embedding of governmental enforcement into everyday situations,
making us subjects of the code.44 As Steven Shaviro explains in reference
to the inescapability of the Internet and the code that determines its content
production and modes of access:
176 45 Steven Shaviro, Connected, Or What It Means to Live in the Network Society (Minnesota:
University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 4.
Webcams and the Archive
As he indicates, digital packages arise from within the analog world in order to
process it according to an algorithmic logic, before producing an output that
is expressed in analog terms. Completing the present argument, it may hereby
be predicted that the actions which artists take up with webcams will most
probably reflect upon the material reality of everyday life. With knowledge of
the cinematic medium, the artist working with webcam footage appropriates
the means of archiving memory and contributes to a somewhat altered
perception of recorded reality.
Such an intervention would alter the narrative giving coherence to the
archive. Furthermore, it would affect the ways in which the archive provides
knowledge to the individual. Working with a medium constantly generating
49 Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis and London: University
of Minnesota Press, 2001), 317. 179
Chapter 5
Webcams are inherently digital and networked: they are born out of
the Internet, and their footage was never a product requiring digitalization.
Moreover, their sheer amount defies structured storage. There is a vast
amount of cameras scattered all over the Internet, unordered and virtually
uncategorizable since they are regularly put online and just as frequently
taken down. The logic that could organize and provide them with a consistent
narrative would need to rely on an algorithm or a string of algorithms that
would constantly adjust to their floating numbers and allocation. For the
above-mentioned reasons, the narrative and historicity of the webcams archive
is always determined by software. This implies a set of instructions given by
the underlying code in order to make sense of the structure that organizes
the archived data. It is relevant at this point to study how the archive changes
when it moves from an analog location into a digital database, moving from a
place of storage to a network of code scattered all over the Internet. In order
to determine how this transition affects and defines the very archive of the
webcams, in the next section I will build on Lev Manovichs analysis of non-
linear database narratives.
operate in a classical fashion like libraries that enable one to find content
by correctly identifying the categories under which data are archived. Once
this has been achieved one must access, just as with a physical library or film
archive, the proper location in order to view the actual webcam capturing
imagery in realtime. However, even if the processes may seem similar at first,
Lev Manovich highlights the differences between the analog and the digital
archive, when he says that:
As Manovich points out, it is not only the materiality of data that has
been changed by digital conversion, but also all of the environments and
the processes of archiving which have been influenced and transformed by
computer structures and logic. The access to the archived information is now
non-linear and networked. Unlike the space of a physical library, a website
offering access to webcams allows for the close and simultaneous inspection
of several cameras that provide access to realtime-generated footage. Such a
website, a new media object, can be considered as an archive of webcams,
perhaps part of a larger archive, but still an archive in its own right.
New media objects, e.g. online archives, are not structured along a
linear narrative but instead function according to a narrative that follows
the non-linear logic of the database. By watching multiple streams, one
may collect audiovisual information from around the world and yet the
relationship between these streams only amounts to the separation of
groupings of data present in the same platform. A webcam website contains
myriad links to seemingly unrelated cameras, and each one of these features
someones backyard, office, favorite pet, etc. They remain individual webcams,
51 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2001),
214. 181
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Indeed, if after the death of God (Nietzsche), the end of the grand
Narratives of Enlightenment (Lyotard), and the arrival of the
Web (Tim Berners-Lee), the world appears to us as an endless and
unstructured collection of images, texts, and other data records, it
is only appropriate that we will be moved to model it as a database.
But it is also appropriate that we would want to develop a poetics,
aesthetics, and ethics of this database.54
52 Ibid., 217.
182 53 Ibid.
54 Ibid., 219.
Webcams and the Archive
and the narrative ties between the different sources of imagery will always be
different.56
This project highlights the search for a narrative of database
environments. It also draws attention to the manner in which algorithms may
give one primacy in ordering the narrative connecting chaotic data.
In my own work, I am interested in the way that fragmented
information allows for a break in linearity, which unveils the opportunity
for poetics and aesthetics to arise by circumventing the narrative. When
one is working with webcams and dealing with the possibility of constantly
capturing the any-instant-whatever,57 the lure of the material is so strong
that potential narratives may be made and broken by slightly shifting the
algorithmic trends. The narrative, in this case, differs from aesthetics and
poetics, which can be found by exploring the medium and its specific
expressive potential rather than trying to adapt it to narrative forms.
To explain the relation between the material world and its translation
into digital form, Manovich points out that the computer age has
introduced a new cultural algorithm: reality media data database.58
This formula may indicate that understanding the inner workings of this
mathematical approach enables one to determine the relations between bits
of information available in the database. Moreover, by incorporating the
flaws of the system, which include digital noise, realtime failures and archival
instability, self-reflexive new media objects can be created to immediately
affect the system by subverting its logic. Here I am specifically referring to the
vast capacity of surveillance archives to constantly generate the future visions
of contemporary society and organize them according to database logic.
When visiting these archives to collect found footage and make new media
objects, the artist interferes with the future image of the subject, for example,
by altering the profiles of data doubles as represented by a database. By
proceeding in this way, the artist is taking the path back into reality: database
data media reality.
By opposing the idea that the archives, whether they are analog linear
narratives or digital databases, are stuck in the past, Derrida advances the
premise that these archives are actually focused on the future. As Derrida
writes:
a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question
of a response, of a promise, and of a responsibility for tomorrow. The
archive: if we want to know what that will have meant, we will only
know it in times to come.59
of fragments collected in realtime from around the world. In this specific film
project I observe possible connections between spatial and temporal levels that
may induce an illusory sense of narrative in the viewer. In so doing, the work
relies on a montage that follows patterns created by streaming failures. These
result in inconsistent color behavior along with a rhythmic movement of lines
across the screen that mark the frame breaks and consist of temporal effects
inherent to the medium. The resulting aesthetics address the expressiveness of
the low quality of the medium, which stems from imagery that is captured by
low-resolution optics and gets copied or recompressed during its transmission
across platforms. Due to an awareness of these networked medium aesthetics,
and their inherent archival modes and indexicality, Unfinished Narratives
deals with the possibility of establishing relations between different bits of
information scattered in the database. It proposes storylines that may be
drawn along the way by connecting seemingly disparate imagery collected
from different areas across the globe. Connecting them all by means of
montage, this film draws attention to forms of historicity that do not require
the linearity of chronological cause and effect, but bring the event of the
moment to the forefront. It highlights the potential of using existing footage
to build suggestions of narratives and construct a future vision of the present.
This does not consist of a linear process but proposes instead storylines that
can potentially be followed up and then interlaced with other storylines,
bringing other possible plots forward, fictional or otherwise. In this particular
work, images of a storm in Miami cut to a caf somewhere in Barcelona
before showing clips streamed from a beach bar in Thailand. The possibility of
watching these cameras simultaneously and the potential of associating their
imagery at will allows for proposing narratives that follow database logic.
I will conclude the present chapter by tying together its various
sections, following a thread that has served to link my ideas about webcams.
First, we have dealt with a film medium that is digital and networked. Second,
this medium is archival in itself since the streams may be recorded at any
point, either captured by the viewer or simply stored at any Internet access
point. And finally, the appropriation by artists implies that one does not need
to own the code in order to be able to contribute to it. What is useful here
is a knowledge of how the system of image production works, along with its
archive and access, in order to choose the way in which the historical accounts
involving personal data of users and artists will be written. To this end, I
187
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have examined at length the way that Chun develops the interchangeability
between digital code, knowledge, and information storage, and how this
interchangeability affects the memory of the individual. By relating her notions
of code to Rosens idea of historicity in film production, I have argued that the
role of the artist who creates or uses new media objects with database logics
may be determinant for future viewings of the present audiovisual production.
In order to continue this line of thought, I will dedicate the last chapter of
this dissertation to the aesthetics of the imagery that is streamed online by
webcams, and the ways in which this contributes not only to their use and the
reworking of their archives, but also to political statements implied in using
archive materials of low image quality.
There have been several artists working with issues relating to the
ever-changing logic of the archives, and each of them uses all sorts of existing
materials in the creation of their artworks. The works of Hito Steyerl,
Harun Farocki and Walid Raad are contributions to making history by the
appropriation of archival materials that derive from all sorts of sources and
platforms. The logic of the database is present in the work of these artists and
enriches its potentials by extending its aims and effects to other realms beyond
art. In the next chapter I intend to analyze the aesthetics of the digital archive,
the narrative construction and the political impact of re-interpreting existing
audiovisual materials in the three diverging approaches of these artists.
188
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Appropriating the
Cinematic Apparatus
189
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6.1 On Appropriation
With regard to the status of webcam footage, the audiovisual material
may be termed as found-footage when appropriated for the making of an art
piece. Several issues related to ownership and authorship may arise, since
the rushes havent been produced by the artist, but rather by the owner of
the camera. When dealing with CCTV, filmmakers have been known to
ask permission from authorities for the use of surveillance records or to
request the footage of themselves captured during their movement in areas
of heightened visibility. This is the course of action taken by artist Jill Magid
when collecting the materials for her 2004 film Evidence Locker, exclusively
shot by surveillance cameras in Liverpool and for which she staged events.
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Appropriating the Cinematic Apparatus
But others produce work of a very different, more subversive, nature. The
Surveillance Camera Players (Figs. 23, 24), an artist collective inspired by
the anti-surveillance manifesto Guerrila Programming of Video Surveillance
Equipment, have performed Samuel Becketts Waiting for Godot and other
famous plays (among several political actions) between 1996 and 2006 in
front of CCTV cameras.1 They chose to perform for a public they knew was
composed of monitoring guards and other employees of some institution or
commercial venue who operate the cameras and watch their streams.
are protected. On the one hand, the already mentioned Earthcam.com and
Webcam.nl show real time footage generated by several cameras without
making any distinction between public and private cameras. They are publicly
accessible online regardless of who owns them. On the other hand, the sites
claim they own copyrights to all the imagery. This raises two main issues: even
if the sites copyrights extend to the owners of the cameras, we are unaware
of whether some of the cameras we are watching could indeed be used for
surveillance; secondly, this further blurs the issues regarding peoples rights
to their own image, as the cameras are placed in public places, ranging from
the church to the beach. What we know is that widespread access to materials
available on the Internet has been feeding the parallel creation of tracking
devices that make it possible to account for every step taken by an end user. As
is known to most users, every time one accesses the Internet to watch a video
on Youtube, read Facebook posts or download files both legally and illegally,
the action leaves marks that can be traced back to the user and the terminal
machine, and be linked to any previous records. Copyright infringement can
be traced back from a future point in time to the moment of appropriation.
This knowledge does not seem to prevent people from using materials
available on the Internet.
As discussed in the introduction to my dissertation, the Internet is full
of information of varying degrees of relevance that is constantly accumulating
and further extending the networked data archive. This informational web is
generated by all sorts of people, companies and state authorities. However,
as Steven Shaviro observes in Connected, Or What It Means to Live in the
Network Society (2003), the rights of private individuals diverge from those of
multinational corporations.2 In other words, companies have more legal power
than individuals when it concerns access to and use of data available on the
Internet. This is important in that their goals differ from those of the ordinary
citizen: corporations wish to increase their dominance while individuals are
more concerned about their own survival.3 Conspiracy theories that hold
major multinationals accountable for the control of all resources are plausibly
true, the evident corporate power over the Internet included. This influence
has far-reaching consequences. All people are beings of the mediasphere that
has become a natural habitat, a Latourian mode of existence whose nature is
comprised of electronic audiovisuals. People have grown into it just as it has
grown into them. Human beings are intertwined with networked pulsating
2 Steven Shaviro, Connected, Or What It Means to Live in the Network Society (Minnesota:
signals that tell them where to go and how to get there. As the cloud grows,
so does the individuals attachment to it. As a consequence, peoples lives have
become increasingly formatted and codified since the corporations who own
the technology determine the scope of possibilities allowed by the network as
mentioned in the previous chapter.
In the realm of art, it is clear that creativity is extraordinarily
influenced by technology and the paths designed by its advancement. Touch
screens and sound bytes have colonized the imagination to a point that
hopes and dreams are as affected by the audiovisual universe as any other
determining form of primordiality. The cinematic mode of existence inspires
contemporary artists to create artworks by borrowing resources available
within its scope. Internet art is an example; likewise, webcam filmmaking.
When considering found footage and appropriation of materials produced
by others, one discerns that the whole idea of originality seems to surface as
a topic for discussion, even if obsolete from the onset. What my dissertation
proposes as a starting point is the widespread knowledge that appropriation
has been practiced since the beginning of art as a method of production: as
an editing of fragments of knowledge that is rearranged in a creative order
to conceive something new. Art is by nature archival. If the mediasphere of
the cinematic mode of existence is the only nature humans know today, it
can be expected that artists access and pick it in order to create artworks that
have it included in their fabric.4 Webcams and the resulting footage are a
trademark of the surveillance society. The aesthetics resulting from their use
speak louder than any detailed narrative about safety or privacy issues ever
would. Appropriating webcam footage echoes the position of the artist in
contemporary society in relation to the archives produced by surveillance.
Blocking access to footage generated by webcams or restricting their
access are counter-creative measures that seriously constrain autonomous
artists from freely choosing their prime matter or medium. As Shaviro
observes:
4 Ibid. 193
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Not only does the assurance of free camera time and attentive
audiences offer the guerilla programmers the opportunity to point
out to the guardians of the spectacle that they are being studied, but,
as well, the community gathered to produce the actions can use the
opportunity to investigate pertinent social and historical phenomena.
As critics of the spectacle, guerilla programming actions should
always be, in each groups own way, an investigation and an expose
However, as guerillas, we must ensure that we do not relish the
in the future by the corporate entities who keep the intel away from the
general public. Recording webcam streams, while they are still freely available
on the Internet, means treating this imagery not as a free commodity, but
rather as a chance for artists to make films establishing new relations between
the contemporary, constant capture of filmed urbanity and future remixes
of their signification. Through these creative means, artists decide how the
imagery is to be read, rather than blindly allowing a corporate-determined
algorithm to establish undisputed links between bits of personal data. This
provides artists with the opportunity to reclaim imagery in the present and
influence its future interpretation.
The owner of an affected personal cam desires to be acknowledged by
and through the camera both by possessing it and by pointing it at his or her
street corner or backyard. Through growing awareness of usage possibilities
mixed with creative insight, an increasing number of people are turning
their gaze back at the camera. Beyond a more affected camera ownership,
other forms of subverting media logics have been carried out by artists who
squat webcam streams or appropriate surveillance footage for making
artworks. Examples include the just-mentioned Surveillance Camera Players
and Jill Magid, but also Harun Farocki, Manu Luksch, and others. As a
consequence, the appropriated affected footage, initially belonging to the
owner of the camera, becomes prime matter for the artist. Once transformed
into an autonomous art piece, the authorship can no longer be equated or
limited to ownership, as the artist has crafted the material into a film or
installation. From this moment on, it is up to the artist to determine how this
extraordinarily charged material is used for making art.
Subverting the use of a webcam, even an affected personal cam, can
have far-reaching consequences in terms of the attitude people in the streets
have towards video surveillance. Understanding the future categorization
of stored, present materials forces citizens into an awareness of their role in
shaping their image for the coming future. The agency of the artist as artist,
as observer, and as observed makes it possible to distinguish an authorship
that is distanced from the authorship of the owner of the camera. The levels
of affect embedded in the final piece allow the viewer to identify with a
potential self-portrait, that of the person in the streets, which means anyone
who lives in a city. The power of this agency may propel the subversion of the
cameras unilateralism when ordinary citizens begin to stare back, becoming
196
Appropriating the Cinematic Apparatus
active agents. This could be the turning point in the order of events, when
the individuals become aware of their roles as actors and reclaim their status
as subjects rather than remaining passive objects of the observers gaze.
Furthermore, there are several approaches to the use of this material. The artist
may, for example, choose to either openly criticize the cameras ubiquitous
presence or raise public awareness about its impact on peoples lives. In any
case, appropriating this footage subverts its intended official role, entailing an
active positioning of the artist as one refusing the uncritical internalization
of surveillance. This position simultaneously entails an act of resistance and
reflection.
197
Chapter 6
7 In April 2013 the Boston Marathon suffered a terrorist bombing that killed three and injured
more than 260 people. Shortly after, two young brothers (Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev)
were identified as suspects, and the military police closed down the city to hunt for them
after a shootout at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus. This resulted in the
death of the older brother and the imprisonment of the other. The younger Tsarnaev was finally
convicted and given the death penalty in July 2015. Besides the role surveillance footage
played in identifying the alleged bombers, I was very interested in the events, as I myself
was about to participate in a media studies conference at MIT. Going there during the recent
aftermath of the bombings was a powerful experience. The respect with which the issue was
198 handled by the hosting faculty members as well as by my fellow panelists inspired me to
create OnScreen Dbris.
Appropriating the Cinematic Apparatus
of live action rather than previous recordings not publicly accessible in the
first place. However, the artwork foregrounds other aspects I have discussed,
mainly in relation to the relevance of surveillance footage for constructing
narratives. This installation further demonstrates how footage can be
approached from a different angle by rearranging the aesthetic codes it relies
on for meaning production.
8 Arild Fetveit, Medium-Specific Noise, in Thinking Media Aesthetics: Media Studies, Film
Studies and the Arts, ed. Liv Hausken (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2013). 199
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The image is liberated from the vaults of cinemas and archives and
thrust into digital uncertainty, at the expense of its own substance.
The poor image tends towards abstraction: it is a visual idea in its very
becoming.9
The cases Steyerl mainly focuses on are rare films and photos that finally,
through contemporary technology, can be copied and distributed among
millions of potential viewers. Due to constant copying, the image has been
converted into unsuitable formats with insufficient resolution to comply with
digital standards. It is no longer sharp and sleek, but blurred and sometimes
its original subject is beyond recognition. These images are the debris, what is
left behind, existing at the margins of the high definition aesthetics.
According to Steyerl there is a hierarchy of images placing high-
resolution and sharpness on top of desirable attributes that ensure an
acceptable value documental in kind. According to this logic, there are
rich and poor images: the first, sharp and shiny, more appealing to the
viewer; the latter, washed out and tired, are more removed from reality and
the powers of mimetics.10 Following Steyerls line of thought, these residual
images, weighed as being of less value in the scale of commodification,
imprint artworks, imbuing them with an anti-capitalist form of content. To
deny the claim that digital technologies provide a seamless ground for the
visualization of the world is a powerful positioning implicit in the use of such
aesthetics. These experimental audiovisual artworks convey a clear decision to
9 Hito Steyerl, In Defense of the Poor Image, e-flux journal no. 10 (2009),
200 http://www.e-flux.com/journal/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/, 1.
10 Ibid.
Appropriating the Cinematic Apparatus
Understanding that, far from being the sovereign subjects, we too have
become data-objects to be mined with relations between body, material
world and the virtual becoming increasingly unstable and fluid.[]
Crucially, Steyerl remarks that circulationism, if reinvented, could
also be about short-circuiting existing networks, circumventing and
bypassing fixed regimes of power and money.14
13 Nick Aikens and Anne Fletcher, Introduction to Too Much World: The Films of Hito Steyerl, ed.
Nick Aikens (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014), 8.
14 Ibid., 8.
15 Ibid., 10.
16 Hito Steyerl Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?, e-flux journal, no. 49 (2013),
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/too-much-world-is-the-internet-dead/.
202 17 Ibid.
18 Ibid.
Appropriating the Cinematic Apparatus
The idea that the cyber world and the material world have become
interchangeable images is intriguing. In Jonathan Bellers exposition of the
cinematic mode of production, it is not the image, as a substitute of the
actual product, that counts, but rather the rate of its distribution.19 As an
example of what this implies, viral Youtube-clips have a higher rate of realness
than the ones that have been forgotten. An images potential for realness is
actualized by its circulation between users who have become both producers
and consumers. Today, this form of visuality focuses less on the actual process
of production and more on its post-production and distribution, and the
acceleration rate of these processes. In the words of Steyerl [i]t is about the
public relations of images across social networks, about advertisement and
alienation, and about being as suavely vacuous as possible.20 This citation
suggests that the autonomy of an image allows it to forge its own social
relations with other images, which, in turn, implies that both the cyber- and
the material world are images in a dialogue of constant circulation.
As an alternative to the hypothesis of an undesirable status quo, the
term circulationism can be rehabilitated and turned around in order to
create the grounds for artistic agency. In Patricia Pisters Deleuzian approach
to film studies, art acts as circuit breaker by escaping crippling standards
and creating new aesthetics.21 Steyerls politically engaged positioning echoes
these claims and urges artists to pervert paradigms based on a corporate
coding of circulation options. As she understands it, this form of grassroots
action could become the art of recoding or rewiring the system by exposing
state scopophilia, capital compliance and wholesale surveillance.22 The
contemporary digital economy could then take a turn, escape the screens and
take over the streets. How could this be actualized? It is possible to imagine
that the use of open source software and computers that allow customization
may create 3D environments that will be realized in material form. In such
cases, the material reality becomes a place of creation and not only exposure.
But when Steyerl asks about the possibility to leave the undead Internet and
start parallel alternatives the question remains whether she is speaking from
the inside of the system or the outside.23 In other words, is Steyerl asking users
to rebel against the coded system and liberate themselves from the corporate
network to build others, or can this movement only emerge from the
19 Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of
the Spectacle (Hanover: Dartmouth College University Press, 2006).
20 Steyerl, Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?
21 Patricia Pisters, Art as Circuit Breaker: Surveillance Screens and Powers of Affect, in Carnal
Aesthetics, Transgressive Imagery and Feminist Politics, ed. Bertina Papenburg and Marta
Zarzycka, 198-213 (London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 2013).
22 Steyerl, Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?, 37.
23 Ibid. 203
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24 The Deep Web consists of large areas of the existing Internet that are not accessible to the
204 public, while the Darknet is part of the Deep Web and forms an overlay network that can only
be accessed with very specific configurations.
Appropriating the Cinematic Apparatus
205
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instead use it as form of expression and multiply it, not only breaking but also
creating other circuits.
The aesthetics of digital visuality are central to circulationism, which
arises from the constant circulation of deficient imagery. In her text In
Defense of the Poor Image,25 Steyerl specifically describes the aesthetics and
the political status of the digital image as it decays through processes entailed
in circulationism. As seen before, she calls its result a poor image, since it
occupies a hierarchically lower position in relation to other, higher resolution
versions, with the cinematic image positioned at the top of the scale. As she
remarks, a high-resolution image looks more brilliant and impressive, more
mimetic and magic, more scary and seductive than a poor one. It is more
rich, so to speak.26 Essays and experimental film that did not comply with 35
mm standard hardly ever made it to film theaters and, thus, often remained
unseen. With the advent of platforms like the popular Youtube and the more
artistically oriented Ubuweb, this has changed suddenly, with low-resolution
copies circulating at an increased speed. The resurge of obscure masterpieces
brings the reasons for their initial demise to the surface. Their specific
aesthetics testify to their status as poor images, and form the conditions of
the very production of this status. What does it actually mean to consciously
choose for these aesthetics, to only work with images to which this status is
intrinsically attached? The poor image has become low resolution due to the
conversion to a web-friendly format for rapid sharing. However, alongside
these copies exist originally poor images. As an example from my artistic
research, the source material for the film work is already low resolution: I
consider the footage generated by the webcams producing precarious imagery
as a prime matter. In this manner, my practice involves raw filmic material
that at present cannot compete with the slick high definition standards of
contemporary filmmaking, but nevertheless comprises potentially expressive
material that reveals underlying political structures at work.
In her analysis of the poor image, Steyerl does not specifically mention
webcams but her conceptualization could and should apply to this imagery,
particularly as she situates the potential of the poor image within the context
of Third Cinema and thereby touches upon its various political implications.
More specifically, Steyerl refers to Juan Garca Espinosas manifesto For an
Imperfect Cinema (1979), in which he discusses how minorities make films
that reflect their living conditions. In this text, Espinosa calls for a production
27 Juan Garca Espinosa, For an Imperfect Cinema, trans. Julianne Burton, Jump Cut, no. 20
(1979): 24-26,
http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC20folder/ImperfectCinema.html.
28 Steyerl, In Defense of the Poor Image, 6.
29 Ibid.
30 Trolling consists of online bullying in which certain users use the Internet to sully other peoples
reputations. 207
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208 The title of this work originates from Roberto Rosselinis film Europa (1951), when Ingrid
Bergmans character in a factory remarks: I thought I was seeing convicts.
Appropriating the Cinematic Apparatus
those not involved lay flat on the ground, arms over their heads. They
know that when a fight breaks out, the guard will call out a warning
and then fire once using a rubber bullet. If the prisoners continue
fighting, the guard will use live ammunition. The pictures are silent,
and the shot is only revealed in the trail of gun smoke drifting across
the screen. The camera and the gun are right next to each other; field
of vision and field of fire merge. The reason that the yard is built in pie
segments is clear so that there is nowhere to hide from observation or
bullets.34
Some guards claim that their colleagues have often deliberately put
members of warring groups into the yard together and placed bets
on the outcome of the fights as if the prisoners were gladiators. The
surveillance cameras run at a slower speed in order to save costs. In
the footage available to us, the intervals were extended so that the
movements are jerky and not flowing. The fights in the yard look like
something from a cheap computer game. It is hard to imagine a less
dramatic representation of death.38
From this citation, it becomes clear that guards play roles that go beyond their
professional functions. In this case, the guards are simultaneously using the
inmates as source of entertainment and income, while allegedly monitoring
their moves. By doing so, they adopt frequent consumerist roles that attribute
attention to audiovisual material in order to produce more of this form of
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid.
The reason for shooting prisoners with real bullets and killing them
is allegedly due to the possibility that they may carry weapons made, for
example, by sharpening a plastic spoon or, as frequently occurs in feature
films, a toothbrush. In such cases, the guards would put their lives in jeopardy
by stepping into the yard to stop the fight between the gang members.
But the control these prisoners are subjected to makes the availability of
211
Chapter 6
212 39 Ibid.
40 Ibid., 290.
Appropriating the Cinematic Apparatus
41 Ibid., 293.
42 Ibid., 293. 213
Chapter 6
Up to this point, I have analyzed and demonstrated the various ways in which
webcams provide a live stream of images that captures public space and at the
same time has an impact on it. Farockis citation allows me now to establish a
comparison between the example of the medieval-future skywalls as an urban
norm, in which webcams potentially become a more efficient control device.
It is possible to predict that soon not only gated communities will make use
of architecture and technology to keep out the undesirables, but that the
principle of medieval city walls will return even though it may not actually
materialize. These towering walls can remain invisible and metaphorical, due
to the fact that control-seeking authorities may choose to rely on webcams
primarily as main devices for social monitoring and control, rather than
investing in costly additional physical fortification.
As Michael Palms film shows (Fig. 7), there is enough sophisticated
tracking software to isolate the individual in a crowd framed by cameras. The
most likely result of a completely pervasive video surveillance would be the
territorialization of a group of citizens and the deterritorialization of other
less desirable people for the predetermined maximized production of the
city space. This, in essence, ensures a perfectly controlled composition of the
space that is considered suitable to be captured by webcams, owned by most
citizens and streaming chronotopes. This form of urban planning takes into
consideration that which will appear within the frame and whether it is in
accordance with the most efficient cinematic mode of production. The main
target of such a control system that draws invisible, even non-transparent,
territory-demarcating lines, is to create an impression of realism by
manipulating and thus controlling every single aspect pertaining to the mise-
en-scne and the acting. Even though hypothetical, this is hardly a futurist
scenario: it can already be experienced on the level of the prison, the factory,
the gated-community as well as in the public space of the city streets.
Going back to Corcoran, and in order to focus on the treatment and
44 Hser, Rembert, Nine Minutes in the Yard: A Conversation with Harun Farocki, trans. Winfried
Thielmann and Laurent Faasch-Ibrahim. In Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight-Lines, ed.
Thomas Elssaesser (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press: 2004), 298.
45 Jean-Louis Baudry, Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus, in Narrative,
Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press,
1986). 215
Chapter 6
216 46 Already Been in a Lake of Fire_Notebook Volume 38 (1999). This consists of an artwork that
is part of the Atlas Group Archive.
Appropriating the Cinematic Apparatus
The Atlas Group Archive contains among its files a film called I Only
Wish That I Could Weep (1999-2002) (Fig. 30), which explicitly uses footage
from a surveillance camera. It consists of a time-lapse of several afternoons,
captured when the monitoring guard decided to turn the camera away
from the designated target to film the sunset. In the background, it shows
Corniche, Beiruts seaside esplanade. This location was known as the favorite
meeting place of political pundits, spies, double agents, fortune-tellers and
phrenologists, according to the information provided by the Atlas Group.
As the opening credits read at the beginning of the film, Lebanese security
positioned surveillance cameras in 1992 all along the strip in order to oversee
the activity in the area. The credits further inform that, instead of supervising
the actions of the people spending their afternoon along the water, the
operator of camera 17 preferred to observe the sunset at the end of each day.
He was decommissioned in 1996, after a year on the job, but was allowed to
keep the tape containing his sunsets. This tape, which lasts for six minutes,
was anonymously sent to the Atlas Group and is, since then, part of its
archive. When questioned about the motivation behind his actions, the guard
later allegedly admitted that because he grew up in the east of the city, which
was divided during the war, he always yearned to watch the sunset from the
Corniche located in west Beirut.
Fig. 30 I Only Wish That I Could Weep (The Atlas Group 19992002). 217
Chapter 6
By bringing the video of the sunset together with the story of the
operator, who merely wanted to gaze at the sight that had been denied to him
in his childhood, Raad exposes the reality of recent history and the way it has
shaped society. Moreover, he points to the potential of surveillance cameras
as affected and affective media that can be used in an aesthetic way for poetic
reasons. As the opening credits indicate this operator was moved by a desire
that he embodied as a child, and the archivist was interested as a spectator
and moved by the affects conveyed through the material. Ultimately, we,
the observers of this artwork (because we view this tape as an artwork), also
contribute to further affecting this material through the relation we establish
with it, recalling the levels of affect generated by webcams.
The presentation of this time-lapse is another aspect that should be
paid attention to. We know that this technique was not Raads decision,
since the tape itself was only six minutes long. By observing the footage, we
witness several sunsets; peoples movements are fragmented and accelerated
as several frames are missing. Eventually these people become an abstract
flow of shadowy figures and the viewer fully concentrates on the small fireball
repeatedly descending below the horizon. In essence, if one awards the guard
authorship, he could be praised as having created a very conceptual and
minimalist piece. This is precisely what Raad did, by providing the tape with
an artistic context within the public presentations of his archive, and thus
appropriating the footage. However, he also does much more when offering
the public this material: Raad points to the reality of a country in which
areas where dissent may be nascent have been supervised since 1992, these
same areas where families used to enjoy a stroll at the end of an afternoon.
The notions of the suspect and the innocent are reversed and analyzed
according to the same parameters. By exhibiting the footage as part of an
archival art project, Raad thus provides us with a view given by a medium
that does not distinguish potential criminals from leisurely wanderers and in
which violence is portrayed at the core of society. In this manner, this work
comments on a medium that does not appear to invite social cohesion, but
instead clearly contributes to societys further fragmentation: a paradoxical
medium with cinematic properties that can also be used to produce objects
that are poetic in nature.
218
Appropriating the Cinematic Apparatus
Afterword 6.3
To recapitulate, artists appropriate pop imagery, porn visuals and
surveillance footage in order to subvert somewhat official chronotopes, by
exposing the inner workings of the medium with an awareness of the latent
potential of poor images. This appropriation contributes to the creation of
alternative meanings and thus provokes encounters of a less controlled nature
in a productive manifestation of contemporary artistic forms of agency. As
Pisters writes about artists that work with materials generated by surveillance
cameras:
of the SMBAs architectural aspects and the ways in which I aim to combine
formats and displays that will engage the viewer on a physical level. This
involves experimentation with the scale, proximity and navigability of the
exhibition space, in which the webcam emerges as an apparatus that affects
the viewer and the experience in a similar way that it affects the urban space of
daily human routines.
220
Conclusion
221
Conclusion
1 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago and
London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998).
222 Derrida refers here to the future analysis of present facts. This is done in retrospect, i.e. when
the present has become the past.
and radically change the very world that has created them in the first place. In
order to define this mode of existence that arose from the creation of a specific
tool devised for social control, I have established a differentiation between the
types of surveillance-oriented cameras and the degree to which they generate
and convey affect. This subject has been studied in detail in the first chapter
of this dissertation. The owners of these cameras, each with different degrees
of attachment to the medium, have instilled qualities upon them by simply
owning and placing their webcams where they lead their lives. In the webcams
I choose the owner does not film his or her body, however, an affective
dimension is attached to the image and sound produced by this camera, which
can be traced back to the owners intentions. Even if there is an automatism
inherent in the webcams modes of operation, each owner chooses to use his
or her camera with a specific personal purpose, e. g. documenting the routines
of newborn kittens, observing wild birds in their habitat or allowing shopping
streets or parks to acquire a whole new dramatic dimension. Each of these
instances produces unique footage loaded with affect. This affect is transferred
through the production and dissemination process of the imagery, and from
the owner to the viewer, the person who is viewed, the appropriating artist,
and the public who will experience the artworks made with such footage. An
affective meta-level pervades all these stages and is inherent in the body of
the camera. This affective dimensionality is medium-specific and extends far
beyond the surveillance purposes that are generally considered to be the main
reason for the existence of these cameras.
In the second chapter, I studied the parallel development of
surveillance and panopticism, starting with Jeremy Benthams late eighteenth
century architectural device known as the Panopticon. One could argue that
the freedom provided by mobile cameras which may be attached to moving
cars, missiles or drones involves a networked system of extreme visuality
that far exceeds the tasks of supervision and data collection comprised by
the original and static Panopticon. Nonetheless, there are several similarities
between the Panopticon and the webcams that contribute to defining the
latter as a rightful successor of the first. With its incorporation of panoptic
principles, the city pervaded by webcams is transformed into a three-
dimensional film set to produce online audiovisual content. The increasing
presence of video-surveillance reinforces self-regulation as a preemptive
measure, in accordance with the main principles of panopticism, and ensures
223
Conclusion
224 2 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New
York: Vintage, 1995).
imagery cannot be dissociated from its outcome. This implies that, if required,
even webcams that are considered to produce trivial visual content will be
used for surveillance.
The artists and filmmakers who appropriate webcam footage and
other surveillance materials are aware of the status of surveillance imagery
and therefore choose to position themselves politically by using this on-
going production as primary material. Moreover, these artists pervert
the intentionality underlying control devices by exposing these materials
as footage that has accumulated affects along its line of production and
distribution. I regard the visuality that is created in this process to be
constitutive of the growing influence of webcams on the construction of a
premeditated mise-en-scne that frames urban locations. As an artist who has
worked with these cameras since 2001, I have attempted to map the cinematic
implications of using such a medium, even when the intentions behind
webcam ownership seem trivial, e.g when showing individuals jogging in a
city park.
It could be argued that the cinematic mode of existence was born
before the invention of the classical film apparatus. After all, cinematic
encounters can be traced back to natural pinhole cameras that show the
worlds reflection projected upside down and in motion.3 However, I have
identified an intensification of daily cinematic encounters caused by pervasive
contemporary forms of networked audiovisual production and distribution,
including webcams and the affected footage they generate. Through these
continuous affective encounters with mediated and mediatizing reality, made
up of traditional and contemporary forms of cinema, the whole world is
rendered cinematic.4 In the context of the present research, this affirmation
entails that webcams incorporate both the principles of panopticism and
cinematography, but also that they display an affective dimension that lies
beyond the fictionalization of reality imposed by the dispositif. In my study,
the cinematic thus stands for a condition of contemporaneity that affects
everyone, regardless of instances of connectivity or even the direct observation
of the imagery. Living in the city involves experiencing this cinematic mode of
existence with its specific forms of time and space compression and expansion.
The contemporary conditions of the cinematic are intensified by the
3 Edwin K. Lai, The History of the Camera Obscura and Early Photography in China, in Brush
& Shutter, Early Photography in China, ed. Jeffrey W. Cody and Frances Terpak (Los Angeles:
Getty Research Institute, 2011).
In this article Lai describes the discovery of the pinhole effect in the 5th century B.C. by
Chinese philosopher Mo Di: he observed the entrance of light rays through a small opening
that would project the exterior on the opposite wall of a dimly lit room.
4 Pepita Hesselberth, Cinematic Chronotopes: Here, Now, Me. London, New York, New Delhi
and Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2014. 225
Conclusion
226 5 Ibid.
security agencies like the NSA. Importantly, even though software developers
program systems increasingly more efficient for categorizing and perusing
data, e.g. through face recognition and algorithm-based logics, the public
simultaneously grows aware of video surveillance.
Over the years, public opinion about webcams has undergone a shift.
Looking back to 2001 when I began my artistic work with these cameras but
prior to my academic research on the topic, there were relatively few publicly
accessible webcams. Moreover, these cameras were viewed benignly and
without suspicion by those who were aware of their existence. Since then, this
consciousness has exponentially grown as people have begun to adapt their
behaviors to the constant presence of cameras and to the image production
entailed by such a presence. Artists and designers position themselves in
relation to this medium with a growing focus on the documentary content
but also with an eye towards the distinctive aesthetic of webcam imagery.
The artistic initiatives mentioned throughout this dissertation demonstrate
the ways in which surveillance inspire to make films and other artwork. For
example, I have drawn attention to recent developments in fashion that focus
on the voluntary invisibility of the human figure by means of makeup and
clothing designed to confuse visual tracking systems. These cases provide
evidence that, even though the proliferation of cameras is difficult to quantify
or predict, webcams affect behavior in the streets. This fact is not only
acknowledged by urban planners but also by commuters and tourists alike.
As a consequence, people adapt to a condition of permanent visibility while
artists increasingly use the technical affordances of this medium to resist
control in some cases, but also to explore audiovisual aesthetics.
In the sixth and last chapter of my dissertation, I have analyzed the
appropriation of low-resolution materials and the political potential of making
art with precarious aesthetics. In this chapter I specifically concentrated on the
work of three artists: Hito Steyerl, Harun Farocki and Walid Raad. Although
the approaches of the three artists are different, the art pieces I analyze,
whether films or installations, are made with archival footage. Working
with imagery that stands in the shadows of standard quality audiovisuality
(and is therefore considered less important), the preferences shown by these
artists draw attention to medium-specific aesthetics with embedded political
significance. As an example, the work of Steyerl extracts feminist values from
pornographic and softcore visuals by cross-referencing the imagery of Japanese
227
Conclusion
228 7 Hito Steyerl, In Defense of the Poor Image, e-flux journal no. 10 (2009),
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/.
the chronotopes, the digital archive, and the artists produce and maintain
the cinematic mode of existence. Through the active engagement with these
combined elements, the city and those who live in it are subjected to a
constant doubling process in which the online profile develops in parallel to
the reality lived in the material world. During this process, the cameras convey
varying degrees of affect while they film people who are increasingly aware
of their presence and play roles according to the behavioral expectations in
the locations where they find themselves. The fact that digital data are being
produced and streamed in a network further implies the potential presence
of many spectators and the possibility of recording. The cinematic city that
simultaneously films and perceives itself while archiving the audiovisuals
it creates differs from the original city in several aspects, due both to film
technology and storage conditions as well as the compliance of people
accepting their new roles. In several respects this can be considered a city of
the future, since most of this fragmented data will only be analyzed and given
meaning in the years ahead. During this research, my main guiding intention
as an artist has been to understand how I could use an emerging medium
that is an oppressive means of control, and yet is simultaneously a filming
device with aesthetic potential. The dual role of surveillance and aesthetics
gives artists the possibility of creating cinematic objects that will influence the
meaning given to images that are being produced at the present moment but
that will only be interpreted at a later stage.
The engagement with the subject of webcams in the present research
only scratches the surface: several of the issues that I have identified can and
should be explored through more detailed analyses that exceed the limitations
of the current project. An intriguing example would be to study film from an
ontological point of view that incorporates the forms of digital indexicality
present in webcam archives. Another theme that I have approached, and
which deserves further analysis, is the matter of code as theorized by Wendy
Chun in relation to the shift from personal memory to data storage. In this
research, I have relied on her writings to demonstrate the premeditation
of a webcams forms of mise-en-scne: its programmability anticipates
and shapes urban flows. In its entirety, I have proposed a starting point
for conceptualizing an emerging cinematic medium that, firstly, entails a
technological continuity with pre-existing techniques, as is the case with most
film-related media, and secondly, also incorporates an archival potential that is
229
Conclusion
230
However, the degrees of intensity entailed by the two processes cannot be
compared. In academia, one follows the timeline of extensive analysis and
careful writing, while artworks emerge from bursts of energetic dedication
where creativity flows from the experimental use of the medium.
Every artist has an autonomous practice, and, consequently, there
cannot be one standardized methodological approach to a PhD in artistic
research that could subsequently be applied to future artistic researchers. Even
though the two are independent from one another, both the present textual
production and the art pieces produced through my artistic research project
should be regarded as one single and consistent, meaning-producing whole.
In other words, this project combines specific modes of knowledge formation
in the academic discourse and in artistic production, which I have considered
productive for analyzing the contemporary condition of the individual in a
world in which surveillance and cinema contribute to a cinematic mode of
existence. The outcome of my experimental artistic research intends to further
increase the possibility of choice for other investigative incursions in the arts
by deepening theoretical as well as material practices that suit and respect each
artists needs and aspirations.
Being now at the conclusion of my personal practice-based research,
I find the results both in writing and in filmmaking quite surprising.
Throughout the process, there was, as mentioned earlier, a degree of
experimentation in both components. The two parallel methods I developed
have stimulated further experiments. Moreover, the theoretical component
of my research has provided me with insights into film philosophy that I
probably would not have come across had I not embarked on this PhD. This
happened through contact with eminent scholars who have offered me the
guidance and opportunity to engage with texts and other works previously
unknown to me. These circumstances were of immense value to my work
as an artist concerned with broadening my knowledge of contemporary
social issues that accompany life in the cinematic city. Such rich background
knowledge enabled me to consider my work, and its potential political
stance, from constantly emerging and shifting perspectives. These have
influenced the directions my work was to follow and clarified the implications
of particular steps I had taken intuitively in the past. As an example of the
mutual inspiration between both paths, I would like to relate an anecdote:
as I was observing a 3D webcam stream at my studio, the Internet became
231
Conclusion
232
Bibliography
233
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Webcam.NL. Accessed September 30, 2015. Jill Magid Evidence Locker 2004.
http://hdtv.webcam.nl.
The Atlas Group I Only Wish That I Could Weep
Welcome to the DonnieCam. Accessed January 1999-2002.
7, 2014, http://donniecam.akikowaka.com/.
films other projects
Adam Harvey Stealth Wear 2013. AH Projects.
Catalog. Directed by John Whitney. Los Accessed June 5, 2015, http://ahprojects.
Angeles, 1961. com/projects/.
Decasia. Directed by Bill Morrison. Canada: Adam Harvey CV Dazzle 2010. AH Projects.
Decade Distribution, 2002. Accessed June 5, 2015, http://ahprojects.
com/projects/.
Holy Motors. Directed by Leos Carax. Kln:
Pandora Film Produktion. 2012. Lev Manovich Soft-Cinema 2002. Soft Cinema:
Ambient Narrative. Accessed July 15, 2014,
In Free Fall. Directed by Hito Steyerl. Germany, http://softcinema.net/editions.htm#.
2010.
Surveillance Camera Players Waiting for
Knight of Cups. Directed by Terrence Malick. Godot 1998. Guerilla Programming of Video
Los Angeles: Dogwood films and Waypoint Surveillance Equipment. Accessed July 21,
Entertainment: 2015 2014, http://www.notbored.org/gpvse.html.
Lyrical Nitrate. Directed by Peter Delpeut. The
Netherlands: Yuca Film, 1991.
films and
Rape. Directed by Yoko Ono and John Lennon.
Vienna: 1969.
installations
Rope. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Los
Angeles: Warner Bros, Transatlantic Pictures
239
List of Images
240
Fig. 1 Two stills from a critique of intrusive Fig. 17 Errata (Paula Albuquerque 2001)
media in Rape (Yoko Ono 1969).
Fig. 18 People drawing messages in the street
Fig. 2 Jennifer Ringley in her dorm room for Don in front of the DonnieCam. Welcome
streamed by the JenniCAM, JenniCAM to the DonnieCam. Accessed January 7, 2014,
Last Week at Jennis Place. Accessed http://donniecam.akikowaka.com/.
January 3, 2014, http://www.arttech.ab.ca/
pbrown/jenni/jenni.html. Fig. 19 A corridor with thousands of pulsating
hard drives stored in one of Googles
Fig. 3 Two stills from Osprey Camera in data centers. Extreme Tech. Accessed 19
the Eagle nest. Osprey Camera. Accessed August, 2015, http://www.extremetech.com/
August 20, 2015, http://pontu.eenet.ee/ computing/212586-google-data-center-
player/kalakotkas.html. EENet (http:// loses-data-following-four-lightning-strikes
www.eenet.ee/EENet/contact.html) and Google
Looduskalender Website (http://www.
looduskalender.ee/en/) Fig. 20 Catalog (John Whitney 1961)
Fig. 4 Split Recognition (Paula Albuquerque Fig. 21 Soft Cinema (Lev Manovich 2002).
2010) Soft Cinema: Ambient Narrative. Accessed
July 15, 2014, http://softcinema.net/editions.
Fig. 5 Mapping the Studio I (Fat chance htm#. Lev Manovich
John Cage) (Bruce Nauman 2001) c/o
Pictoright Amsterdam 2015 Fig. 22 Unfinished Narratives # 41 (Paula
Albuquerque 2013)
Fig. 6 The Creators of Shopping Worlds
(Harun Farocki 2001) Harun Farocki GbR Fig. 23 The Surveillance Camera Players
performing in front of CCTV. Guerilla
Fig. 7 Low Definition Control Malfunctions Programming of Video Sur veillance
#0 (Michael Palm 2011) hammelfilm/ Equipment. Accessed July 21, 2014, http://
Michael Palm www.notbored.org/gpvse.html. Surveillance
Camera Players
Fig. 8 Bucuti 2121212 (Paula Albuquerque
2012) Fig. 24 The Surveillance Camera Players give
the finger to CCTV. Guerilla Programming of
Fig. 9 PAN (Paula Albuquerque 2013) Video Surveillance Equipment. Accessed
July 21, 2014, http://www.notbored.org/
Fig. 10 Holy Motors (Leos Carax 2012) gpvse.html. Surveillance Camera Players
Fig. 11 Faceless (Manu Luksch 2007) Fig. 25 OnScreen Dbris (Paula Albuquerque
Manu Luksch 2014)
Fig. 12 Anti-drone hoodie from Stealth Wear Fig. 26 In Free Fall (Hito Steyerl 2010) c/o
by Adam Harvey. AH Projects. Accessed Pictoright Amsterdam 2015
June 5, 2015, http://ahprojects.com/
projects/. Fig. 27 I Thought I was Seeing Convicts
(Harun Farocki 2000) Harun Farocki GbR
Fig. 13 Two images of the project Camouflage
from Face Detection in CV Dazzle by Adam Fig. 28 I Thought I was Seeing Convicts
Harvey. AH Projects. Accessed June 5, (Harun Farocki 2000) Harun Farocki GbR
2015, http://ahprojects.com/projects/.
Fig. 29 I Thought I was Seeing Convicts
Fig. 14 Realtime Ellipsis (Paula Albuquerque (Harun Farocki 2000) Harun Farocki GbR
2012)
Fig. 30 I Only Wish That I Could Weep (The
Fig. 15 Decasia (Bill Morrison 2002) Bill Atlas Group 19992002)
Morrison
242
At the age of four I had the impression I was constantly being filmed.
It felt almost like intuitive knowledge. I believed that in the future, when I
would be very old, the uncut rushes would be played back to me. This was
the inception of my awareness that I was living in an increasingly cinematic
world.
The present dissertation results from an art project in which I use
webcam footage to make experimental films and installations. I explore a
networked form of filmmaking that contributes to the doubling of its subject
by constantly archiving audiovisual documentation of city life. I consider the
main reason for the intense dissemination and pervasiveness of this cinematic
medium, primarily intended for surveillance, to be the affect generated by the
relation people have to the cameras.
There is no outside to the citys cinematic realm, as the networked
cameras form a closed circuit in which everyone is either pointing a webcam
at the streets, observing its streams, being filmed by it, or engaging in all these
activities simultaneously. I am part of this process.
Artistic Research
When I began the present doctoral program in artistic research, I
decided to establish a relation between surveillance and cinematography to
find the webcams specificity as film medium. In keeping a balanced ratio
between theory and artistic practice, I consciously avoided explaining my
artwork through a theoretical discourse. When providing information about
the experimental films and installations I make with this footage, I restricted
the writing to a description of the elements constitutive of a specific artwork
to unveil how the project was developed, rather than why. In addition, I
consciously steered away from using my own artworks to illustrate the theory
I was writing. The relation between the two research components is thus based
on interweaving text and art in a mutually supportive yet methodologically
independent process, respecting a guiding premise that artistic processes
differ from scientific ones and thus deserve autonomous approaches. With
this hybrid methodology, I demonstrate how webcams become a cinematic
medium.
The cinematic, as I conceive of it, takes place beyond the film set
243
Summary
and the movie theatre. It is an urban condition that affects people through
the multitude of cameras and screens that surround them, but also exists
independently of the presence of any filmic equipment. This is a situation
that the webcams, with their twenty-four seven audiovisual generation, have
actively contributed to.
In the introduction to my dissertation, relying on Bruno Latours
theories about modes of existence and tool usage, I identify the way in which
urbanity is shaped and adjusted according to the potential presence of video
surveillance tools.
In the first chapter of my dissertation, Video Surveillance versus the
Affected Personal Cam, I differentiate between types of surveillance-oriented
cameras and the degree to which they generate and convey affect. The level
of the owners attachment to their webcams determines the intensity of affect
being generated. Affect is transferred through the process of production and
dissemination of imagery from the owner to the viewer, the person who is
observed, the appropriating artist, and the public experiencing the artworks
made with such footage. An affective meta-level pervades all these stages,
which is inherent to the body of the camera. This affective dimensionality is
medium-specific and extends far beyond the surveillance purposes generally
considered the main reason for the existence of these cameras.
In the second chapter, Post-Panopticism and the Attention Economy,
I emphasize how surveillance and panopticism have been developing hand
in hand, ever since Jeremy Bentham devised the architectural device of
the Panopticon in the late eighteenth century. With the incorporation of
panoptic supervision principles, the contemporary city has been transformed
into a three-dimensional film set for the production of online content that
may get archived and thus becomes a production site similar to the factory,
the school, or the prison. The increasing presence of video-surveillance and
growing camera awareness reinforces self-regulation as a preemptive measure,
in accordance with Michel Foucaults definition of panopticism, which affects
the construction of identities entailed in processes of subjectification. In the
cinematic mode of existence, cities have become laboratories for experiments
in social environments, simultaneously influencing routines of public life in
the present moment and shaping the future image of the urban space.
In the third chapter, From Cinematographic to Cinematic
Apparatus, I analyze the traditional cinematographic apparatus
244
The Webcam as an Emerging Cinematic Medium
245
Summary
246
Samenvatting
De Webcam
als een Opkomend
Cinematisch Medium
247
Samenvatting
Toen ik vier jaar oud was had ik de indruk constant gefilmd te worden.
Dit voelde bijna als een intutieve kennis. Ik geloofde dat in de toekomst,
wanneer ik heel oud zou zijn, de ongemonteerde rushes voor mij terug
gespeeld zouden worden. Dit was het begin van het bewustzijn dat ik in een
toenemend cinematische wereld leefde.
De huidige dissertatie is het resultaat van een kunstproject waarin
ik beeldmateriaal afkomstig van webcams gebruik voor het maken van
experimentele films en installaties. Ik verken een genetwerkte vorm van
filmmaken die leidt tot de verdubbeling van zijn subject door de constante
archivering van audiovisuele documentatie van het stedelijk leven. De
voornaamste reden voor de intensieve disseminatie en doordringendheid van
dit cinematisch medium, voornamelijk bedoeld voor beveiliging, wijt ik aan
een door de relatie tussen mens en camera gegenereerd affect.
Er bestaat geen buiten in het cinematische gebied van de stad. Dit
komt doordat de genetwerkte cameras een gesloten circuit vormen waarin
men ofwel een webcam op de straat richt, zijn stream observeert, erdoor
gefilmd wordt, of zich bezig houdt met al deze activiteiten tegelijk. Ik maak
onderdeel uit van dit proces.
Artistic Research
Toen ik het huidige doctoraal programma in Artistic Research begon,
besloot ik een relatie te leggen tussen beveiliging en cinematografie om het
specifieke karakter van de webcam als filmisch medium te vinden. Om een
gebalanceerde ratio tussen theorie en kunst praktijk te behouden, heb ik
bewust vermeden via een theoretisch discours mijn werk als kunstenaar te
duiden. Wanneer ik informatie geef over de experimentele films en installaties
die ik met dit beeldmateriaal maak, heb ik mij beperkt tot het benoemen
van de individuele onderdelen van een specifiek kunstwerk om uit te leggen
hoe een project zich heeft ontwikkeld, in plaats van uit te leggen waarom.
Bovendien heb ik bewust vermeden mijn eigen kunstwerken als illustratie
te gebruiken voor de theorie die zich in mijn dissertatietekst ontvouwt. De
relatie tussen de twee onderzoekscomponenten is daardoor gebaseerd op
het verweven van tekst en kunst in een elkaar wederkerig ondersteunend
doch methodologisch onafhankelijk proces. Volgens deze aanpak wordt het
248
De Webcam als een Opkomend Cinematisch Medium
249
Samenvatting
maatregel. Dit sluit aan bij Michel Foucaults definitie van panopticisme,
waarin de constructie van identiteit benvloed wordt door, en verbonden is
met, processen van subjectivering. In de cinematische mode of existence zijn
steden laboratoria geworden voor experimenten in sociale omgevingen, die
routines van het huidige publieke leven benvloeden en tegelijkertijd het
toekomstbeeld van de stedelijke ruimte vormen.
In het derde hoofdstuk, From Cinematographic to Cinematic
Apparatus, analyseer ik het traditionele cinematografische apparaat
geconceptualiseerd door Jean-Louis Baudry, om door middel van vergelijking,
het potentieel van de webcams als hedendaagse cinematische media te
omlijnen. Het is mijn doel geweest om de aura van objectiviteit van deze
cameras te demystificeren door te benadrukken welke invloed ze hebben
op gefilmde gebeurtenissen, en hoe ze door hun technische mogelijkheden
tevens de toekomstige interpretatie van dezelfde gebeurtenissen bepalen. Door
het toe-eigenen van dit beeldmateriaal voor mijn films, laat ik zien hoe het
visuele materiaal dat in dit proces geproduceerd wordt een resultaat is van een
voorbedachte mise-en-scne die de stedelijke locaties omkadert. Deze mise-
en-scne vertaalt een conditie van de hedendaagse urbaniteit die (mogelijk
gelijktijdig) mensen transformeert tot cameramannen, filmregisseurs, acteurs
en toeschouwers.
In het vierde hoofdstuk, getiteld Cinematic Chronotopes:
Temporality of the Cinematic Mode of Existence of the Webcams, analyseer
ik eigenschappen die behoren tot de specifieke temporaliteit van webcams
en introduceer ik de term realtime ter definitie hiervan. Deze term bevat
de real time van de single shot in de traditionele film, maar ook die van
zijn datatransmissie over het internet. Het voorbeeld dat in dit hoofdstuk
gebruikt wordt, mijn installatie Realtime Ellipsis, bevat een situatie waarbij de
grillige transmissie een esthetische repercussie uitlokt die zichtbaar is in het
beeldmateriaal dat ik registreer. Deze uitdrukking van tijd, die de waarneming
van de cinematografische ruimte benvloedt, creert narratieve eenheden die ik
identificeer als cinematische chronotopen. Deze kunnen naar kijkers worden
gestreamd en aangepast naar wat men een geschikt kader vindt.
Het vijfde hoofdstuk, Webcams and the Archive, analyseert
het digitale archiveren van audiovisuele documentatie geproduceerd
door webcams. Zelfs als het moeilijk is te bewijzen of streams van deze
cameras opgeslagen worden, blijkt dat de grootste uitdaging die digitale
250
De Webcam als een Opkomend Cinematisch Medium
251
Samenvatting
252
Appendix
Exhibition Plan
253
Appendix
255
Appendix
list of films and
installations in
the floor plan
1 As mentioned before this corresponds to 3 Portraying Adam
the first monitor that is encountered in the Webcam / Screen Capture 4 08
space, which displays audiovisual fragments Amsterdam 2014
that have been used during the research but
have not yet been worked into art pieces. Exhibited at Bradwolff Projects, Amsterdam
2015.
2 Birds Eye View
Live Webcam Stream Amsterdam 2013 Competition Selection Alternative Film and
Video Festival Belgrade 2014.
Film version Exhibited at DeFKa Campis,
Assen 2013. FUSO Videoart Biennial, Lisbon 2014.
256
4 Realtime Ellipsis 5 PAN
Video Installation Video Installation
257
Appendix
258 www.paulaalbuquerque.org
the webcam
as an emerging
cinematic
medium
This study results from an art project in which
I use webcam footage to make experimen-
tal films and installations. Through an artis-
tic research process I explore a networked
biography
form of filmmaking that contributes to the
doubling Paula Albuquerque holds a BFA in Audiovisu-
of its subject by constantly archiving audiovi- al Art from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and
sual documentation of city life. an MFA in Video and Film from the Sand-
berg Institute. She has taught Film History
and Theory at the SAE Institute Amster-
As a connecting thread running through the dam and is currently tutor of the ART and
six chapters of this dissertation, I delineate RESEARCH Honours Programme, Gerrit
the paradigmatic way in which several ac- Rietveld Academy and University of Am-
tants engage with one another to produce sterdam. She is presently Dutch delegate of
and maintain a contemporary cinematic the international Cinema and Moving Image
mode of existence. These are what I call Research Assembly and Artistic Adviser at
affected personal cams but also surveil- the Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst.
lance cameras in general, the principles of
panopticism, the cinematic apparatus, the Her publications include articles in Necsus:
chronotopes, the digital archive, and the European Journal of Media Studies, the
artists appropriating such materials. catalogue for the Sorbonne Conference
on Cinema and the Revolution and the
During this research my guiding intention as forthcoming MIT Media Studies Conference
an artist has been to understand how to Series book. She gave talks and guest
use a medium that is simultaneously an lectures at Pratt Institute in New York, the
oppressive means of control and a filming Masters of Filmmaking at the Dutch Film
device with aesthetic potential. The impli- and Television Academy and the Sandberg
cations of this dual role of video surveil- Institute in Amsterdam.
lance, to which the networked character of
the webcams and the possibility of eternal Albuquerques artwork has been shown at
archival have been added, provide artists i.e. Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam,
with the opportunity to create cinematic Gallery Bradwolff Projects in Amsterdam,
objects and influence the future interpre- DeFKa Campis Assen Contemporary Art
tation of images that are constantly being Museum, Netherlands Media Art Institute,
produced. Boijmans van Beuningen Museum Rotter-
dam, Venice Biennale Rietveld Arsenale,
Organhaus Art Space Chongqing, So Pau-
lo Art Museum, Beijing Today Art Museum,
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon
and Paris.