Surveillant Architectures

Could be truthful: Moscow cameras streamed false pictures

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Police have learned that CCTV cameras all across Moscow streamed prerecorded pictures, while the company servicing them received more than a million dollars in payments.
The company, StroyMontageService, has been accused of security fraud. Police have detained its director, Dmitry Kudryavtsev, who denies all charges saying the scandal is an attempt by his rivals to squeeze him out of the market.
The alleged fraud was uncovered during a routine check of Moscow CCTV cameras.
“From May to September 2009 CCTV cameras in several districts of Moscow streamed pre-recorded pictures instead of real-time video,” police spokeswoman Olga Dumalkina stated on Tuesday.

http://rt.com/Top_News/2010-01-13/cctv-cameras-fraud-moscow.html

DICTIONARY OF WAR

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http://dictionaryofwar.org/concepts/

DICTIONARY OF WAR is a collaborative platform for creating 100 concepts on the issue of war, to be invented, arranged and presented by scientists, artists, theorists and activists at four public, two-day events in Frankfurt, Munich, Graz and Berlin. The aim is to create key concepts that either play a significant role in current discussions of war, have so far been neglected, or have yet to be created.

DICTIONARY OF WAR is about polemics in various respects: It seeks confrontation with a reality that is characterised by the concealment of power relations the more that one talks about war and peace. But it is also about finding out to what extent war may function as an “analyzer of power relations” that constitutes current changes.

Changes that have been producing ever new wordings: The new war, post-modern war, global war, immanent war – all sorts of labels that indicate that the juridical model of sovereignty would seem to have had its day: war as an armed confrontation between sovereign nation states is a thing of the past.

While this still refers to conflict between different interest groups that are defined by the degree of their intensity and extension, unlike in the past war serves to regulate rather than destroy or renew existing power relations.

War is a “constitutive form of a new order” that no longer knows an inside or outside, that not only destroys but also produces life. In this new world order there is no difference between war and non-war: war is perpetual and everywhere.

So like so many other things these days, war too seems to be subject to a de- and re-regulation process that radically challenges old certainties and replaces them with new premises that shall not be questioned. DICTIONARY OF WAR sets out to oppose war and, at the same time, calls for “desertion” from a war of words in which facts are created with such force in their communication and propaganda that they can no longer be challenged.

The aim of DICTIONARY OF WAR is to make the creation or revaluation of concepts transparent into more or less open processes in which we can and need to intervene; at the same time, the aim is to develop models that redefine the creation of concepts on the basis not of interdisciplinary but rather undisciplined, not co-operative but rather collaborative processes.

“At least, when we create concepts, we are doing something.” The idea of DICTIONARY OF WAR, then, begins by referring to the theory of creating concepts proposed by Deleuze and Guattari: Concepts must be invented, created, produced; concepts refer to problems without which they would be meaningless. It is not about definitions, anecdotes, original opinions or entertainment, but rather about developing the tools with which to attain new ideas.

The concepts are created by conceptual personae, who are not identical to the author, philosopher, artist self, but rather testify to a third person beneath or beside. According to Deleuze and Guattari, “we do not do something by saying it but produce movement by thinking it, through the intermediary of a conceptual persona”.

DICTIONARY OF WAR is not a book in the proper sense. It is not about texts, deadlines or editing but about performativity. The concepts are introduced in alphabetical order by their conceptual personae in twenty-minute presentations.

There are no restrictions with regard to format. DICTIONARY OF WAR will be composed of lectures, choreographies, films, slide shows, readings or whatever format authors, actors, organisers and conceptual personae choose to use.

Finally, DICTIONARY OF WAR may well be a kind of war machine itself: the concepts are not intended to be deployed as means of control that regulate meanings, but which rather activate developments and processes and evoke events. “To draw speech to oneself and bring something incomprehensible into the world.” (Kleist)

SA + CfPP bibliography 09/10

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Surveillance Architecture:
/ Andreas Böhn, Christine Mielke (Hg.), Die zerstörte Stadt – Mediale Repräsentationen urbaner Räume von Troja bis SimCity

Vogelsang aftermath:
/ Hinderik M. Emrich, “Was Avatare und Engel uns sagen können…” Zur Philosophie des Unsichtbaren, 2006
/ Daniel Levy/Natan Sznaider, Erinnerung im globalen Zeitalter: Der Holocaust, 2001
/ Klaus Theweleit, Männerphantasien 1+2, Stroemfeld 1977 + 1978, Lizenzausgabe als TB bei Piper Verlag 2000
/Schenker, Christoph [Hrsg.], Kunst und Öffentlichkeit
/Schwierin, Marcel [Regie], Ewige Schönheit
/Virilio, Paul, Die Kunst des Schreckens
/Zielinski, Siegfried, Archäologie der Medien
/Steinacher, Gerald [Hrsg.], Faschismus und Architektur
/Lennon, John, Dark tourism
/Foucault, Michel, Die Heterotopien
/Colomina, Beatriz, Domesticity at war
/Chomsky, Noam, Interventionen
/Agamben, Giorgio, Die souveräne Macht und das nackte Leben
/Agamben, Giorgio, The coming community 2001

other references:
Caroline Jones
http://architecture.mit.edu/people/profiles/prjones.html

Caroline Bassett
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/mediastudies/profile24166.html

"A Cultural History of Surveillance" : working on a TimeLine

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1608 The earliest known working telescopes appeared, credited to Hans Lippershey and Zacharias Janssen, spectacle-makers in Middelburg, and Jacob Metius.

1609 Galileo used a refracting telescope as an instrument to observe stars, planets or moons. The name telescope was coined for Galileo’s instrument by a mathematician, Giovanni Demisiani, in 1611. The name was derived from the Greek tele = ‘far’ and skopein = ‘to look or see’.

1642 Pascal constructed a mechanical calculator capable of addition and subtraction, called Pascal’s calculator or the Pascaline

1785 Plan for Hotel-Dieu, Drawing by Bernard Poyet (Fonte: FERMAND, C.. Les hôpitaux et les cliniques: architectures de la santé, Paris, Le Moniteur, 1999, p. 20)

Bernard Poyet
1786 Plan for a Hospital, Drawing by Bernard Poyet

1791 General Idea of a Penitentiary Panopticon, Drawing by Willey Reveley after Jeremy Bentham

1791 Reveley after Bentham

1796-98 Alois Senefelder developed lithography

1837 Charles Babbage designed a fully programmable mechanical computer he called The Analytical Engine

1837 1st telegraph by Samuel F. B. Morse

1840 Projet de pénitencier, Drawing by Harou Romain

1840 Romain

1878 1st phonograph, patented by T.A.Edison, invented by Charles Cros

1887 Emil Berliner invented and patented the grammophone

1889 Herman Hollerith developed and patented a punched card data processing technology for 1890 US Census and founded the Tabulating Machine Company,  one of the three companies that merged to form Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation, later renamed IBM

1900 Reginald Fessenden successfully transmitted his speech over a distance of about one mile, which appears to have been the 1st audio radio transmission.

1927 Russian inventor Léon Theremin developed a mirror drum-based television system which used interlacing to achieve an image resolution of 100 lines.

1927 Herbert E. Ives of Bell Labs transmitted moving images from a 50-aperture disk producing 16 frames per minute over a cable from Washington, DC to New York City. Ives used viewing screens as large as 24 by 30 inches.

1927 Fritz Lang directed Metropolis (screenplay written 1924)

1929 Dziga Vertov edited the movie Man with a Movie Camera

1929 Vertov

1932 Aldous Huxley published Brave New World

1935-1944 On air period of the German TV Station Paul Nipkow. Its headquarters were in Berlin. It was named after Paul Nipkow, the inventor of the Nipkow disk

1936 Walter Benjamin published The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

1939 John Cage composed Imaginary Landscape No. 1

1941 Konrad Zuse developed Z3, the first working machine featuring binary arithmetic, including floating point arithmetic and a measure of programmability. In 1998 the Z3 was proved to be Turing complete, therefore being the world’s first operational computer.

1942 Siemens installed first CCTV for the monitoring Test Stand VII of A4-skyrockets (in Peenemünde)

1945 Vannevar Bush published in Journal The Atlantic Monthly the article  As We May Think. He is thinking about a system called Memex (for Memory Extender) as an electronic exstention of human memory and knowledge. A prototype both of PC and hypertext.

1946 Peter Goldmark (CBS) demonstrated his color television system. His system produced color pictures by having a red-blue-green wheel spin in front of a cathode ray tube.

1949 This mechanical means of producing a color picture (by Peter Goldmark) was used to broadcast medical procedures from Pennsylvania and Atlantic City hospitals. In Atlantic City, viewers could come to the convention center to see broadcasts of operations. Reports from the time noted that the realism of seeing surgery in color caused more than a few viewers to faint.

1951 The first video tape recorder (VTR) captured live images from television cameras by converting the information into electrical impulses and saving the information onto magnetic tape1956 Ampex sold the first VTR for $50,000

1957 Sputnik launch, 1st artificial satellite

1958-1980 Developement and activity of SAGE, Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:SAGE_control_room.png (This image is a work of a U.S. Air Force Airman or employee, taken or made during the course of the person’s official duties. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the image is)

1950-80ies US SAGE

1961 first meteorological satellites launched by the USA

1963 Philips presented first audio cassette recorder

1963 Nam Jun Paik exhibit 13 TV monitors at EXPosition of Music ELetronic television at Galerie Parnass Wuppertal

1964 Marshall McLuhan published Understanding Media

1963-65 Ted Nelson (Projekt Xanadu) coined and published the term hypertext

1969 Vito Acconci produced Following Piece in New York

1969 Following Piece

1969 US Defence and its Advanced Research Project Agency developed ARPANET

1969 Sony introduced a prototype for the first widespread video cassette, the 3/4″ composite U-matic system, which Sony introduced commercially in 1971 after working out industry standards with other manufacturers. Sony later refined it to Broadcast Video U-matic or BVU

1969-70 Bruce Nauman developed the installation Live-Taped Video Corridor (http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/live-taped-video-corridor/)

1969-70 Bruce Nauman produced Video Surveillance Piece / Public Room, Private Room

1969-70 Bruce Nauman’s Video Surveillance Piece

1970 William S. Burroughs published The Electronic Revolution (In both The Electronic Revolution and The Job (1970), Burroughs mapped strategies for the use of tape recorders as instruments of psychic terrorism); (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Electronic_Revolution)

1970 Dan Graham staged TV Camera / Monitor Performance at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax

1971 The first Video Cassette Recorder were sold by Sony

1971 Jochen Gerz presented IBM Colour Ribbon: Unlike the videotape, the typewriter ribbon directly and visibly shows the information transferred to it. As a waste product, it embodies mechanical text production as a process in time (http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/ibm-farbband/)

1971 Gerz

1973 Peter Weibel installed Observation of the Observation: Uncertainty

1973 GPS program Joint Program Office is started

1974 Francis Ford Coppola directed the movie The Conversation

1974 Coppola

1975 Michel Foucault published Surveiller et punir

1976 Dara Birnbaum edited Technology / Transformation: Wonder Woman

1976 Wonder Woman

1976 VHS video format introduced by JVC

1977 Dan Graham staged Performer/Audience/Mirror

1978 1st GPS satellite launched

1978 Antonio Muntadas produced the video On Subjectivity (About TV)

1978 Antonio Muntadas

1979 Sony and Philips developed toghether the Compact Disk CD

1979 first edition of ars electronica festival, Linz, austria

1981 Sophie Calle acted The Shadow : «In April 1981, at my request, my mother went to a detetctive agency. She hired them to follow me, to report my daily activities, and to proviede photographic evidence of my existence.» In The Shadow she sets the detective’s photographic account against her own observations: the observer becomes the observed. The viewer is the third witness. This search for her own identity fails to reveal a clear picture here, too. Sophie Calle’s face does not appear in any of the pictures: her figure emerges like a shadow throughout the detective’s photographs. (http://www.hausderkunst.de/englisch/aus/daten_pages/0008.html)

1981 Sophie Calle’s The Shadow

1982 Ridley Scott directed Blude Runner

1982 David Rokeby started to develope Very Nervous System, his first major interactive work using video cameras, image processors, computers, synthesizers and a sound system to create a space in which the movements of one’s body create sound and/or music.

1983 Michael Klier directed/edited the movie Der Riese, an unconventionally constructed essay video on video surveillance in public space

1983 Der Riese

1984 1st Macintosh 128k presented

1985 Julia Scher‘s 1st reference to surveillance Hardley Feel It Going In (painting with surveillance system)

1986 Julia Scher‘s 1st Bubble Memory device by Hitachi Softly Tapping The Wires (interactive installation)

1991 Julia Scher presenting DDD (Danger Dirty Data)

1998 Surveillance Camera Players staged George Orwell’s 1984. Excerpt of the storyboard of Art Toad’s adaptation of George Orwell’s famous anti-utopian play 1984 took place on the platform of a New York subway station in November 1998. www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/george-orwells-1984

1998 Surveillance Camera Players

2007 Nino Leitner directed Every Step You Take, a CCTV surveillance documentary (everystepyoutake.org)

** to add:

* deutsche Romantik / Landschaften

* Humanismus

* datafiles and computer science

* practies of social authority : examples from asia, south america

* CCTV 1st references in USA and Sowiet Union

* the past happening in the present (show the shift) -> explosion of media -> tube-technology

* shift from tape to hard-drive

* capture & control

* unframed (before Acconci)

*all the things send to space (library)

* Irit Batsy

* Apocalypse (result of no watching) -> look for a work or position dealing with apocalypse (Lars von Trier? Michael Haneke?)

* seeing not seeing: millions of art works: which subcategory for explosiotion? A list of places where art is shown! (after date with Jason Simon)

* data desaster

* timeline compiled by arte-e-parte, 2008