Surveillant Architectures

Women under Surveillance Symposium

Please scroll down for English version

Symposium
2. & 3. Dezember 2015
Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln
Filzengraben 2, 50676 Köln

http://wus.khm.de

 

Das zweitägige Symposium Women under Surveillance tritt vermeintlich neutralen Definitionen von Überwachung entgegen. Es führt einen künstlerischen und interdisziplinären Dialog über Überwachung im Digitalzeitalter. Dieses Bezugsfeld wird dabei mit einem besonderen Fokus auf dessen Bedeutung für Frauen diskutiert.

Das Symposium bringt Vorträge, Performances, Installationen und Filmscreenings zusammen, die sich mit Themen wie Datensammlung oder Kontrollobsessionen im Namen der Sicherheit auseinandersetzen.

Ziel ist die reine Diskussion, ob exzessive Überwachung notwendig und zielführend ist angesichts einer zunehmend unsichereren Welt, hinter sich zu lassen und stattdessen anhand geschlechtsspezifischer historischer Überwachungskomplexe, wie beispielsweise der Regulierung der Autonomie der Fortpflanzung und der Sexualität, die Frage zu stellen, wer von wem beobachtet wird, wie, warum und zu welchen Kosten?

 

Konzeption und Organisation: Prof. Julia Scher, Christian Sievers, Dieuwke Boersma und die Surveillant Architectures Group an der Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln. Filmprogramm kuratiert von Christa Pfafferott. Design von Stephanie Glauber.

Im Rahmen des Symposiums präsentiert GLASMOOG – Raum für Kunst & Diskurs an der Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln „Tektite Revisited“, ein Ausstellungs- und Filmprojekt der Filmemacherin Meghan O’Hara und des Kunsthistorikers James Merle Thomas.

 

Referenten / Performer:
bankleer (KünstlerInnengruppe, Berlin)
chicks on speed (KünstlerInnengruppe, Köln/Hamburg)
Sophie Maintigneux (Bildgestalterin, Professorin für Bildgestaltung, KHM)
Karin Michalski (Vertretungsprofessorin für Kunst- und Medienwissenschaften/Gender, KHM)
Lívia Nolasco-Rozsas (Kuratorin, ZKM Karlsruhe)
Meghan O’Hara (Filmemacherin, California State University, Monterey Bay, Seaside, CA) & James Merle Thomas (Kunsthistoriker und Kurator, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA)
Christa Pfafferott (Autorin und Regisseurin, Hamburg)
Angela Richter (Regisseurin, Schauspiel Köln)
Katrin Schlösser (Filmproduzentin, Professorin für kreative Film- und Fernsehproduktion, KHM)
Dirk Schulz (GeStiK – Gender Studies, Universität zu Köln)
Mark von Schlegell (Autor und Kulturtheoretiker, Köln)
Mi You (Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin, Kunst- und Medienwissenschaften, KHM)
und Studierende der KHM

 

 

 

The two-day symposium Women under Surveillance counters neutral definitions of surveillance to establish a platform for artistic and interdisciplinary dialogue along the lines of women and surveillance in our digital age.

Lectures, performances, installations and film screenings go deeper into the critical means of collecting data and monitoring processes in the name of security and the general interest of the “public”.

The symposium aims to move beyond the discussion whether excessive surveillance is a necessary and productive practice in an increasingly insecure world.

Rather, in taking the gendered history of surveillance strategies as its starting point—such as the regulation of women’s productive autonomy and sexuality—the symposium engages artistically and critically with questions as: “Who is being watched by whom, how, why and at what expense?”

 

Konzeption und Organisation: Prof. Julia Scher, Christian Sievers, Dieuwke Boersma and the Surveillant Architectures Group at Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Filmprogram curated by Christa Pfafferott. Design by Stephanie Glauber.

As part of the symposium, GLASMOOG – Raum für Kunst & Diskurs at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne presents “Tektite Revisited”– an exhibition and film project by filmmaker Meghan O’Hara and art historian James Merle Thomas.

 

Speakers & Performers:
bankleer (artist group, Berlin)
chicks on speed (artist group, Cologne/Hamburg)
Karin Michalski (professor for art and media studies/gender, KHM)
Lívia Nolasco-Rozsas (curator, ZKM Karlsruhe)
Meghan O’Hara (filmmaker, California State University, Monterey Bay, Seaside, CA)
& James Merle Thomas (art historian and curator, University of Southern California,
Los Angeles, CA)
Sophie Maintigneux (cinematographer, professor for artistic cinematography, KHM)
Christa Pfafferott (author and film director, Hamburg)
Angela Richter (director, Schauspiel Köln)
Katrin Schlösser (film producer, professor for creative film and TV production, KHM)
Dirk Schulz (GeStiK – Gender Studies in Cologne, University of Cologne)
Mark von Schlegell (author and theorist, Cologne)
Mi You (assistant researcher, art and media studies, KHM)
and students of the KHM

Women_under_Surveillance_invite

SAG shared calendar with all seminar events, constantly updated.

We  have a shared calendar with all seminar dates. Maintained by Christian and Julia in a collaborative effort, this calendar will always hold the latest info about seminar events, and some more stuff we think is relevant to the group.

You can see the calendar in a web page here.

Another way to access it is to subscribe to it with your favorite calendaring application.

To do that, select and copy this address:
https://kalender.khm.de/public.php/sag/SAG-Public-Events/
Then go to e.g. Calendar.app and choose Calendar -> Subscribe (-> Abonnieren on German systems). Paste the entire address including the https://.
Accept and trust the security certificate, and confirm with your computer password.

Make sure to switch ‘Auto-Update’ on (set it to an hour or so).

The procedure is similar on smart phones and with other calendaring apps. Happy to help if you need setting it up!

Gendered surveillance

Main-Spying

When teacher Catharine Higginson, 45, discovered by accident that her husband James, 42, had installed an app on her phone which allows him to track her movements, read her texts and even listen to her conversations she didn’t plan to divorce him as her friends urged, for being creepy and intrusive.
Instead, the mum of three from Dorking, Surrey, says it makes her feel loved and safe

This is beyond creepy (via) . Make sure you get the undertones about the power structures at play here. It reads like an advert for personal tracking apps.

It also completely ignores the huge problem of women being utterly exposed to stalkers through spyware just like the one celebrated in that article. Women (it’s always women) seeking shelter from stalkers now routinely have to go through a digital quarantine, to make sure they’re really safe. See Surveillance Begins at Home and Digital Detox At The Shelter.

Another example why the NSA’s undermining of security standards is so harmful. Everyone’s mobile phones are unsafe by design. All of them have backdoors for law enforcement built in, but it’s impossible to restrict the use of those to only the ‘good guys’. As a result, creeps and criminals exploit them, too. This isn’t just about privacy, it’s about being safe from physical harm. People get killed because of this.

All Cameras Are Police Cameras

All Cameras Are Police Cameras
Great essay by James Bridle, about the advances in locking down public space.

Surveillance images are all “before” images, in the sense of “before and after”. The “after” might be anything: an earthquake, a riot, a protest, a war. Any system reliant on flow, which is all networks from vehicle traffic to commercial supply to video feeds to the internet itself, view disruptions within the same negative moral context. Surveillance images attain the status of evidence for unknown crimes the moment they are created, and merely await the identification of the moment they were created for. Automated imagery criminalises its subject.

Read on for what happened just walking down the streets of London documenting security cameras.

http://shorttermmemoryloss.com/nor/

I wonder what happened to the imagery here? Strangely drained of colour and, presumably, all meta data.

"Citizen Four" next week

As we’re going to go to Dortmund to see “Citizen Four” next week, here are some hand picked articles about the background to the film and its making.

Laura Poitras on Filming Edward Snowden and Her New Documentary About Him, Citizenfour – in Vogue Magazine! A reminder of how far this story has infected everyone’s minds now http://www.vogue.com/2865709/laura-poitras-edward-snowden-documentary-citzenfour

Berlin’s digital exiles: where tech activists go to escape the NSA http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/09/berlins-digital-exiles-tech-activists-escape-nsa I sent this to some British friends to try and explain why I’m so upset.

Plus an older interview with Constanze Kurz, about the Berlin exile scene. By Jörg Heiser. http://frieze-magazin.de/archiv/kolumnen/spurlos-verbunden/?lang=en (also available auf deutsch http://frieze-magazin.de/archiv/kolumnen/spurlos-verbunden/ )

 

Semesterapparat for Women under Surveillance

Semesterapparat
Women under Surveillance
KHM WS 2014/15

Exposed. voyeurism, surveillance and the camera
These selected essays:
1. Looking Out, Looking In, Voyeurism and its affinities from the beginning of photography, Sandra S. Phillips

3. Voyeurism and Desire, Sandra S. Phillips

4. Celebrity and the Public Gaze, Sandra S. Phillips

5. Surveillance, Sandra S. Phillips

6. Up Periscope! Photography and the surreptitious image
Simon Baker

9. Dare To Be Famous, Self-Exploitation and the Camera, Richard B. Woodward

10. From Observation to Surveillance, Marta Gili

Rosalind Krauss
Essay: Cindy Sherman: Untitled
Especially the first two chapters, about the film stills and the horizontals. All of it is great. Available in the original English and in German.

CTRL [Space]: Rhetorics of Surveillance, from Bentham to Big Brother, Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Frohne, and Peter Weibel, ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002)
All the essays are worth a read but start with these two essays:
Victor Burgin, “Jenni’s Room”, 228-235

Peter Weibel, “Pleasure and the Panoptic Principle”, 207-223

Beatriz Colomina: Sexuality & space
Essay by Beatriz Colomina: The Split Wall, Domestic Voyeurism,
p. 72-128