Under Surveillance: Spaces and Technologies of the Society of Control

Catalog description

"ID please." We are all too familiar with this perfunctory and ostensibly benign request: in airports and bars, in banks and post offices, at school or in the street, we are routinely asked to confirm that we are who we are, and that we belong there. The injunction to produce identification is but one of the many practices of control that condition modern life, i.e., life in a society haunted by the question of security and increasingly defined by ubiquitous apparatuses of surveillance. This seminar investigates in both historical and theoretical terms the spaces and technologies of such society. In exploring modern society's practices of control and its big-brotherish arsenal of surveillance technologies (closed-circuit cameras, remote sensors, face-recognition devices, global- positioning systems, data-gathering software and the like), we will look in particular at the ways in which the modern paradigm of security is transforming the spaces around us, from the domestic realm of the house to the public arena of the city. The seminar is ultimately a critical investigation of the impact that surveillance technologies and the paradigm of security have on architecture, urban space, and the very fabric of everyday life.