The Macula have a new work and this time instead of just mapping architectural details they have made them into a virtual instrument. Visitors can play music with the chapel by using laser pointers to trigger various sounds that are linked to each element.

Archifon is a big interactive virtual musical instrument originally made for the Olomouc Baroque de-baptized chapel. Architectonical objects are re-interpreted by virtual visual elements via projection and sound. It is possible by mapping the virtual surface on the chapel’s interior. Up to ten visitors at a time can interact with the Archifon through the laser pointers. By pointing on any of more than 100 elements different audiovisual actions are initiated.

The Macula have a new work and this time instead of just mapping architectural details they have made them into a virtual instrument. Visitors can play music with the chapel by using laser pointers to trigger various sounds that are linked to each element.

Archifon is a big interactive virtual musical instrument originally made for the Olomouc Baroque de-baptized chapel. Architectonical objects are re-interpreted by virtual visual elements via projection and sound. It is possible by mapping the virtual surface on the chapel’s interior. Up to ten visitors at a time can interact with the Archifon through the laser pointers. By pointing on any of more than 100 elements different audiovisual actions are initiated.

The City of Paris, viagra order
France just launched a project called ParisData that supplies raw data for all sorts of city services: open, advice
free, shop
and to the public. The data is visualized on a map and available as an ODb (open database) license enabling it to be used in all sorts of innovative ways by researchers and analysts. This is a victory for the Open Data movement, netting a large metropolis into their ongoing campaign of governmental transparency through open access to city data. The site has already drawn enough hits to temporarily crash the server. If you cannot get it to load, you might as well take a look at Paris’ city website, simulataneously gaudy and tech savvy for a stodgy government website.

There is also an interesting heat map of popular spots in Paris using a layer on Google Maps API.

Via Business Insider

SFMOMA’s Exposed show was conceptualized and curated by Simon Baker of the Tate Modern and Sandra S. Phillips, price SFMOMA’s senior photography curator. According to Phillips, sick “Exposed poses compelling and urgent questions about who is looking at whom, approved and why.” The show is roughly organized around five themes: the unseen photographer, celebrity, voyeurism/desire, witnessing violence, and surveillance. “Works by major artists, will be presented alongside photographs made by amateurs, professional journalists, and governmental agencies, exploring the larger cultural significance of voyeurism and surveillance technology.” The description leads one to believe that Exposed will bring some serious and pressing dialogue into a public forum, however the result is mixed and the audience is presented with more of a historical survey of photography than its impact on wider social questions.

Historically speaking, the possibility of recording images without the subject’s knowledge is preceded only by the invention of a recording technology itself. Cameras were immediately deployed to take the images of unwilling or unaware people. When photography enthusiasts quickly encountered or perceived resistance to image taking, they invented ways to make hidden cameras. The Unseen Photographer features a selection of early unpermitted photographs i.e. those taken without the knowledge or consent of the subjects, along with a number of hidden “spy” cameras and devices from these early days. Many of the photographers were the big names of early twentieth century photography—Alfred Steiglitz and Walker Evans notably.

While not wholly uncritical of the “taking” of people’s images, the underlying gaze behind the images highlight the serious class divisions between the subjects and the photographers. Walker Evans stated that he wanted to capture people without masks, in their most unguarded state. This is evident in many of his photographs in his subway series and in the main street scenes in the South. The unguarded image afforded by the subjects yields a striking result in the photographs, however this fascination seemed to have an implicit class-component—the Other-ness of poverty captured and interpreted by the well-to-do. The class-basis of this early photography is evident in all the work in the unseen photographer, and is an observation that goes unmentioned in the show’s written materials

The fascination with Otherness as seen through the lens extends easily to sexuality. The voyeuristic desire that pries into the sex lives of strangers is on display to interrogate. The assembled pieces about voyeurism, desire, the visuality of sex and its accidental or intentional observation appear together without a sense of cohesion. The voyeurism section of Exposed features a large number of women artists and it seems implicitly assumed that the artists are there to critique the male gaze. The result is anything but uniform. The ways of seeing are varied: from cold and clinical, to desiring, to journalistic record and the totally ambiguous—there is no one way of seeing sex or visualizing voyeuristic desire.

Merry Alpern’s images from Dirty Windows (1994) are a strong example of the uncomfortable, illicit seeing of the sex act. She trained her camera on the windows of a “short-stay hotel” and captured the action therein. Her relationship to her subjects is no different than Walker Evans as her goal is to get the subjects unmasked and unaware, again assuming that this makes them more honest subjects of her camera. Her work interestingly brings up the question of labor, the subject of the series are invariably on-the-job working girls. Similarly, Susan Meiselas’ series Carnival Strippers (1971) seeks to document the work lives of strippers working at the carnival. The difference is that her presence is known rather than a mysterious unknown gaze of the voyeur as in Alpern’s work.

Kohei Yoshiyuki’s The Park (1971) shows people seeking public sex in a park and the crowds of viewers crawling in the bushes with them. These infra-red photographs watching the watchers makes for a compelling image, and opens a potentially interesting discussion of public sex and surveillance. Would the act of being photographed/observed while watching someone else’s sex act be an additional turn-on or is the anonymity of the peeping-tom its only appeal? There is an ambivalent relationship of subject/viewer in the images in this section: they are neither inherently erotic nor prurient or shocking. The relation between subject and photographer is often cold and mechanical. It is hard to imagine voyeurism without passion, that necessary albeit unknown connection between subject and viewer. Does a photograph taken by a computer have a desire to speak of? Is autonomous surveillance a voyeuristic practice or does voyeurism take intention?

Like the voyeurism of public sex and of peering into the lives of others, the cult of celebrity is fueled by the act of seeing. The history of paparazzi is a sordid history of creating scenes—hunting celebrities like animals to capture their image. Legendary stories and conflicts between celebrities and paparazzi are often more interesting then the photographs that result from these encounters. Paparazzi photographs are usually hurried, poorly lit objects rather than highly aesthetic or technical masterpieces. The usual result of paparazzi intrusions is violence—its most disgusting moment being the death of Princess Diana in a paparazzi-led car-chase. The form that celebrity culture takes is a result of our visual media culture. With the internet, the insatiable thirst for fame appears in strange ways—celebrity sex tapes, Gawker.com, and a myriad of other manifestations.

Most of the aspects that make celebrity culture interesting in this context are ignored and remain unaddressed in Exposed, instead opting for an uninspired historical selection of celebrity photos. Even with work by WeeGee and Richard Avedon, the paparazzi portion of the show feels lacking. One exception is the work of Allison Jackson. Shot in the style of paparazzi but too perfect to be real: her photographs The Queen plays with her Corgis and Jack (Nicholson) Road Rage assaulting a photographer with a golf club. Both are fakes—staged confrontations with imposter celebrities. In her work there is both a critique of celebrity and a critique of the celebrity hunters. Like that of celebrity hunters—war and crime photographers seek to capture those elusive events that shock, provoke, horrify or fascinate.

Witnessing Violence was paired with the Paparazzi section in the flow of the exhibition featuring scenes of violence. This small section felt inappropriate for a number of reasons. The idea of witnessing violence as a mode-of-seeing could easily fit into the framework of the show. There are plenty of artists who deal with witnessing as a core aspect of their work. The choice of photographs—the decades old war photography on the wall does not guarantee its success in creating the intended dialogue. A show with this material should confront the fact that the US is currently at war. The horror of these images is dulled by its historical status instead of contemporary atrocities. There has been an ongoing debate as to if images of violence desensitize people to violence or whether the opposite is true—that is by facing the horror we become more averse to it and more sensitive and affected by what we see. There are a couple of other reasons that Witnessing Violence does not seem to fit. Firstly, nearly all of work presented was documentary/journalistic photography by people who are not considered artists or consider their work artistic practice. Secondly, there are a number of “photographer unknown” pieces so there is no real way to determine the intent of the creator and hence the “way of seeing” the work. Thirdly, most of the works seemed like War/Gore Porn, not artistic in any good sense and not created with that intent. The other element that needs exposing is in the uncritical use of tortured brown bodies. Most, if not all of the war photos on the wall were of non-Europeans creating, in effect further exoticization and separation from subject and audience.

This is not part of the dialogue that the Exposed show presents. Again the curators omit the exact details and talking points that would make this exhibition thought-provoking rather than an ambiguous collection of images. Of all the sections in Exposed, Witnessing Violence is the least connected to the rest and its omission would have improved the show’s cohesion.

Luckily what brings Exposed full circle is the largest section on Surveillance, showcasing the most variety, humor, thought-provoking, and conceptually rigorous works in the exhibition. Experimental geographer, researcher, and artist, Trevor Paglen has a varied body of work documenting the infrastructure of State surveillance and government black-ops. Two of his photographs are featured here: Chemical and Biological Weapons Proving Ground and The Other Night Sky. Proving Ground is an ethereal photo of a hidden military base, taken at an extreme distance using limit-telephotography appearing almost abstract from the great distance. The Other Night Sky is a striking shot of Half Dome at Yosemite National Park with the streaks of spy satellites visible in the sky. Both pieces are striking not only for Paglen’s technical ability but for his conceptual strength and thoroughly researched execution. Similarly striking is Simon Norfolk’s BBC World Service Atlantic Relay Station at English Bay (2003), a stunning photo of the spiders web of high frequency antenna. Both of these works make visible systems that we civilians are not supposed to see and the resulting photos are hauntingly beautiful, simultaneously specific and abstract.

Another note worthy piece is Triangle (1979) by Croatian artist, Sanja Ivekovic. Her piece (below) contains a short description of a performance along with five photographs. She describes the performance as going out to the balcony, reading, drinking whiskey, and making masturbation motions while General Tito parades through Zagreb. There are police both on the street and watching from the roofs of buildings. Her performance is for them. Her work illustrates the crucial difference between surveillance (observation from above) and sousveillance (observation from below). The difference between sous and sur is a matter of perspective (viewing angle) between the gaze of the authorities versus the gaze of the artist. Through her flippantly defiant performance, she is watching the watchers (the police) and sets herself up to be watched and questioned. There is a playful and resentful feeling that one gets from Ivekovic in this performance.

Sanja Ivekovi? “Triangle”
“The action takes place on the day of the President’s visit to the city, and it develops as intercommunication between three persons:
1. a person on the roof of a tall building across the street from my apartment;
2. myself, on the balcony;
3. a policeman in the street in front of the house.
Due to the cement construction of the balcony, only the person on the roof can actually see me and follow the action. My assumption is that this person has binoculars and a walkie-talkie apparatus. I notice that the policeman in the street also has a walkie-talkie.
The action begins when I walk out onto the balcony and sit on a chair, I sip whiskey, read a book, and make gestures as if I perform masturbation. After a period of time, the policeman rings my doorbell and orders the “persons and objects are to be removed from the balcony.”
(source: Sanja Ivekovi?, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb 1998, S. 27.)

Yoko Ono and John Lennon Film no 6. Rape (1969) and Vito Acconci’s Following(1969) are two classic performance pieces about stalking. In Rape Ono and Lennon hired a film crew to intrude upon a random woman for a day and record her reactions. Following involved Acconci picking out a random person to follow each day for a month, documented it, and sent the resulting document to a various critics and friends.

In the lobby of the museum is a computer-controlled spotlight. The project called Access (2003) created by Marie Sester turned surveillance into an interactive game, allowing a person at the control panel to target and follow people in the lobby with the light. The fun of this piece is observing people’s reactions to the light and seeing if the catch that it is following them. There is a strange pleasure in being the unseen observer at the control panel.

In 2001 the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany curated a show called ctrl[space] about surveillance. The core of pieces in Exposed were also part of ctrl[space] including Acconci, Nauman, Merry Alpern, Bureau of Inverse Technology, and others. The difference between the two shows lies in the clearer and more limited focus on surveillance by the ZKM versus the diffuse and messy collection of modes-of-seeing things illicitly, presented by the SFMOMA/Tate collaboration.

Another area in where Exposed falls short is that it feels like a dated survey of semi-related material then a document of current artistic practices on the subject. Surveillance is increasingly a central part of our everyday lives and is becoming a major topic in the arts. The urgency that Phillips speaks of in the press releases is not present in the show. The bulk of the work comes from before the nineteen-nineties. This is especially glaring in the witness and paparazzi sections where little of the work reflects its relevance to the contemporary moment.

Notably absent in Exposed was the work of Critical Art Ensemble, the Surveillance Camera Players, and more recently, Michael Wolf. Wolf’s large format photographs of people in their offices and tower blocks are intimate and uncanny, giving viewers a rarely seen perspective and violating ones assumed personal privacy. CAE and the Players emerged in the mid-1990’s specifically as a political critique of the control society. These artists explicitly address surveillance’s impact in their writing and objects and would have contributed significantly.

There are a number of laudable elements to Exposed, however, the unevenness of the message and the inclusion of the Witnessing Violence section removes the chance of cohesion. The blurring of fine artist, amateurs, and photojournalists creates an inconsistency of concept and execution. If the goal was to speak broadly of the culture of seeing, then it fails precisely for this breadth. Instead of a broad wide-ranging dialogue, viewers are left with a diffuse and ambiguous message about witnessing illicit events and the public nature of seeing. It is arguably not the role of the museum to spoon-feed ideas or a particular ideological perspective to viewers, however in this particular case the wall text and program materials did not present enough conceptual frameworks to bring the material together and focus a dialogue.

Exposed misses out on lessons learned over the past decade and the uniqueness of our contemporary moment. Interesting questions that come from a cultural analysis of surveillance are only now starting to get interrogated with frequency. This is partially reflected in the changing nature of technology and our relationship with it. With ubiquitous computing and ubiquitous cameras comes ubiquitous surveillance. Younger generations have adapted to always been watched, always performing for an unseen camera. The nature of seeing and being seen has become a generalized and participatory surveillance. Has the transgression of image-taking has been normalized? Has it become the norm to act like you are always being watched or even posing for ones viewers? Crucial questions are being asked and artists offer interesting responses. The current backlash against body scanners at airports has been all over the news and artists are already responding. If only the curators could have incorporated more recent work instead of taking the path of least resistance in choosing work. The lack of clear choices or reasoning as to selection criteria for the show and the vague statements about the subject lead the viewers to a passive stance in regard to what should be controversial and though provoking material. SFMOMA missed a real opportunity to engage the public in a crucial and fascinating dialogue.

Exposed is on display at SFMOMA until April 17th, 2011 and then moving to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

SFMOMA’s Exposed show was conceptualized and curated by Simon Baker of the Tate Modern and Sandra S. Phillips, price SFMOMA’s senior photography curator. According to Phillips, sick “Exposed poses compelling and urgent questions about who is looking at whom, approved and why.” The show is roughly organized around five themes: the unseen photographer, celebrity, voyeurism/desire, witnessing violence, and surveillance. “Works by major artists, will be presented alongside photographs made by amateurs, professional journalists, and governmental agencies, exploring the larger cultural significance of voyeurism and surveillance technology.” The description leads one to believe that Exposed will bring some serious and pressing dialogue into a public forum, however the result is mixed and the audience is presented with more of a historical survey of photography than its impact on wider social questions.

Historically speaking, the possibility of recording images without the subject’s knowledge is preceded only by the invention of a recording technology itself. Cameras were immediately deployed to take the images of unwilling or unaware people. When photography enthusiasts quickly encountered or perceived resistance to image taking, they invented ways to make hidden cameras. The Unseen Photographer features a selection of early unpermitted photographs i.e. those taken without the knowledge or consent of the subjects, along with a number of hidden “spy” cameras and devices from these early days. Many of the photographers were the big names of early twentieth century photography—Alfred Steiglitz and Walker Evans notably.

While not wholly uncritical of the “taking” of people’s images, the underlying gaze behind the images highlight the serious class divisions between the subjects and the photographers. Walker Evans stated that he wanted to capture people without masks, in their most unguarded state. This is evident in many of his photographs in his subway series and in the main street scenes in the South. The unguarded image afforded by the subjects yields a striking result in the photographs, however this fascination seemed to have an implicit class-component—the Other-ness of poverty captured and interpreted by the well-to-do. The class-basis of this early photography is evident in all the work in the unseen photographer, and is an observation that goes unmentioned in the show’s written materials

The fascination with Otherness as seen through the lens extends easily to sexuality. The voyeuristic desire that pries into the sex lives of strangers is on display to interrogate. The assembled pieces about voyeurism, desire, the visuality of sex and its accidental or intentional observation appear together without a sense of cohesion. The voyeurism section of Exposed features a large number of women artists and it seems implicitly assumed that the artists are there to critique the male gaze. The result is anything but uniform. The ways of seeing are varied: from cold and clinical, to desiring, to journalistic record and the totally ambiguous—there is no one way of seeing sex or visualizing voyeuristic desire.

Merry Alpern’s images from Dirty Windows (1994) are a strong example of the uncomfortable, illicit seeing of the sex act. She trained her camera on the windows of a “short-stay hotel” and captured the action therein. Her relationship to her subjects is no different than Walker Evans as her goal is to get the subjects unmasked and unaware, again assuming that this makes them more honest subjects of her camera. Her work interestingly brings up the question of labor, the subject of the series are invariably on-the-job working girls. Similarly, Susan Meiselas’ series Carnival Strippers (1971) seeks to document the work lives of strippers working at the carnival. The difference is that her presence is known rather than a mysterious unknown gaze of the voyeur as in Alpern’s work.

Kohei Yoshiyuki’s The Park (1971) shows people seeking public sex in a park and the crowds of viewers crawling in the bushes with them. These infra-red photographs watching the watchers makes for a compelling image, and opens a potentially interesting discussion of public sex and surveillance. Would the act of being photographed/observed while watching someone else’s sex act be an additional turn-on or is the anonymity of the peeping-tom its only appeal? There is an ambivalent relationship of subject/viewer in the images in this section: they are neither inherently erotic nor prurient or shocking. The relation between subject and photographer is often cold and mechanical. It is hard to imagine voyeurism without passion, that necessary albeit unknown connection between subject and viewer. Does a photograph taken by a computer have a desire to speak of? Is autonomous surveillance a voyeuristic practice or does voyeurism take intention?

Like the voyeurism of public sex and of peering into the lives of others, the cult of celebrity is fueled by the act of seeing. The history of paparazzi is a sordid history of creating scenes—hunting celebrities like animals to capture their image. Legendary stories and conflicts between celebrities and paparazzi are often more interesting then the photographs that result from these encounters. Paparazzi photographs are usually hurried, poorly lit objects rather than highly aesthetic or technical masterpieces. The usual result of paparazzi intrusions is violence—its most disgusting moment being the death of Princess Diana in a paparazzi-led car-chase. The form that celebrity culture takes is a result of our visual media culture. With the internet, the insatiable thirst for fame appears in strange ways—celebrity sex tapes, Gawker.com, and a myriad of other manifestations.

Most of the aspects that make celebrity culture interesting in this context are ignored and remain unaddressed in Exposed, instead opting for an uninspired historical selection of celebrity photos. Even with work by WeeGee and Richard Avedon, the paparazzi portion of the show feels lacking. One exception is the work of Allison Jackson. Shot in the style of paparazzi but too perfect to be real: her photographs The Queen plays with her Corgis and Jack (Nicholson) Road Rage assaulting a photographer with a golf club. Both are fakes—staged confrontations with imposter celebrities. In her work there is both a critique of celebrity and a critique of the celebrity hunters. Like that of celebrity hunters—war and crime photographers seek to capture those elusive events that shock, provoke, horrify or fascinate.

Witnessing Violence was paired with the Paparazzi section in the flow of the exhibition featuring scenes of violence. This small section felt inappropriate for a number of reasons. The idea of witnessing violence as a mode-of-seeing could easily fit into the framework of the show. There are plenty of artists who deal with witnessing as a core aspect of their work. The choice of photographs—the decades old war photography on the wall does not guarantee its success in creating the intended dialogue. A show with this material should confront the fact that the US is currently at war. The horror of these images is dulled by its historical status instead of contemporary atrocities. There has been an ongoing debate as to if images of violence desensitize people to violence or whether the opposite is true—that is by facing the horror we become more averse to it and more sensitive and affected by what we see. There are a couple of other reasons that Witnessing Violence does not seem to fit. Firstly, nearly all of work presented was documentary/journalistic photography by people who are not considered artists or consider their work artistic practice. Secondly, there are a number of “photographer unknown” pieces so there is no real way to determine the intent of the creator and hence the “way of seeing” the work. Thirdly, most of the works seemed like War/Gore Porn, not artistic in any good sense and not created with that intent. The other element that needs exposing is in the uncritical use of tortured brown bodies. Most, if not all of the war photos on the wall were of non-Europeans creating, in effect further exoticization and separation from subject and audience.

This is not part of the dialogue that the Exposed show presents. Again the curators omit the exact details and talking points that would make this exhibition thought-provoking rather than an ambiguous collection of images. Of all the sections in Exposed, Witnessing Violence is the least connected to the rest and its omission would have improved the show’s cohesion.

Luckily what brings Exposed full circle is the largest section on Surveillance, showcasing the most variety, humor, thought-provoking, and conceptually rigorous works in the exhibition. Experimental geographer, researcher, and artist, Trevor Paglen has a varied body of work documenting the infrastructure of State surveillance and government black-ops. Two of his photographs are featured here: Chemical and Biological Weapons Proving Ground and The Other Night Sky. Proving Ground is an ethereal photo of a hidden military base, taken at an extreme distance using limit-telephotography appearing almost abstract from the great distance. The Other Night Sky is a striking shot of Half Dome at Yosemite National Park with the streaks of spy satellites visible in the sky. Both pieces are striking not only for Paglen’s technical ability but for his conceptual strength and thoroughly researched execution. Similarly striking is Simon Norfolk’s BBC World Service Atlantic Relay Station at English Bay (2003), a stunning photo of the spiders web of high frequency antenna. Both of these works make visible systems that we civilians are not supposed to see and the resulting photos are hauntingly beautiful, simultaneously specific and abstract.

Another note worthy piece is Triangle (1979) by Croatian artist, Sanja Ivekovic. Her piece (below) contains a short description of a performance along with five photographs. She describes the performance as going out to the balcony, reading, drinking whiskey, and making masturbation motions while General Tito parades through Zagreb. There are police both on the street and watching from the roofs of buildings. Her performance is for them. Her work illustrates the crucial difference between surveillance (observation from above) and sousveillance (observation from below). The difference between sous and sur is a matter of perspective (viewing angle) between the gaze of the authorities versus the gaze of the artist. Through her flippantly defiant performance, she is watching the watchers (the police) and sets herself up to be watched and questioned. There is a playful and resentful feeling that one gets from Ivekovic in this performance.

Sanja Ivekovi? “Triangle”
“The action takes place on the day of the President’s visit to the city, and it develops as intercommunication between three persons:
1. a person on the roof of a tall building across the street from my apartment;
2. myself, on the balcony;
3. a policeman in the street in front of the house.
Due to the cement construction of the balcony, only the person on the roof can actually see me and follow the action. My assumption is that this person has binoculars and a walkie-talkie apparatus. I notice that the policeman in the street also has a walkie-talkie.
The action begins when I walk out onto the balcony and sit on a chair, I sip whiskey, read a book, and make gestures as if I perform masturbation. After a period of time, the policeman rings my doorbell and orders the “persons and objects are to be removed from the balcony.”
(source: Sanja Ivekovi?, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb 1998, S. 27.)

Yoko Ono and John Lennon Film no 6. Rape (1969) and Vito Acconci’s Following(1969) are two classic performance pieces about stalking. In Rape Ono and Lennon hired a film crew to intrude upon a random woman for a day and record her reactions. Following involved Acconci picking out a random person to follow each day for a month, documented it, and sent the resulting document to a various critics and friends.

In the lobby of the museum is a computer-controlled spotlight. The project called Access (2003) created by Marie Sester turned surveillance into an interactive game, allowing a person at the control panel to target and follow people in the lobby with the light. The fun of this piece is observing people’s reactions to the light and seeing if the catch that it is following them. There is a strange pleasure in being the unseen observer at the control panel.

In 2001 the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany curated a show called ctrl[space] about surveillance. The core of pieces in Exposed were also part of ctrl[space] including Acconci, Nauman, Merry Alpern, Bureau of Inverse Technology, and others. The difference between the two shows lies in the clearer and more limited focus on surveillance by the ZKM versus the diffuse and messy collection of modes-of-seeing things illicitly, presented by the SFMOMA/Tate collaboration.

Another area in where Exposed falls short is that it feels like a dated survey of semi-related material then a document of current artistic practices on the subject. Surveillance is increasingly a central part of our everyday lives and is becoming a major topic in the arts. The urgency that Phillips speaks of in the press releases is not present in the show. The bulk of the work comes from before the nineteen-nineties. This is especially glaring in the witness and paparazzi sections where little of the work reflects its relevance to the contemporary moment.

Notably absent in Exposed was the work of Critical Art Ensemble, the Surveillance Camera Players, and more recently, Michael Wolf. Wolf’s large format photographs of people in their offices and tower blocks are intimate and uncanny, giving viewers a rarely seen perspective and violating ones assumed personal privacy. CAE and the Players emerged in the mid-1990’s specifically as a political critique of the control society. These artists explicitly address surveillance’s impact in their writing and objects and would have contributed significantly.

There are a number of laudable elements to Exposed, however, the unevenness of the message and the inclusion of the Witnessing Violence section removes the chance of cohesion. The blurring of fine artist, amateurs, and photojournalists creates an inconsistency of concept and execution. If the goal was to speak broadly of the culture of seeing, then it fails precisely for this breadth. Instead of a broad wide-ranging dialogue, viewers are left with a diffuse and ambiguous message about witnessing illicit events and the public nature of seeing. It is arguably not the role of the museum to spoon-feed ideas or a particular ideological perspective to viewers, however in this particular case the wall text and program materials did not present enough conceptual frameworks to bring the material together and focus a dialogue.

Exposed misses out on lessons learned over the past decade and the uniqueness of our contemporary moment. Interesting questions that come from a cultural analysis of surveillance are only now starting to get interrogated with frequency. This is partially reflected in the changing nature of technology and our relationship with it. With ubiquitous computing and ubiquitous cameras comes ubiquitous surveillance. Younger generations have adapted to always been watched, always performing for an unseen camera. The nature of seeing and being seen has become a generalized and participatory surveillance. Has the transgression of image-taking has been normalized? Has it become the norm to act like you are always being watched or even posing for ones viewers? Crucial questions are being asked and artists offer interesting responses. The current backlash against body scanners at airports has been all over the news and artists are already responding. If only the curators could have incorporated more recent work instead of taking the path of least resistance in choosing work. The lack of clear choices or reasoning as to selection criteria for the show and the vague statements about the subject lead the viewers to a passive stance in regard to what should be controversial and though provoking material. SFMOMA missed a real opportunity to engage the public in a crucial and fascinating dialogue.

Exposed is on display at SFMOMA until April 17th, 2011 and then moving to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

The City of Paris, store
France just launched a project called ParisData that supplies raw data for all sorts of city services: open, free, and to the public. The data is visualized on a map and available as an ODb (open database) license enabling it to be used in all sorts of innovative ways by researchers and analysts. This is a victory for the Open Data movement, netting a large metropolis into their ongoing campaign of governmental transparency through open access to city data. The site has already drawn enough hits to temporarily crash the server. If you cannot get it to load, you might as well take a look at Paris’ city website, simulataneously gaudy and tech savvy for a stodgy government website.

There is also an interesting heat map of popular spots in Paris using a layer on Google Maps API.

Via Business Insider

SFMOMA’s Exposed show was conceptualized and curated by Simon Baker of the Tate Modern and Sandra S. Phillips, price SFMOMA’s senior photography curator. According to Phillips, sick “Exposed poses compelling and urgent questions about who is looking at whom, approved and why.” The show is roughly organized around five themes: the unseen photographer, celebrity, voyeurism/desire, witnessing violence, and surveillance. “Works by major artists, will be presented alongside photographs made by amateurs, professional journalists, and governmental agencies, exploring the larger cultural significance of voyeurism and surveillance technology.” The description leads one to believe that Exposed will bring some serious and pressing dialogue into a public forum, however the result is mixed and the audience is presented with more of a historical survey of photography than its impact on wider social questions.

Historically speaking, the possibility of recording images without the subject’s knowledge is preceded only by the invention of a recording technology itself. Cameras were immediately deployed to take the images of unwilling or unaware people. When photography enthusiasts quickly encountered or perceived resistance to image taking, they invented ways to make hidden cameras. The Unseen Photographer features a selection of early unpermitted photographs i.e. those taken without the knowledge or consent of the subjects, along with a number of hidden “spy” cameras and devices from these early days. Many of the photographers were the big names of early twentieth century photography—Alfred Steiglitz and Walker Evans notably.

While not wholly uncritical of the “taking” of people’s images, the underlying gaze behind the images highlight the serious class divisions between the subjects and the photographers. Walker Evans stated that he wanted to capture people without masks, in their most unguarded state. This is evident in many of his photographs in his subway series and in the main street scenes in the South. The unguarded image afforded by the subjects yields a striking result in the photographs, however this fascination seemed to have an implicit class-component—the Other-ness of poverty captured and interpreted by the well-to-do. The class-basis of this early photography is evident in all the work in the unseen photographer, and is an observation that goes unmentioned in the show’s written materials

The fascination with Otherness as seen through the lens extends easily to sexuality. The voyeuristic desire that pries into the sex lives of strangers is on display to interrogate. The assembled pieces about voyeurism, desire, the visuality of sex and its accidental or intentional observation appear together without a sense of cohesion. The voyeurism section of Exposed features a large number of women artists and it seems implicitly assumed that the artists are there to critique the male gaze. The result is anything but uniform. The ways of seeing are varied: from cold and clinical, to desiring, to journalistic record and the totally ambiguous—there is no one way of seeing sex or visualizing voyeuristic desire.

Merry Alpern’s images from Dirty Windows (1994) are a strong example of the uncomfortable, illicit seeing of the sex act. She trained her camera on the windows of a “short-stay hotel” and captured the action therein. Her relationship to her subjects is no different than Walker Evans as her goal is to get the subjects unmasked and unaware, again assuming that this makes them more honest subjects of her camera. Her work interestingly brings up the question of labor, the subject of the series are invariably on-the-job working girls. Similarly, Susan Meiselas’ series Carnival Strippers (1971) seeks to document the work lives of strippers working at the carnival. The difference is that her presence is known rather than a mysterious unknown gaze of the voyeur as in Alpern’s work.

Kohei Yoshiyuki’s The Park (1971) shows people seeking public sex in a park and the crowds of viewers crawling in the bushes with them. These infra-red photographs watching the watchers makes for a compelling image, and opens a potentially interesting discussion of public sex and surveillance. Would the act of being photographed/observed while watching someone else’s sex act be an additional turn-on or is the anonymity of the peeping-tom its only appeal? There is an ambivalent relationship of subject/viewer in the images in this section: they are neither inherently erotic nor prurient or shocking. The relation between subject and photographer is often cold and mechanical. It is hard to imagine voyeurism without passion, that necessary albeit unknown connection between subject and viewer. Does a photograph taken by a computer have a desire to speak of? Is autonomous surveillance a voyeuristic practice or does voyeurism take intention?

Like the voyeurism of public sex and of peering into the lives of others, the cult of celebrity is fueled by the act of seeing. The history of paparazzi is a sordid history of creating scenes—hunting celebrities like animals to capture their image. Legendary stories and conflicts between celebrities and paparazzi are often more interesting then the photographs that result from these encounters. Paparazzi photographs are usually hurried, poorly lit objects rather than highly aesthetic or technical masterpieces. The usual result of paparazzi intrusions is violence—its most disgusting moment being the death of Princess Diana in a paparazzi-led car-chase. The form that celebrity culture takes is a result of our visual media culture. With the internet, the insatiable thirst for fame appears in strange ways—celebrity sex tapes, Gawker.com, and a myriad of other manifestations.

Most of the aspects that make celebrity culture interesting in this context are ignored and remain unaddressed in Exposed, instead opting for an uninspired historical selection of celebrity photos. Even with work by WeeGee and Richard Avedon, the paparazzi portion of the show feels lacking. One exception is the work of Allison Jackson. Shot in the style of paparazzi but too perfect to be real: her photographs The Queen plays with her Corgis and Jack (Nicholson) Road Rage assaulting a photographer with a golf club. Both are fakes—staged confrontations with imposter celebrities. In her work there is both a critique of celebrity and a critique of the celebrity hunters. Like that of celebrity hunters—war and crime photographers seek to capture those elusive events that shock, provoke, horrify or fascinate.

Witnessing Violence was paired with the Paparazzi section in the flow of the exhibition featuring scenes of violence. This small section felt inappropriate for a number of reasons. The idea of witnessing violence as a mode-of-seeing could easily fit into the framework of the show. There are plenty of artists who deal with witnessing as a core aspect of their work. The choice of photographs—the decades old war photography on the wall does not guarantee its success in creating the intended dialogue. A show with this material should confront the fact that the US is currently at war. The horror of these images is dulled by its historical status instead of contemporary atrocities. There has been an ongoing debate as to if images of violence desensitize people to violence or whether the opposite is true—that is by facing the horror we become more averse to it and more sensitive and affected by what we see. There are a couple of other reasons that Witnessing Violence does not seem to fit. Firstly, nearly all of work presented was documentary/journalistic photography by people who are not considered artists or consider their work artistic practice. Secondly, there are a number of “photographer unknown” pieces so there is no real way to determine the intent of the creator and hence the “way of seeing” the work. Thirdly, most of the works seemed like War/Gore Porn, not artistic in any good sense and not created with that intent. The other element that needs exposing is in the uncritical use of tortured brown bodies. Most, if not all of the war photos on the wall were of non-Europeans creating, in effect further exoticization and separation from subject and audience.

This is not part of the dialogue that the Exposed show presents. Again the curators omit the exact details and talking points that would make this exhibition thought-provoking rather than an ambiguous collection of images. Of all the sections in Exposed, Witnessing Violence is the least connected to the rest and its omission would have improved the show’s cohesion.

Luckily what brings Exposed full circle is the largest section on Surveillance, showcasing the most variety, humor, thought-provoking, and conceptually rigorous works in the exhibition. Experimental geographer, researcher, and artist, Trevor Paglen has a varied body of work documenting the infrastructure of State surveillance and government black-ops. Two of his photographs are featured here: Chemical and Biological Weapons Proving Ground and The Other Night Sky. Proving Ground is an ethereal photo of a hidden military base, taken at an extreme distance using limit-telephotography appearing almost abstract from the great distance. The Other Night Sky is a striking shot of Half Dome at Yosemite National Park with the streaks of spy satellites visible in the sky. Both pieces are striking not only for Paglen’s technical ability but for his conceptual strength and thoroughly researched execution. Similarly striking is Simon Norfolk’s BBC World Service Atlantic Relay Station at English Bay (2003), a stunning photo of the spiders web of high frequency antenna. Both of these works make visible systems that we civilians are not supposed to see and the resulting photos are hauntingly beautiful, simultaneously specific and abstract.

Another note worthy piece is Triangle (1979) by Croatian artist, Sanja Ivekovic. Her piece (below) contains a short description of a performance along with five photographs. She describes the performance as going out to the balcony, reading, drinking whiskey, and making masturbation motions while General Tito parades through Zagreb. There are police both on the street and watching from the roofs of buildings. Her performance is for them. Her work illustrates the crucial difference between surveillance (observation from above) and sousveillance (observation from below). The difference between sous and sur is a matter of perspective (viewing angle) between the gaze of the authorities versus the gaze of the artist. Through her flippantly defiant performance, she is watching the watchers (the police) and sets herself up to be watched and questioned. There is a playful and resentful feeling that one gets from Ivekovic in this performance.

Sanja Ivekovi? “Triangle”
“The action takes place on the day of the President’s visit to the city, and it develops as intercommunication between three persons:
1. a person on the roof of a tall building across the street from my apartment;
2. myself, on the balcony;
3. a policeman in the street in front of the house.
Due to the cement construction of the balcony, only the person on the roof can actually see me and follow the action. My assumption is that this person has binoculars and a walkie-talkie apparatus. I notice that the policeman in the street also has a walkie-talkie.
The action begins when I walk out onto the balcony and sit on a chair, I sip whiskey, read a book, and make gestures as if I perform masturbation. After a period of time, the policeman rings my doorbell and orders the “persons and objects are to be removed from the balcony.”
(source: Sanja Ivekovi?, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb 1998, S. 27.)

Yoko Ono and John Lennon Film no 6. Rape (1969) and Vito Acconci’s Following(1969) are two classic performance pieces about stalking. In Rape Ono and Lennon hired a film crew to intrude upon a random woman for a day and record her reactions. Following involved Acconci picking out a random person to follow each day for a month, documented it, and sent the resulting document to a various critics and friends.

In the lobby of the museum is a computer-controlled spotlight. The project called Access (2003) created by Marie Sester turned surveillance into an interactive game, allowing a person at the control panel to target and follow people in the lobby with the light. The fun of this piece is observing people’s reactions to the light and seeing if the catch that it is following them. There is a strange pleasure in being the unseen observer at the control panel.

In 2001 the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany curated a show called ctrl[space] about surveillance. The core of pieces in Exposed were also part of ctrl[space] including Acconci, Nauman, Merry Alpern, Bureau of Inverse Technology, and others. The difference between the two shows lies in the clearer and more limited focus on surveillance by the ZKM versus the diffuse and messy collection of modes-of-seeing things illicitly, presented by the SFMOMA/Tate collaboration.

Another area in where Exposed falls short is that it feels like a dated survey of semi-related material then a document of current artistic practices on the subject. Surveillance is increasingly a central part of our everyday lives and is becoming a major topic in the arts. The urgency that Phillips speaks of in the press releases is not present in the show. The bulk of the work comes from before the nineteen-nineties. This is especially glaring in the witness and paparazzi sections where little of the work reflects its relevance to the contemporary moment.

Notably absent in Exposed was the work of Critical Art Ensemble, the Surveillance Camera Players, and more recently, Michael Wolf. Wolf’s large format photographs of people in their offices and tower blocks are intimate and uncanny, giving viewers a rarely seen perspective and violating ones assumed personal privacy. CAE and the Players emerged in the mid-1990’s specifically as a political critique of the control society. These artists explicitly address surveillance’s impact in their writing and objects and would have contributed significantly.

There are a number of laudable elements to Exposed, however, the unevenness of the message and the inclusion of the Witnessing Violence section removes the chance of cohesion. The blurring of fine artist, amateurs, and photojournalists creates an inconsistency of concept and execution. If the goal was to speak broadly of the culture of seeing, then it fails precisely for this breadth. Instead of a broad wide-ranging dialogue, viewers are left with a diffuse and ambiguous message about witnessing illicit events and the public nature of seeing. It is arguably not the role of the museum to spoon-feed ideas or a particular ideological perspective to viewers, however in this particular case the wall text and program materials did not present enough conceptual frameworks to bring the material together and focus a dialogue.

Exposed misses out on lessons learned over the past decade and the uniqueness of our contemporary moment. Interesting questions that come from a cultural analysis of surveillance are only now starting to get interrogated with frequency. This is partially reflected in the changing nature of technology and our relationship with it. With ubiquitous computing and ubiquitous cameras comes ubiquitous surveillance. Younger generations have adapted to always been watched, always performing for an unseen camera. The nature of seeing and being seen has become a generalized and participatory surveillance. Has the transgression of image-taking has been normalized? Has it become the norm to act like you are always being watched or even posing for ones viewers? Crucial questions are being asked and artists offer interesting responses. The current backlash against body scanners at airports has been all over the news and artists are already responding. If only the curators could have incorporated more recent work instead of taking the path of least resistance in choosing work. The lack of clear choices or reasoning as to selection criteria for the show and the vague statements about the subject lead the viewers to a passive stance in regard to what should be controversial and though provoking material. SFMOMA missed a real opportunity to engage the public in a crucial and fascinating dialogue.

Exposed is on display at SFMOMA until April 17th, 2011 and then moving to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

The City of Paris, store
France just launched a project called ParisData that supplies raw data for all sorts of city services: open, free, and to the public. The data is visualized on a map and available as an ODb (open database) license enabling it to be used in all sorts of innovative ways by researchers and analysts. This is a victory for the Open Data movement, netting a large metropolis into their ongoing campaign of governmental transparency through open access to city data. The site has already drawn enough hits to temporarily crash the server. If you cannot get it to load, you might as well take a look at Paris’ city website, simulataneously gaudy and tech savvy for a stodgy government website.

There is also an interesting heat map of popular spots in Paris using a layer on Google Maps API.

Via Business Insider

“Architecture is the expression of the very soul of societies, viagra
just as
human physiognomy is the expression of the individuals? souls. It is, capsule
however, cheapest
particularly to the physiognomies of official personages
(prelates, magistrates, admirals) that this comparison pertains. In
fact it is only the ideal soul of society, that which has authority to
command and prohibit, that is expressed in architectural compositions
properly speaking. Thus great monuments are erected like dikes,
opposing the logic and majesty of authority against all disturbing
elements: it is in the form of cathedral or palace that Church or
State speaks to the multitudes and imposes silence upon them. It is,
in fact obvious that monuments inspire social prudence and often even
real fear. The taking of the Bastille is symbolic of this state of
things: it is hard to explain this crowd movement other than by the
animosity of the people against the monuments that are their real
master.”

-Georges Bataille