CCTV1984 - Art Activism

taken from the GuardianCulture/film section. I'm looking for other artists who involve the use of CCTV in their work.I want to use a CCTV camera at my degree show to illustrate how much we are watched as a society not only CCTV but by each other through social networks.To look at a persons profile page is a faceless act, you are separated from the reality of the physical person by a screen which makes the act of watching easy.I would like to expose this action. I would like to see a person watching another person but unbeknown to them they are also being watched. I would like to make some film portraits, the idea that an image of a person that is captured by CCTV could be considered as a portrait of the person is something I find interesting. The image of the person that is captured would then be projected elsewhere in the building.

Film stars of CCTV

With 20 per cent of the world's CCTV cameras located in Britain, we're clearly a nation under surveillance. Yet some artists are fighting back. Andrea Hubert takes a peep at the film-makers turning the tables on the world's biggest brother ...

Stalkers might be creepy little blighters, but it's quite refreshing to see the most recent examples of peeping toms - Jamie Bell in Hallam Foe and Shia LaBoeuf in Disturbia (a homage to Hitchcock's Rear Window, a voyeuristic classic) - somehow still getting the girl, even after grossly violating her privacy. Well, fair's fair; perverts are still people, give or take the odd handheld video camera, and anyway, some ladies like a bit of benign voyeurism before breakfast. But while, at a stretch, one-on-one stalking could be seen as merely selective walking, the new players in town are less obtrusive, completely omniscient and far more terrifying. And they're watching you all day, every day, everywhere you go.

Britain's CCTV coverage is the most comprehensive in the world. Its 4.2 million cameras (20% of the world's) cover every road, bus, train, shopping centre and workplace. In fact, the average person is caught on film 300 times a day, which is certainly something to think about next time you surreptitiously try and adjust your knickers in the lift when you think no one's looking (or do anything else, Lizzie Jagger). You can ignore them if you want to but the truth is that, from the moment you leave your house to the moment you come back each day you leave a data trail behind you that is visible and accessible to so many companies, it makes you long for the days when the only place you had to worry about being watched was through your own windows by amateur doggers up trees.

It's this totalitarian police state mentality that has incensed artists and film-makers into fighting back, using art to probe a law designed to protect. Faceless is a new film by Austrian artist Manu Luksch of the media artist collective Ambient TV, who pioneered free wireless access in 2002, and it's compiled entirely from her own personal data. In this case, that means CCTV footage. Compiled over a period of five years, it follows the rules of her Dogme-esque CCTV manifesto, which states that no other cameras can be used to make a CCTV narrative and the ever-changing goalposts of the dense, often incomprehensible Data Protection Act of 1998.

Faceless imagines the future as a real-time urban dystopia, where CCTV cameras continually record blank faced citizens in the present, thus wiping out the existence of memory or identity for the viewer. When the protagonist, Ma Nu (Luksch herself, by necessity) develops a face, she discovers a city teeming with thought police-style assassins and spectral children roaming the city away from the prying eyes of the cameras. With an eerily muted voiceover from Tilda Swinton (whose disembodied vocals are as brilliantly unsettling as her screen presence), and an obvious debt both to Chris Marker's 1962 short La Jetee and Haskell Wexler's 1969 cult pioneering docudrama Medium Cool, Faceless plunges headfirst into Orwellian territory. It dares its audience to question their own culpability in this all too real state of affairs, and combines its message with beautifully choreographed dance routines performed by children with blacked out faces, a plot device borne naturally from the legal obligation of CCTV providers to protect the identity of anyone but Luksch in the footage. The result is incredibly uncomfortable. If, as Hard Fi warble, we really are the stars of CCTV, then Warhol's 15 minutes will stretch to a lifetime of paranoia, and Shakespeare's stage becomes a movie set from which we, the reluctant, unpaid players, are unable to storm away.

Unsurprisingly for those in the business of dramatic observation, voyeuristic surveillance has long since been a hot Hollywood plot fodder, and the tortured psyche of those who watch, equally so. In Francis Ford Coppola's taut 1974 thriller The Conversation Gene Hackman plays a tortured surveillance expert wracked with guilt at the revelation that his snooping skills might lead to murder. Touching it might be to see the stalker's guilt but what about poor Jason Bourne or Jodie Foster's hunted Meg Altman in 2002's Panic Room? Clearly, over exposure is a double edged sword as the innocent are hunted by the guilty. Art imitating life, some might argue but either way, film-makers can't deny the all-pervasiveness of surveillance and are simply forced to give it its own, often malevolent status. That said, nobody complained when Cruise's character was forced to remove his own eyeballs in 2000's Minority Report to avoid iris scanners.

More recent films, such as Hidden and A Scanner Darkly, have interpreted surveillance to great dramatic effect, and last year's Red Road, directed by Andrea Arnold, (and winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes), adhering to the Dogme 95-inspired Advance Party manifesto, flipped the idea once again with her sensitive portrayal of Glaswegian CCTV operator Jackie, (played by Kate Dickie). Jackie's genuine concern for the potential crime victims she observed daily restored audience's faith that CCTV was indeed less an invasion of privacy than it was a means of keeping the vulnerable safe. Until Jackie starts doing a little stalking of her own, which raised the same dark questions that Luksch's Faceless poses - who are these people watching us, and why should so much power rest in the hands of so few? The same questions can equally apply to the poor man's Big Brother - the one that would make poor Mr Orwell turn in his grave. We've stopped judging the witless moron army that prance about making themselves figures of national hate, and turned our piercing gaze on the real stalkers - Channel 4, for making us watch, and ourselves, for being complicit in what is surely this century's Soma.

Over the five years it took Luksch to accrue enough footage to create her 50-minute narrative, the Data Protection Act redefined what constitutes personal data, following a groundbreaking (and ultimately damaging) lawsuit in 2001. It would be virtually impossible for Luksch to make the same film again, with the new restrictions stipulating the data requested must be of a "biographical nature" for the subject to retain the rights - simply featuring in raw footage or a crowd scene is no longer personal enough. Although the ridiculously self indulgent proviso in Section 8 (2) that prevents a person from gaining data that would cause "disproportionate effort" to the operator - in other words, extra work for the people who sit all day at a screen watching other people - seems pretty damn personal. These restrictions further ossify the need to chip away, through any artistic means possible, the myriad of restrictions within which we've been ensnared by the Data Protection Act and its naughty little sister, the Freedom of Information Act. Artists the world over are also doing their bit - Mark Thomas, erstwhile comedian and self-styled libertarian anarchist was one of the inspirations behind Faceless, having exploited the DPA himself in a similar vein for his show the Mark Thomas Comedy Product in 2001. Since 1996, a group of anonymous New York based performance artists known only as the Surveillance Camera Players have voiced their protest by staging plays directly in front of CCTV cameras. This is probably a welcome diversion for the eyes behind the cameras, but no less subversive for its comedy value.

Foucault got it partly right when he predicted a time when there would be " ... no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorising to the point that he is his own overseer". We're certainly under scrutiny, but the static crime rates refute his self-policing prediction. So with the law of precedent the beast that continues to claw away at the true representation of our personal data, we have a choice. We can ignore our video stalkers, pretend we don't know they're following us, and hope nothing bad happens. We can zip our hoodies up South Park style and slink about like the criminals they seem to think we are. Or, in the grand tradition of method acting, we can stick two fingers up, stalk them right back and really give Big Brother something to watch.

How to collect your CCTV data

The Information Commissioner's guide to determining what personal data means is 22 pages long. Here's a summary ...

1. Under new rules, data must be deemed to be "biographical" in order for you to request it.

2. Don't bother putting on rehearsed dramatic monologues in front of corner shop cameras - they're exempt from having to give any footage, as their cameras rarely zoom in.

3. Anything relating to religion - whether it's rolling out your prayer mat or performing an impromptu circumcision - is biographical, although not always advisable in public.

4. Nudity, and scenes of a sexual nature are also biographical gold. Unfortunately, that sort of thing is pretty much illegal outside the privacy of your own home.

5. CCTV camera operators are obliged to put their contact details anywhere they've placed cameras, and are obliged to reply to your request within 40 days, and charge a maximum of £10 for the requested footage.

· For more info go to ico.gov.uk