8
VISIBILITY AND INVISIBILITY
Graffiti is positioned at the edge of our optical range, at once the most evident and most concealed of public arts. While the image thrives through its intense visibility—the stylistic focus on captivation and distribution in graffiti creating an object that is made explicitly so as to be seen—its performative process is one in which invisibility is critical, the participatory action necessarily hidden from the public eye. These differing scales of perceptibility—a dynamic between what I have termed “artefactual publicity” and “performative invisibility” (Schacter 2015)—are fundamental to graffiti's functioning. Without material discernibility, graffiti could not attract, could not speak. But without bodily obscurity, graffiti could not even begin to exist! Invisibility thus enables visibility. Yet in the surveillance society many of us today live within, the digital transformation of the so-called “smart city” (Townsend 2013) has led to a decreasing ability to remain private in the public sphere—a position mirroring the increasing privatization of the city noted in chapter 7. The classic site of the public protest or annual carnival is thus no longer a site of concealment but of capture, with any notion of the street as a site in which one can “fall into the crowd” extinguished. As such, the in/visible balance that graffiti has relied on—the ability to publicly proclaim the name and then physically fade into black—has gone through unimaginable change over the last decades. The all-consuming visibility of the contemporary urban body thus leads to an inversion of the perceptible norms of graffiti. Rather than the visible image and the invisible body, the always-visible-body should presage an increasingly invisible image world or, at the least, a more precarious performative process. Clarity, here, thus leads to obscurity.
This chapter will examine the tense relationship between fugitivity and revelation in both graffiti and the city through examining contemporary techniques of sur-veillance (our witnessing from above), contra-veillance (our rejection of the gaze), as well as of sous- and meta-veillance (our observation from below and our sensing of senses). It will be a means of not just observing but evading, engaging, and seeing sight that we will explore here, modes of appearance and publicity that function not just through (literal) enlightenment but through the indistinct and the opaque. The dazzling lights of the increasingly digitized and automated city has for many led toward an embracement of a space in which ambiguity becomes a technique not just of escape but of potential in an environment where anonymity is available only to the few. The monument here thus will be seen not only as that which can repel or attract attention, as something visualized and surveilled itself,1 but as that which can reveal the dense asymmetries of visibility. The graffiti monument will in this way be understood first as a monumental achievement within the contemporary securitized city but likewise as an artifact revealing the possibilities of urban opacity today.
CONTEMPORARY VISIBILITY (SUR-VEILLANCE)
Let's head back to Granary Square again. While in the previous chapter we discussed its plop art and its constitutive lack, its frictionless aesthetic engendering its private acts of consumption, what was not mentioned was the impossibility of our ever being in private within the square's atmospheric walls. This is a “public” site in which automatic facial recognition (AFR) was used between 2016 and 2018 without the consent of the site's users (and almost certainly illegally), a practice undertaken via an equally covert partnership with the Metropolitan Police (only admitted to in 2019), which handed over images of individuals to the private landowners of the King's Cross Estate Services without any processes of oversight.2 While the usage of AFR was discontinued after an investigation by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), the landowners claimed that their “detection and tracking methods” had been employed solely “in the interest of public safety and to ensure that everyone who visits has the best possible experience” (Rawlinson 2019). Whom the owners of the site were looking for, what sort of experiences they were trying to create, and why they thought scanning the faces of hundreds of thousands of people without permission was an appropriate tool to achieve this is still unclear.
A contemporary tool of visualization that has today come to exemplify our pervasive surveillance culture, facial recognition software is an omnipresent fact in hundreds of cities around the world today.3 A form of biometric technology (alongside fingerprinting and retina scans) that confirms an individual's identity through “face mapping,” AFR and LFR (live biometric facial recognition) strive to extract, analyze, and classify facial features from a real-world environment before measuring them against a set of enrolled images held within a preexisting databank. As shown in Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's installation Zoom Pavilion (see figures 8.1 and 8.2), AFR can thus distinguish distinct individuals and map their movements and spatial relationships. Yet through developing proximity data on their targets, it can also, as seen in Lozano-Hemmer's work, examine and test the behavioral patterns of not just individuals but groups alike. While promoted as a scientifically exact tool, however, a tool moving beyond the shortcomings of mere mortals, AFR constantly fails. Using human operators alongside their human-formed algorithms, facial misrecognition emerges via the malfunctions both of the software (often via the inherent/unconscious biases of their programmers) as well as of their human users (in much the same way). Moreover, the watchlists that these tools utilize are commonly constructed without independent guidance and have the potential to discriminate against communities before the technology has even been introduced to a live environment. Gender theorist Shoshana Magnet, for example, has exposed the manner in which biometric systems’ usage of white male bodies as the presumed norm leads to them malfunctioning when observing women, people of color, or people with disabilities (Magnet 2011: 45). As a result of incorrect identification through a process of “false acceptance” (emergent when a “person who is not you is accepted as you”), “false rejection” (emergent “when you are not accepted as you”), as much as a total failure “to be enrolled in the system at all” (p. 22), lack of representative data thus becomes a genuine danger for those outside the putative whole.
FIGURE 8.1
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Zoom Pavilion, 2018. Courtesy of Antimodular Research. Photo: François Maisonneuve.
FIGURE 8.2
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, collaboration with Krzysztof Wodiczko, Zoom Pavilion, 2015. Courtesy of Antimodular Research. Photo: Oliver Santana.
First publicly tested in the United Kingdom by the Met Police at London's Notting Hill Carnival in 2017,4 today the main biometric tool they use is produced by Japanese conglomerate NEC, which recently refused to reveal the origins of their datasets (or even the statistics relating to gender and race) during a case brought against them at the British Court of Appeal. Expert witness Dr. Anil Jain explained that while he could not prove whether the software had a “discriminatory impact” as he was denied access to the datasets on which the software was trained, the police themselves were in the same way “not in a position to evaluate” whether the software they were using contained implicit bias (Jain 2019). Prior to NEC, however, the software used in the United Kingdom was created by the infamous US-based company Clearview AI, which was fined £7.5 million by the ICO in 2022 for illegally scraping the twenty billion images accessible on their database from websites and social media platforms without their owners’ knowledge or permission. The ICO found that Clearview breached UK data protection laws through “failing to use the information of people in the UK in a way that is fair and transparent,” through “failing to have a lawful reason for collecting people's information,” “failing to have a process in place to stop the data being retained indefinitely,” as well as, incredibly, through “asking for additional personal information, including photos, when asked by members of the public if they are on their database,” a clear “disincentive to individuals who wish to object to their data being collected and used” (ICO 2022). While Clearview's concepts of privacy (and their CEO's links to a clique of alt-right radical white nationalists)5 are genuinely disturbing, the tools of visibility they and others use have been configured in a perfectly contrasting, perfectly opaque manner themselves. While the United Kingdom has today become an internationally leading testing ground for the technology, there remain no overarching legal regulations for facial recognition. During a recent Justice and Home Affairs Committee session, in fact, the committee warned that there was no “clear strategic plan” or “mechanisms to control the use of new technologies,” and neither could it be “ascertained where ultimate responsibility lies” (House of Lords 2022: 4). “As it stands,” the committee concluded, “users are in effect making it up as they go along” (p. 4).
While Granary Square may no longer be illegally scanning our faces, closed-circuit television (CCTV) is still highly dominant in the space. Here the images “captured by CCTV” or by the site's “appointed photographer or videographer” are used not only for “maintaining the safety of visitors, security of property and premises and for preventing and investigating crime” but likewise for “marketing, advertising and promotional purposes” (King's Cross Estate Services 2022). Just by being in the space, we are thus passively assenting to our bodily capture and bodily corporatization, our private movement through space turned into privately owned (and exploitable) data. As seen with its AFR, London is a city with a famous penchant for CCTV. Most commonly witnessed through its many pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras—as seen in the artist SpY's pointed installation Cameras in figure 8.3—these can today be moved manually as well as automatically and, unlike their fixed-view ancestors that were fixed to equally limiting analog videotape recorders, can record high-definition images and sound that can be kept as indefinitely as the hardware they are attached to. A recent study estimated that there are over a billion CCTV cameras globally, over half in mainland China, which has just under one camera for every two people (Blischoff 2023).6 Yet CCTV is just one of a wide range of surveillance techniques utilized today. Within the larger pool of what is termed “urban informatics,” we are today not just watched and listened to but so too felt. While our streetlights engage in sonic surveillance and our dustbins7 track our smartphones, so too other forms of sensor data—from locational media and vehicle license plate readers8 to purchasing data and the omnipresent “internet of things”—jointly track our movements while scanning them for unique markers (literally so, via gait recognition technology). Surveillance today is thus fully networked, biometrically multimodal, and statistically universalized through data points that have collectively come to standardize, index, and manage their set populations. Yet that doesn't mean that the human eye has lost all its disciplinary power. At Granary Square, for example, an array of private security personnel are employed to work alongside the AFR and the CCTV. Hyper-visible individuals in hi-visibility clothing adorned with an array of bells, whistles, and body-worn cameras, these uniformed “ambassadors” (Sleiman and Lippert 2010) are visible, mobile companions to the often invisible and static surveillance technologies these spaces otherwise use. Policing behavior through both “establishing a visible presence and discreetly invoking law,” the ambassadors not only work to dissuade the “undesirable” (i.e., the non-consumptive) from entering the site, but likewise act as the “‘eyes and ears’ of police” in a vertically integrated surveillance machine (Sleiman and Lippert 2010: 318).
FIGURE 8.3
SpY, Cameras, 2013. Installation of 150 fake security cameras on building façade with the intention of not watching over anything. Courtesy of the artist.
The “new surveillance” of the twenty-first century, as Gary T. Marx has described it, the surveillance enabled by both the maximalist and microscopic capacities of our digital age, has thus entirely transformed the way we understand visibility in the city today. It has come to extend our “senses and cognitive abilities” through tools that today take on both a “spongelike absorbency and laserlike9 specificity,” through sensory tools that occur from both “farther away and closer” than ever before (Marx 2005: 817). In the near field, surveillance is thus ever more intimate. From our resting heart rate to our body mass index, from our front doors to our bedrooms, we now watch ourselves while others watch us (and while our watches watch us too), not just consenting to our surveillance but inviting it into our own homes. Here, we willingly submit to our capture in exchange for “consumer benefits (e.g., frequent flyer and shopper discounts) or for convenience (e.g., fast track lanes on toll roads in which fees are paid in advance)” (p. 818), ease of use trumping any concerns of seemingly distant privacy issues.10 Yet it is in the space of health and safety apps that our most personal information is freely given up. Here, as Julie E. Cohen has explored, surveillance has become not only privatized but “increasingly participatory,” aligned with “the exercise of economic and expressive liberty” (Cohen 2016: 207). The gamification of our personal data (and our whereabouts) has created an environment in which we publicly “check in” and “check out” of sites online, display the routes we've cycled or run, reveal the locations of our families and places of work. We track our animal companions, ultimately tracking ourselves as seen in figure 8.4. We fix ourselves (and our friends) within the panopticon-like structure of the Instagram square,11 our online selves regulating and exposing our offline ones, the selfies of today coming to form the biometric profiles of tomorrow.12 Any act in the city is thus today an act potentially witnessable to the entire world.
FIGURE 8.4
Screenshot from dog tracker (The Bagel). Image captured July 4, 2023.
While the microscopic is freely given, however, the macroscopic emerges via an ever-present surveillance from above. Here, the god's-eye view emergent via the power of military and commercial drones (known officially as unmanned aerial vehicles or UAVs) as much as from satellites and the globally dominating forms of Google Earth and Google Street View (as per figure 8.5) are slowly digitizing and monumentalizing every inch of our planet. Explored in artist Jon Rafman's Nine Eyes of Google Street View (as seen in figures 8.6 and 8.7)—a vast, ongoing project documenting Google's “endless quest to photograph every highway and byway in the free world,” a digital surveillance of the planet which has come to appear not as a “distrusted invasion of privacy” but “made ‘friendly’ and transformed into an accepted spectacle” (Rafman 2009)—our cities and the activities within them have become visible in perpetuity from the comfort of our armchair. Yet these tools of visibility have also come to create what Caren Kaplan and Andrea Miller have termed the new “technology of atmospheric policing” (Kaplan and Miller 2019: 421). From the sonic aggression of police helicopters to the disconcerting buzzing of UAVs, atmospheric policing patrols the city from above so as to pervade it from below, colonizing both the literal and mental atmospheres. Moreover, the systems of “predictive analytics” that these airborne tools of visibility help to institute, via their ability to plot patterns of flow and movement, lead to both individuals and entire areas of the city being targeted by police action, whether or not a crime has occurred. Brian Jordan Jefferson's examination of predictive crime mapping, for example, has shown the way in which “spatial statistical analysis [and] geovisualization” have come to entrench and legitimize racialized policing, already existent datasets that are the “effects of invidious law making . . . discriminatory policing policy . . . and police officer bias” ensuring that new geographic information systems simply come to “reinforce the differential policing of racialized people and places” (Jefferson 2018: 2). Surveillance from above and below thus becomes modeled into simulations that, in a self-fulfilling manner, further entrench attacks on already marginalized communities, exacerbating disproportionate policing in which the deployment of high-level violence for low-level crimes (often assisted via UAVs and helicopters) has led to an equally disproportionate impact on marginalized communities’ very lives. Exemplifying the way in which the “technology of everyday policing practices,” as Kaplan and Miller continue, is linked with “genealogies of colonial violence and population management”—in particular within a military-police nexus that is most visible when taking place at the border (Kaplan and Miller 2019: 423)—what becomes clear is that while surveillance today is all-pervading, not all of us are surveilled alike.
FIGURE 8.5
Screenshot from Google Street View 3D (14 Taviton Street, London). Image captured February 14, 2022.
FIGURE 8.6
Jon Rafman, 53128 Cl. 51, Medellín, Antioquia, 2019. Archival pigment print on dibond aluminum. 101.6 × 162.6 cm, 40 × 64 in. Courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers.
FIGURE 8.7
Jon Rafman, Via Guglielmo Marconi, Grottaglie, Puglia, Italy, 2013. Archival pigment print on dibond aluminum. 101.6 × 162.6 cm, 40 × 64 in. Courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers.
It is thus not only that the digital turn in surveillance has exacerbated (rather than ameliorated) already extant issues of racialization but, as Simone Browne has argued, that the paradigm of surveillance culture from which it emerged is itself set within a constitutively racialized frame. Browne's discussion of what Frantz Fanon termed “epidermalization” or the “imposition of race on the body,” alongside what she terms the “facticity of surveillance in black life,” begins to reveal a way of comprehending surveillance (both in the US setting that Browne examines and within a much wider postcolonial context) as that which not only comes to “reify boundaries along racial lines” but comes to “undergird and sustain the intersecting surveillances of the present order” (Browne 2015: 7–9). As such, whether examining AFR and UAVs or “traffic stops (driving while black) [and] stop-and-frisk policing practices” (p. 13), Browne's approach takes on board a historical perspective—going back to the surveillance techniques of the slavery era, from branding and photography to the schematic plans of slave ships themselves—in which individuals of color become conceptualized through a notion of “abnormalization” and whereby the “mere presence of blackness gets coded as criminal” (p. 20). As seen earlier in Anderson's discussion of white space (2015), here techniques of visibility become intimately intertwined with the techniques of white supremacy in which the “totalizing surveillance” and “cumulative white gaze” of the pre-emancipation period have continued directly into the “postslavery era” of today (Browne 2015: 21). Whether it is Homeland Security's “If you see something, say something” or the British Transport Police's “See it. Say it. Sorted,” the everyday citizen is here deputized into the local neighborhood watch, making every set of eyes the eyes of police. As such, as Browne continues, while the “street behaviors of white men (standing still and talking, using a cellular phone, passing an unseen object from one to another) may be coded as normal and thus granted no attention . . . the same activity performed by Black men will be coded as lying on or beyond the boundary of the normal, and thus subject to disciplinary action” (p. 17).13 The incredibly prescient work of British artist Keith Piper, in particular his installation and video piece Tagging the Other (see figure 8.8), can be seen to exemplify Brown's argument here. Produced as the United Kingdom was about to enter the European single market, and exploring the way in which black Britons experience of the legendarily violent stop and search (SUS) laws14 were not only being reinforced by the digital but transmuted into a domain encompassing the whole of Europe, the work visually depicts the artist as a scrutinized target of digital visualization. Backing this with a series of audio fragments from contemporary news sources discussing increasing racist violence across the continent, Tagging the Other explores not only the technological fixing of the European “other,” but likewise the implicitly racialized techniques of visibility that seek, as Piper has said, “to classify and codify the individual within an arena in which the logical constraints of race, ethnicity, nation, and culture are fixed and delineated in a discourse of exclusion” (Piper 1997: n.p.).
FIGURE 8.8
Keith Piper, Tagging the Other, 1992. Mixed media installation with four video monitors and slide projection. Courtesy of the artist.
With that said (and as many do say), if you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to fear, right? This is the constant refrain of those (from senior politicians to “the man on the street”) who insist we should not be concerned by these new tools of visibility, that the hit we take to our privacy is worth the gain we make to our apparent safety.15 If we can catch just one criminal or stop just one plot, the “minor” inconvenience of being permanently surveilled is all worth it. Yet not only does this belief privilege those at the least risk of state violence, but the maxim, as legal scholar Daniel J. Solove has argued, rests on the assumption that secrecy is inherently immoral and privacy simply “about hiding bad things” (Solove 2007: 767). Rather than arguing about what one would or wouldn't want to hide, then, the form of uncontrolled surveillance that we today witness (or rather do not witness) must be understood as a tool of visibility that inhibits not only illegal activities but so too legal ones, reducing the “range of viewpoints expressed and the degree of freedom with which to engage in political activity” (p. 765).16 Not only making people more fearful of public assembly, however, high-level surveillance also has the danger of leading to what Solove terms “aggregation,” the combination of “small bits of seemingly innocuous data” that together can come to reveal things that we do not (yet) know about ourselves, while acting as predictors of future activities that, as we have yet to do them, become impossible to disprove!17 And this is all without even discussing the errors that these datasets commonly contain, the discriminately coded algorithms that skew the picture created as much as the total impossibility of our ever being able to amend or even access these errors themselves! It doesn't touch the issue of secondary use, in which “data obtained for one purpose [is then used] for a different unrelated purpose without the person's consent” (p. 767), nor the length of time our data will be kept,18 nor the fact that the data collected is so commonly lost!19 The right to privacy here is thus not just about immediate harm, not about a supposed wrong-doing, but about a range of long-term dangers being undertaken without due process and without oversight via a (literally) warrantless20 practice of contemporary mass surveillance. For communities that have already been subject to state and social surveillance, already targeted by discriminatory policing, there was thus always something to fear and thus always something to hide too (the body itself in most cases).
Today, then, we can see surveillance as a technology emergent through a very clear set of methodologies, through techniques in which we are captured via the vast power of the gaze and the limitless license of the algorithmic, via Big Brother and Big Data both. We can see both the strategies of Jeremy Bentham's famous panopticon—the techniques of individual control encompassed by the disciplinary conventions of the all-seeing prison famously described by Michel Foucault (1995 [1977]: 195)—and the strategies of what Foucault (2008) later described as biopolitical power—a bureaucratic knowledge of our most intimate data that then scrutinizes us on the scale of the predictable. While the space of limitless one-way voyeurism exemplified by the panopticon thus comes to discipline our body and self-censor our behavior through the knowledge that we are always (potentially) being observed, the regulatory control of our data produces an indirect supra-visibility far beyond the capacity of traditional surveillance alone. Together, we thus have what appears to be a form of total visibility, total exposure, total truth, that places the power not in the hands of those who created the data but in those who collect and control it. Our surveillance culture thus attempts to “render the previously opaque or indeterminate not merely knowable but actionable,” the “observation and control of urban processes,” as Adam Greenfield has argued, being a result of the “desire to observe and control citizen behavior” (Greenfield 2013: n.p.). Moreover, by reducing identity down to what artist Zach Blas calls “disembodied aggregates of data” that can only ever function through diminishing difference, individuals from minority backgrounds often become “rendered uncomputable because their difference, or alterity, cannot be digitally measured” (Blas 2013: n.p.), become dangerous because their bodies or faces or movements diverge from a supposed norm. Groups already marginalized from mainstream society thus become “excessively vulnerable to violence, discrimination, and criminalization because,” as Blas concludes, “their opacity is not fully controllable” (n.p.). Here, then, the city becomes not simply the city of perfect visibility, the city of total clarity, but rather a “jittery space,” a space that “cannot be utilized unobserved” (Flusty 1994: 18). It becomes a space in which the nonnormative body is a body always under suspicion, a body not allowed full entry into the public sphere yet whose privacy is simultaneously forsaken. Public space thus becomes a site of danger for all those whose movement and features place them outside its algorithmic norms. Public space becomes a space in which visibility, as Foucault said, is a trap.
TOTAL INVISIBILITY (CONTRA-VEILLANCE)
For those set most firmly within the city's gaze, then, constant visibility comes to create a real affective presence on the body itself. Leaning once more upon the seminal work of Fanon, Browne emphasizes what she terms the “embodied psychic effects of surveillance,” from physical impacts such as “nervous tensions, insomnia, fatigue, accidents, lightheadedness, and less control over reflexes” to constant nightmares such as a “train that departs and leaves one behind, or a gate closing, or a door that won't open” (Browne 2015: 6). Here, visibility becomes a constant source of anxiety through its persistently alienating presence. The artist Sarah Ross (whose work on prickly space was discussed in chapter 7) explored the affectivity of jittery space in a film entitled Surveillance Sounds. Produced in collaboration with artists who had each been formerly incarcerated (in locations from the United States and Iran to Australia), the film pans slowly through images of CCTV cameras and surveillance artifacts while audio recordings, developed through interviews between the artist and her interlocutors, discuss the felt experience of visibility in their post-detention lives. As seen in figure 8.9, Ross's work reveals the everyday effects that constant exposure creates, the intimate, violent, visceral nature of surveillance that creates a feeling of harassment akin to the relentless unease caused by stalking.21 Jill Magid's seminal surveillance works have similarly explored the unnerving, unsettling nature of contemporary visibility. In her project Evidence Locker, produced in Liverpool with the local police's Citywatch surveillance program, the artist formed a collaborative portrait of the infrastructure of visioning itself (seen in figure 8.10). Attempting to examine the differential relations of power between seeing and being seen, it is in the culmination of the work Trust, in a part of the film that could have easily been cut or redacted, that these themes most revealingly emerge. While in the bulk of the film we see Magid navigating a busy urban street with her eyes shut, being directed through crowds by the off-screen CCTV operator (with whom she is connected via an earpiece), at the conclusion of Magid's blind act of trust—after what appears to be the culmination of the “work,” and as seen in the video stills in figure 8.11—we see the camera suddenly shift from its fixed position and attach its gaze on a young, smart, shopping-laden woman. Focusing out from its stationary position before zooming back in to take a closer look, the camera operator tracks the unsuspecting victim walking down the street until she becomes occluded at a traffic light. As the camera struggles to capture her, the operative then pans out once again before refocusing at the near side of the adjacent road, the new position perfectly capturing the target's image as reflected in the windows of the cars and buses that sweep by. Although just a brief moment, it acts as a highly revealing exposé of gendered voyeurism that provides an equally disconcerting and knowing end to the film.
FIGURE 8.9
Sarah Ross, stills from Surveillance Sounds, 2022. Video, 7 minutes 23 seconds. Courtesy of the artist.
FIGURE 8.10
Jill Magid, still from Trust | Evidence Locker, 2004. Single-channel digital video, 18 minutes. Image modified by the Liverpool Police Forensic Imaging Unit. Courtesy of the artist and LABOR, Mexico City.
FIGURE 8.11
Jill Magid, still from Trust | Evidence Locker, 2004. Single-channel digital video, 18 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and LABOR, Mexico City.
In this space of overwhelming one-way visibility, of what engineer and professor Steve Mann (2016) has called both univeillance, in which we are subject to surveillance without our knowledge, and McVeillance, where we know we are under surveillance but are forbidden from returning that gaze (as is the case in corporate environments such as McDonald's in which we are recorded but denied the ability to record back), relief may only come through an evasion of veillance altogether. Visibility, even the desired political visibility of minoritized groups, can thus lead not only to one being heard (and hence being included within societal structures) but likewise to one being more easily surveilled (and hence trapped within them). What we must therefore acknowledge, in the words of feminist scholar Peggy Phelan, is that there may be “serious limitations to visual representation as a political goal” (Phelan 1993: 6). “[R]eal power,” as Phelan continues, can thus emerge through “remaining unmarked” by the visibility that “summons surveillance and the law,” unmarked by a visibility that “provokes voyeurism, fetishism, [and] the colonialist/imperial appetite for possession” (p. 6). Invisibility can hence be protective, but can also offer a space from which counter-visualities can be formed, a resistance to visibility that is itself powerfully visible. The indiscernibility of graffiti writers (as discussed in chapter 5), the critical bodily invisibility that enables the critical visibility of the image itself, must in many ways be seen as a tactic of protection that (as discussed in chapter 6) can give rise to collective ways of being that the city otherwise denies. In a similar way, for artists from marginalized groups whose visibility has always been qualified via an “otherness” from the normative white, male paradigm, this ability to entirely disappear or at least to restrict one's own visibility can be seen both as a strategy of safeguarding as much as a way of questioning the condition of their surveillance itself. Rather than simply using invisibility as an artistic method that could reject the “bigger is better” aesthetic that characterized much postwar art, that could refuse, as Ralph Rugoff has suggested, the “heroically-sized canvases of Abstract Expressionists, the Pop-giganticism of Rosenquist and Oldenburg, and the monuments of Minimalism and Earth Art” (Rugoff 2000: n.p.), escape and fugitivity could be understood as techniques of suppression in which one could then control the system of visibility as a whole. Invisibility can not simply be something one was passively subject to, but rather an actively adopted (or at least exaggerated) living tactic.
The master of this approach is David Hammons (as discussed earlier in chapter 7), an artist who has engaged concepts of suppression throughout his career.22 Not only producing an untold amount of public works, which he left in the street never to be “officially” exhibited (works that still occasionally come to light today),23 when Hammons does show, his works are often occluded in both literal and metaphorical ways. In his seminal exhibition Concerto in Black and Blue (2002), for example, Hammons left an entire 20,000-foot gallery space both empty of “art” and shrouded in darkness, forcing visitors to investigate the pitch-black space with a small blue flashlight they were provided on entry. Rather than simply obscuring our view, however, the darkness, as artist and theorist Glenn Ligon has suggested, could both provide a “space in which blackness can be constructed in light” while simultaneously illuminating an “unreadable” art practice that (as Ligon also suggests regarding the work of Lorna Simpson and Steve McQueen) can function through a “theater of refusal” and via a “thwarting of legibility” (Ligon 2004: n.p.). In his Kool-Aid drawings (2003–2007), however, Hammons's paintings may have been classically hung and lit, yet they were displayed behind an enveloping veil. The only way to truly see the painting was thus by making an official appointment with the gallery, for which the visitor was then required to enter the location via a side door! Here, then, secrecy and concealment, control and revelation, become a method not only of denying visibility (to us here too!) but of troubling it, ensuring that visibility is permitted only on the artist's terms. Still, while in many of Hammons's independently produced public works he utilized the street24 as a site in which the surveillance (and desires) of the art world could be eluded, the street as a site of refuge and anonymity is a site of this no more. As such, while the guarding of perceptibility can be seen as a strategic move, the question is how these methods can help one escape the trap of visibility today.
To intervene within the city, then, the dangerous visibility of the urban surface must be contested through a public furtivity, through a tactic of hiding in plain sight. For the Berlin-based artist Adam Kraft, for example, the need to escape the visible led to the creation of what he and his frequent partner E. B. Itso called their “small asylums,” insurgent spaces from which they could escape the claustrophobic and spectacular state of the city.25 Kraft's most recent clandestine haven (discussed further in Kraft 2023) was formed in the very heart of historical Berlin within the Bauakademie, the original site of the Academy of Architecture that had been left partially abandoned since being destroyed during World War II and that had since become a fertile haven for wild plants and wild animals. Covered by a giant tarpaulin trompe l’oeil façade, however, a façade presaging its planned reconstruction, Kraft surreptitiously gained access to this literally veiled site, turning an abandoned workers’ hut—suspended sixteen meters above the ground on a scaffold structure holding up the surrounding tarpaulin—into a secret dwelling space with electricity, plumbing, and kitchen (see figures 8.12 and 8.13). Naming it An-Bau (a building as a negation), Kraft eventually expanded this project into the bricked-up showroom set in the center of the space, turning it into an informal site of gathering and learning called the An-Akademie. Used for “screenings, meals, readings, dance practices, pirate radio broadcasts, performances, theater plays, presentations of all kinds” and for exploring “lock studies, trap door engineering, furniture making, EMP-jamming, hacking, [and] book printing” (Kraft 2023: 57), the secret site was advertised through word of mouth and accessed through a constantly changing series of secret entrances, including, for example, a hidden doorway set behind a large, framed picture itself found at the site (as seen in figure 8.14). Here Kraft created a passage to an academic Narnia that existed a world away from the traditional academy. Challenging our assumptions of where the limits of both the possible and the visible are today, our assumptions of what freedom in the city now truly means, Kraft's project hints toward the outsider people and the outsider places that remain, as seen in figure 8.15, in the shadows of the everyday. Here, then, just as with our graffiti writers who actively embrace erasure, one's practice is heard but not seen, emerges through stories and narratives rather than images. Here the power of the invisible becomes its very existence beyond the power of the visible itself.
FIGURE 8.12
Adam Kraft, An-Bau, 2019. Courtesy of the artist.
FIGURE 8.13
Adam Kraft, Pivoting Door (An-Bau), 2019. Courtesy of the artist.
FIGURE 8.14
Adam Kraft, Entrance (An-Akademie), 2021. Courtesy of the artist.
FIGURE 8.15
Adam Kraft, Window Peep (An-Akademie), 2021. Courtesy of the artist.
This elusive positionality and ability to quietly embrace the unmappable was also seen in the work of the late Étienne Boulanger. In his project Plug-In Berlin (2001–2003), for example, Boulanger mapped out over 950 sites in the city (after six months of walking through it in a peripatetic approach) that were set in its center yet outside its visible range. Working to then modify, camouflage, and inhabit these spaces—behind a destroyed advertising structure in Alexanderplatz Station (as seen in figures 8.16–8.18), behind a billboard on Joachim Strasse, or beneath the foundations of Monbijou Bridge, for example—Boulanger would make minor adaptations to the sites in order to create what he termed “residual spaces” or “furtive shelters” in which to hide and subsist, shelters that aimed to merge “as much as possible with the architecture on which they leech” (Boulanger 2003: 11). Pre-constructing his architectural amendments before they were then “plugged in” to the city—being “assembled, wedged or screwed, on site in the middle of the night and as quickly as possible”—Boulanger's wish for “dissimulation and disappearance” was enabled through what he termed a tactic of “infiltration, disturbance, diversions and dispersion” (p. 10). As he continued, since “the face of the city is inseparable from that of the state, working at the limits of this territory, in the shadows, at the very point where it breaks down, is perhaps to escape its control” (p. 10). In his later project The Single Room Hotel (2007), however, Boulanger developed his tactical invisibility into a tactic of mimicry. Built on a disused wasteland in central Berlin that was previously part of the no-man's land or “Death Strip” of the Berlin Wall, Boulanger constructed a thirty-two-square-meter apartment—a modular space with electricity, hot water, bathroom, and double bed—within the four sides of an advertising billboard (as seen in figures 8.19 and 8.20). Making this space available for rent for members of the public at twenty euros per night through subsidizing it via the exterior advertising, the highly visible posters thus paradoxically enabled the apartment to remain hidden, camouflaged by this economic necessity itself. Boulanger's architectural construction thus enabled one not only to escape from the city's surveillance but to remain concealed through utilizing its most omnipresent form of visual culture.
FIGURE 8.16
Étienne Boulanger, Shelter #10, Alexanderplatz. Part of the series Plug-In Berlin, Berlin, 2001–2003. Wood, hardboard. Courtesy of Association Étienne Boulanger.
FIGURE 8.17
Étienne Boulanger, Shelter #10, Alexanderplatz. Part of the series Plug-In Berlin, Berlin, 2001–2003. Images of the intervention under construction, video (stills). Courtesy of Association Étienne Boulanger.
FIGURE 8.18
Étienne Boulanger, Shelter #10, Alexanderplatz. Part of the series Plug-In Berlin, Berlin, 2001–2003. Wood, hardboard. Courtesy of Association Étienne Boulanger.
FIGURE 8.19
Étienne Boulanger, Single Room Hotel. Skulpturen Park, Berlin_Zentrum, 2007–2008. Outside views, with Boulanger. Scaffolding, chipboard panels, plasterboard, insulating materials, electrical installation, sanitary installation, advertising displays, hotel furniture. Photo: Philipp Horst. Courtesy of Association Étienne Boulanger.
FIGURE 8.20
Étienne Boulanger, Single Room Hotel. Skulpturen Park, Berlin_Zentrum, 2007–2008. Interior views of the bedroom. Scaffolding, chipboard panels, plasterboard, insulating materials, electrical installation, sanitary installation, advertising displays, hotel furniture. Courtesy of Association Étienne Boulanger.
For the graffiti writer, however, bodily visibility (as seen in figures 8.21 and 8.22) is a constant prospect that participants must work to avail themselves of: there has never been a writer who didn't need to know how to run, and a writer who hasn't run has never partaken in the canonically mandated necessity for public exposure. While for many graffiti writers a tactic of literal disappearance is thus critical, a movement into the guts and intestines of the city that enables one to work outside the surveillance gaze, the evasion of visibility also emerges through a strategy of mimicry similar to that seen within the work of Boulanger. Here, however, the graffiti writer's characteristic tactic of concealment comes through the paradoxical use of “hi-vis.” A now ubiquitous urban artifact—first worn by those working in construction but today a health and safety sanctioned uniform for almost all public service workers—high-visibility clothing has the amazing advantage of forming an appearance of anonymity and propriety, leading to an ease of disregard. Pull on your hi-visibility suit and, super-heroically, invisibility is engaged. The British artist Duncan Weston has explored this potential extensively within his practice. In 2016, for example (see figures 8.23–25), he produced a series of customized hi-vis vests as well as a full hi-vis boiler suit, playing with the in/conspicuous in/visibility they impart. While the suit incorporated the insignias of both British Rail26 and the American fashion brand Ralph Lauren (a key figure within Weston's practice), his vests carried a series of ironic aphorisms—“In Security,” “Out of Sight,” “Law Abiding Citizen,” “Community Disservice,” “Trust Worthy,” “Don't Ask,” “Look Out”—that reinforced the cloaking-device abilities that this material enables. Alongside the now equally omnipresent (and game-changing) COVID-19 masks, writers can thus fade into invisibility in the city through their personal protective equipment, a visibly invisible, banal fixture of the everyday. In the design collective Hyphen-Labs’ work HyperFace (2017), however, in what they term a low-tech countersurveillance garment developed as part of their project NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism, the veiling techniques of both hi-vis and literal masks are enhanced through a prototype textile pattern that confuses the datasets utilized by facial detection software. Speaking directly to the systems of racialized surveillance discussed earlier by Simone Brown alongside the dangers of algorithmic surveillance discussed by Shoshana Magnet, here the pattern printed on the scarf counters contemporary visioning systems through the provision of a series of “false” faces (as seen in figure 8.26) that overloads the system's processing capabilities. Like traditional camouflage (or disruptive pattern material), the design thus eludes ocular power through embracing a visual distortion that corrupts the machinic eye. Designed in conjunction with artist and technologist Adam Harvey, HyperFace worked in an equal and opposite way to his earlier project CV Dazzle (2010), which targeted the figure (the face itself) rather than the ground (the surrounding area). Through undertaking a series of simple modifications—such as the hair styling, makeup, and accessories utilized by the art collective Dazzle Club in their public protest walks seen in figure 8.27—a user's face becomes undetectable through interrupting the rules of the algorithm. Wearers could thus “appear one step below the threshold of detection . . . break[ing] apart the expected features targeted by computer vision algorithms and prov[ing] that faces, or other objects, can exist in a dual perceptual state: visible to humans yet invisible to machines” (Harvey 2023: n.p.). Here, then, the bodily eye still bests the machinic one, the sensory abilities of the individual containing sensitives beyond the capacities of the algorithmic. Here the methods of refusal are as much about visibility as invisibility, methods that refuse the tools of standardization and instead form new ways of both seeing and being seen.
FIGURES 8.21 AND 8.22
Enrique Escandell, Valencia Subway Police Investigation, date unknown. Taken from Subterráneos by Enrique Escandell. Courtesy of the artist.
FIGURE 8.23
Duncan Weston (Petro), LAW ABIDING CITIZEN (Utopian Security), 2016. Photo: Rafael Schacter. Courtesy of the artist.
FIGURE 8.24
Duncan Weston (Petro), Utopian Security, 2016. Photo: Filippo Minelli. Courtesy of the artist.
FIGURE 8.25
Duncan Weston (Petro), OUT OF SIGHT (Utopian Security), 2016. Photo: Rafael Schacter. Courtesy of the artist.
FIGURE 8.26
Adam Harvey × Hyphen-Labs [Ashley Baccus-Clark, Carmen Aguilar y Wedge, Ece Tankal, Nitzan Bartov], Hyperface, 2016. Textile print. Courtesy of the Hyphen-Labs.
FIGURE 8.27
The Dazzle Club, February Silent Dazzle Walk, Shoreditch, February 2020 © The Dazzle Club.
WATCHING OURSELVES/WATCHING THE WATCHERS (SOUS-/META-VEILLANCE)
For many individuals, then, and for graffiti writers in particular, the only response to overwhelming visibility is a move to curb one's own exposure and to navigate within the shadows of the sweeping surveillance lights. Yet the techniques of anti-veillance seen above are not the only way of addressing the top-down veillancing of the city. Another, as addressed by Mann, is what he termed sousveillance or undersight, an imitative technique whereby individuals try not to hide from view but instead see back. Rather than the “few watching the many” as formed by surveillance (Mann 2013: 5), sousveillance leads to the “many watching the few,” a state, according to Mann, in which a balanced veillance (an equi-veillance) could mitigate the threats that univeillance presents (p. 1). While Mann's position could be seen to emerge from a space of racial and gendered neutrality and potentially lead to a further entrenchment of both participatory and self-surveillance, the basic position, as undertaken in practices such as “cop-watching,” for example, is clearly powerful enough to have warranted a response from state forces. While in the United Kingdom members of the public are thus legally allowed to film police officers, it is an offense to obstruct them from carrying out their duties, a rationale often used to restrict their filming by the public. In the United States, however, several states have recently attempted to introduce legislation to legally prohibit the sousveillance of police, claiming (in an amazing exemplification of Mann's McVeillance argument) to be doing so in order to protect their officers’ right to privacy. In a similar way, the writer and artist James Bridle's attempt to take a photograph of every CCTV camera monitoring London's Congestion Charge Zone (as seen in figures 8.28 and 8.29), described in an essay from 2014 entitled “All Cameras Are Police Cameras,” led to his physical restraint by a private security firm and his threatened arrest by the Met Police on the grounds of “going equipped,” a stipulation held within the 1968 Theft Act, Bridle explained, that “determines the imprisonment for up to three years of anyone carrying equipment which may be used to commit a burglary” (Bridle 2014). Here the simple possession of a digital camera (or today just a smartphone) could be used to justify state detainment, sousveillance so dangerous to surveillance that it must be halted by repressive force.
FIGURES 8.28 AND 8.29
James Bridle, All Cameras Are Police Cameras (2014). Digital photographs. Courtesy of the artist.
The technologically enabled ability to engage in sousveillance is, however, something that many artists have come to utilize in a bottom-up attempt to both combat hegemonic visibility and extend their own ocular capabilities. For graffiti writers in particular, and as discussed in chapter 5, in order to engage in more spatially complex practices, the monitoring and reconnaissance of the activities of authorities is critical. As Erik Hannerz has shown in an analysis of homemade graffiti videos that incorporate not only the process and results of train painting but likewise the sousveillance of authorities that occurs beforehand, these films reveal writers “discussing maps, internal service schedules and blueprints of the transit system” while likewise following them “as they monitor the monitors, hide in bushes, map out and disable cameras, and avoid sensors and alarms” (Hannerz 2022: 7). Yet while the rejection of univeillance is here undertaken for reasons of safety (and, once more, for the sake of the canon), the author likewise argues that the inclusion of this material in the videos helps to define the “adversary but also the playground, its rules, and what is at stake” (p. 2). Rather than being about revealing hegemonic power alone, sousveillance can create a reciprocal relation between writer and rival and thus represent “a sense of individual control and collective cohesion against the security officers” (p. 3). Looking becomes agentic here, not just passively revealing but actively engaging the gaze on one's own terms. The “logic of surveillance” is thus flipped, as Hannerz continues: the writers not only follow the “security officers safely from a distance—while the latter are incapable of detecting both that they are being surveilled and the transgressive movement of the graffiti writer from outside to inside” (p. 8), but the members of the graffiti crew likewise gain power and prestige through eluding and overcoming this prodigious power itself.
Other artists have also utilized visioning techniques as ways to engage with both self and sight. Jill Magid's early work, for example, utilized tools such as a camera hidden in her lipstick (Lobby 7, 1999) or in high-heeled shoes (Surveillance Shoe, 2000) in an attempt to both make the image mobile and create a more intimate connection to her own body. Yet others have taken this into even more personal territories. In Wafaa Bilal's project 3rdi, seen in figure 8.30, he surgically implanted a camera into the back of his head via a two-hour medical procedure, setting it to take images automatically every minute of the day for an entire year. Automatically uploading these images along with his GPS coordinates to his website http://www.3rdi.me, the project not only tore down any barrier between private and public, visibility and invisibility, but likewise created images that were simultaneously by and of him, a self-documentation, as seen in figure 8.31, in which the artist was both present and hauntingly absent at the same time. Yet 3rdi not only reinforced the overarching new powers of digital surveillance and the ways these track and codify particular “problematic” bodies (especially Iraqi-American ones such as his own), but produced a surfeit of images leading to an unmanageable excess. Here the overabundance of images he produced—the majority of them entirely banal, the majority of them indistinct and blurred—created a glut of data that overloaded any possibility of true capture. Bilal's work thus not only renders surveillant technologies as both familiar and unfamiliar, but placed them under stress through an equally brutal and everyday act of visioning. Sousveillance here becomes a technique not only of equivalence and safety but of hiding in plain sight, a seeming compliance that camouflages through its generation of too much. Like the technique of “subversive affirmation” discussed by Inke Arns and Sylvia Sasse, a strategy of mimesis in which an exaggerated practice of imitation comes to “affirm, appropriate, or consume” hegemonic discourses “while simultaneously undermining them,” here Bilal's acts of “pure wastefulness” come to repeat the “aesthetic conditions of totalitarian aesthetics” (Arns and Sasse 2006: 446–447). Fanatical over-identification thus “makes explicit the implications of an ideology and thus produces such elements that may not be publicly formulated in order for an ideology to reproduce itself” (p. 448). A maximalist veillance from below not only can come to create a feeling of ambivalence (of an ambiguous veillance or an ambiveillance) by replicating what is already happening yet doing so willingly, but so too maps out the practices and ideologies of contemporary methods of visibility today. It thus reveals an obsessive, violent performance as equally obsessive and violent as the visual culture from which it emerged.
FIGURE 8.30
Wafaa Bilal, 3rdi, 2010–2011. Durational performance. Photo: Ben Pier. Courtesy of Ben Pier and the artist.
FIGURE 8.31
Wafaa Bilal, 3rdi, 2010–2011. Durational performance. Courtesy of the artist.
The need to witness contemporary visibility has incorporated not only practices of sousveillance, however, but so too a meta-veillance that seeks to see sight itself, to function, as Mann has said, through the “sensing of sensing” (Mann 2016: 1409). In Bridle's Drone Shadow project, for example, the artist created a series of 1:1 scale outlines of surveillance drones on the surface of the city, bringing these purposefully invisible artifacts of visibility into the visible human range (as seen in figure 8.32). Seeing drones as a representative of all invisible contemporary technologies, his intervention attempted to “render” this invisibility visible in order to “make it comprehensible,” to both point toward its invisibility while simultaneously “pointing out that we always have the capability to see, should we choose to pay attention” (Bridle in Michel 2014). His Rainbow Plane project, however, sought to examine not simply the physical technology of seeing but the ways in which these technologies actually see. While like his Drone Shadows, what was created was a 1:1 outline of an airborne vehicle (here the Gulfstream V); its rainbow pattern recreated a “true ‘glitch,’ where we see not an error, but a glimpse of how systems really function . . . An aesthetic which reveals not the surface, but the depth of things” (Bridle 2014). The image formed, as seen in figure 8.33, thus recreates the way in which satellite imagery sees—not via photography but rather via recording “electromagnetic radiation in the red, blue, green, and high-resolution panchromatic (black-and-white) bands” (Bridle 2014: n.p.), a technique that, when encountering fast-moving objects such as planes, creates this psychedelic effect. Here we begin to see “how technology sees the world, and thus how technology both obscures and reproduces political intent,” while at the same time, as Bridle concludes, acknowledging the way in which “analogous technologies can be used to invert and render visible these relationships” (n.p.).
FIGURE 8.32
James Bridle, Drone Shadow 006, 2013. Public space installation, Windrush Square, London. Courtesy of the artist, in partnership with Britdoc and Picturehouse Cinemas.
FIGURE 8.33
James Bridle, Rainbow Place 002, 2014. Public space installation, Kiev. Courtesy of the artist and the PinchukArtCentre.
This technique of revelation and exposure has also been undertaken by Steve Mann, one of the omnipresent voices in this field whose critical neologisms have helped to structure this chapter. Working since the 1970s to form a series of tools that can make “visible various otherwise invisible physical phenomena”—as seen in the montage from his Augmented Reality Wand27 in figure 8.34—these can then sense the energy emitted from cameras and microphones, for example, to discern their ability to “see” or “hear” us. Utilizing “Surveilluminescent light sources” that, as seen in figure 8.35, can “glow brightly when within a surveillance camera's field-of-view, resulting in augmented reality overlays that display surveillance camera sightfields” (Mann 2016: 1415), or creating a Sequential Wave Imprinting Machine (SWIN) that “makes visible the otherwise invisible electromagnetic radio waves from a smartphone” (pp. 1414–1415), Mann's augmented visual tools thus show us what happens beyond our traditional scopic powers, enabling us to see what we normally are unable to see. For the geographer and artist Trevor Paglen, however, it is not the clarity exposed by Mann but a distortion of vision he aims to reveal, the moments in which we observe (rather than “see”) the edges of what we will never truly be able to visually perceive. While his early and celebrated Limit Telephotography works photographed secret military bases and surveillance structures from distances of up to forty miles away (as seen in figure 8.36), creating images that foregrounded the right to veillance while themselves depicting blurry, distorted, otherworldly landscapes, his more recent project, A Study of Invisible Images (2017), set its sights on the way our new scopic environment visualizes us. Here, Paglen examines how machine visioning interprets and “sees” images—often in ways that surpass our own methods of visualization—a type of sight that, he argues, could lead to the “automation of vision on an enormous scale and, along with it, the exercise of power on dramatically larger and smaller scales than have ever been possible” (Paglen 2016: n.p.). His unsettling image of Frantz Fanon, to return to the philosopher discussed earlier by Browne (see figure 8.37), was in fact produced algorithmically via facial recognition software (to return us to the start of this chapter) that uses the titular “eigenface” technique to classify human faces. The resultant “faceprint,” an overlaid collection of found images of Fanon that are averaged out against each other and then subtracted against an averaging of a set of faces held within the system's database (in order to identify the unique facial elements of the individual, or suspect, in question) thus not only forms an image that has never previously existed, but forms a perfect depiction of what Fanon himself termed “control by quantification” (Browne 2015: 6). What Paglen's image thus reveals is a ghostly image and an image of a ghost, an image fixing Fanon as an “object among objects” (Browne 2015: 7), an image digitizing him, reducing him, for purposes of “automation, identification, and verification” (p. 26). Like the now omnipresent facial recognition and surveillance we are each subject to, Fanon is here reduced not merely via the techniques of an overwhelming white gaze, but the techniques of an overwhelming machinic one.
FIGURE 8.34
Steve Mann, Surveillance Study—36 Exposures (Montage), 1974. 35 mm film strip, animation of thirty-six exposures. Metavision™ and Metaveillance™ (Veillance of veillance, sensing sensors and sensing their capacity to sense). Courtesy of the artist.
FIGURE 8.35
Steve Mann, Steve Mann with Spaceglasses Demonstrating Surveilluminescence, 2013. Metaveillogrammetry™ as captured by a Metaveillograph™. Presented at IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, June 23–28, 2014. Courtesy of the artist.
FIGURE 8.36
Trevor Paglen, They Watch the Moon, 2010. C-print, 36 × 48 in. (91.44 × 121.92 cm). Collection SFMOMA. Courtesy of the artist and Altman Siegel, San Francisco. © Trevor Paglen.
FIGURE 8.37
Trevor Paglen, “Fanon” (Even the Dead Are Not Safe) Eigenface, 2017. Dye sublimation print, 48 × 48 in (121.92 × 121.92 cm). Courtesy of the artist; Altman Siegel, San Francisco; and Pace Gallery. © Trevor Paglen.
CONCLUSION OR THE RIGHT TO OPA/CITY
So where does all this discussion of veillancing leave us now? What is clear to me is that the overarching visibility of the urban body today, the almost total impossibility of invisibility in the city, makes graffiti's continuing existence a monumental act, a monumental achievement in itself. The civilian and surveillance gaze, the omnipresent smartphones and CCTV, the all-seeing-eye of Instagram and AFR, have entirely transformed the act of producing graffiti from just ten, not to say twenty or more, years ago. While graffiti has always toed the line between visibility and invisibility, between that which must be witnessed and that which must remain hidden, the city today has squeezed the width of that line—the gap between the seen and the unseen—into an infinitesimally small state. As such, graffiti's continual existence within this landscape—produced in the face of the algorithmic and digital eye, of the domineering gaze that not only sees us but sees straight through us—reveals a possibility for action outside the domination of the new surveillance. It reveals a form of public action and public speech challenging the visibility trap we are set within.28
The controlling visibilities of a city such as London—a city as famed for its AFR as its CCTV—must be understood not simply to restrict but rather to refashion the graffiti aesthetic that it co-creates. Rather than the colorful graffiti of Barcelona, the experimental output of Paris, or the typographic verticality of Sao Paulo, the surveillance city that London exemplifies means that a writer's tactics must prioritize not simply speed but likewise efficacy, must prioritize a material visibility and bodily invisibility in the most temporally and physically effective way possible. Surveillance culture in London does not simply reduce the quantity of graffiti, then; it reduces its decorative qualities, increasing the aesthetic of “damage” that must necessarily arise from it: paint stripper and etch, tools that rapidly and permanently burn into a surface, here become tools of stylistic beauty, violent tools working in a parasitic symbiosis with the violence of the city and the violence of surveillance itself. The sheer density of the gaze thus enforces the notorious “ugliness” of London's graffiti (its beautiful ugliness, I should add). Surveillance here thus does create a disciplined body, but not one, as in Foucault's reading, that stands in the service of the state. Discipline here comes from caution, attention, from a way of encountering and surpassing the gaze (whether via hi-vis and a hoodie or the knowledge of how to erase filmic metadata). It comes through a sixth sense29 encompassing not just seeing but the sense of being seen, a scopaesthetic sensitivity to the feeling that one is being watched, whether by a human or machinic eye. The discipline created by graffiti is thus not a docility in which a body is “manipulated, shaped, [and] trained” so as it “obeys [and] responds” (Foucault 1995 [1977]: 136) to the economic imperatives of the state, but one that does so in resistance to the desired utility and coercive obedience the state requires. Visibility thus creates an efficiency enacted against utility, against obedience and the gaze. It creates an aesthetic emergent through the basic necessities of in/visibility in which the need to be both in and out of sight is met.
As such, what becomes critical here is an understanding of not simply the benefits of visibility or invisibility but rather the asymmetries of in/visibility, the ability of some to be seen when they desire visibility and to be invisible when it is privacy they choose, and yet of others to be invisible when they crave witnessing and visible when it is privacy they require! Visibility is critical to ensure that a political actor's actions and deeds are seen (or critical to ensure one's safety in a space of darkness), while it can also compel us to act in ways other than we desire due to the very knowledge that we are seen. Invisibility, likewise, can form a (safe) space in which we can assemble (rather than appear) together in concert (or simply for us to remain invisible from those who may seek our harm) yet can likewise be an area of ostracization in which our voices are compulsorily silenced. Visibility is thus a scale, not a rigid either/or. And while we may doubt, as Peggy Phelan has argued, the potency of visibility as a “source of unity or wholeness,” that does not need suggest that “continued invisibility is the ‘proper’ political agenda for the disenfranchised,” nor does it go beyond the false “binary between the power of visibility and the impotency of invisibility” (Phelan 1993: 6).
Rather than the pure transparency of contemporary visibility or the absolute erasure of the concealed, then, it is the Martiniquan philosopher Édouard Glissant's “right to opacity” (Glissant 1997: 189) that can provide us with the critical conceptual frame for this chapter, for a space of in/visibility within the hyper-visible city. For Glissant, the concept of opacity acted not only as a refusal of the enlightenment project of knowledge acquisition that functioned only for the benefit of the colonial power, but as a way of being that could not be reduced “into the preconceived transparency of universal models” (p. 193). Opacity here is thus not simply about obscurity, but instead a resistance to normativity and capture, to the surveillant lights that create an all-too-lucid bodily clarity. It is about a visibility not rejected but obfuscated, an opacity (as seen in figure 8.38) that blurs rather than shrouds. Here, then, visibility can be eluded through using a language incomprehensible to power, a language that is resistant to translation. Like the graffiti monument itself, a monument balanced at the edge of concealment and revelation, a monument that exposes what it must likewise suppress, opacity reveals without necessitating total transparency, retaining a notion of publicity in which privacy still exists, a notion of visibility in which there is always still something to hide. Rather than the harsh illumination that blinds, it provides us with that which is visible yet inscrutable, enigmatic, a monument not seeking to illuminate but to hint toward, to warn. The Lefebvrian right to the city, then, the right to speak, to act, and to participate in the city, here becomes refigured via a right to opacity without which these primary rights themselves become impossible. It becomes prefigured by a right to opa/city without which transparency becomes the inescapable mode, a radical opa/city placed at the very edge of the in/visible range.
FIGURE 8.38
Post-Panel Tagging, 2000. Rural England. Photo: Christopher Stead. Digital manipulation: Rafael Schacter. Courtesy of the photographer.
The graffiti monument thus becomes visible proof of a visible world away from the dangers of visibility. It marks out a presence revealing that which it hides, a visible invisibility that perfectly mirrors the invisible visibilities of the institutional monument, the ability of the monument, as famously discussed by Robert Musil (1986 [1936]), to actively repel attention. The power that the institutional monument exudes through its ability to disappear into the background of the urban mise-en-scène—only coming to the fore when being asserted (in times of national need) or being questioned (in times of social unrest)—thus functions much like the invisible hand of what Pierre Bourdieu termed “habitus” (1977). The “indifference of the public to monuments,” as Magda Szcześniak and Łukasz Zaremba have described it, thus becomes “proof of the efficaciousness of the monumental form,” proof of the “naturalization of the monument and its values” (Szcześniak and Zaremba 2019: 213). While the graffiti monument can thus be understood to reveal what it hides (the body itself), the institutional monument hides what it reveals! It hides its power, its politics, its status as constructed not natural. It hides its dominance through its mundanity. The graffiti monument, however, brings those at the edge of the city into a visibility that leaves them still unseen. It emerges via a masked revelation, via a thwarting of clarity in which the opaque becomes luminous. Like the subcultures studied by Dick Hebdige, graffiti functions “at the interface between surveillance and the evasion of surveillance” (Hebdige 1983: 86), acting neither as an “affirmation or a refusal” but as a “play for attention and a refusal” (p. 87). It not only “translates the fact of being under scrutiny into the pleasures of being watched” but likewise the “elaboration of surfaces which takes place within it reveals a darker will towards opacity, a drive against classification and control, a desire to exceed” (pp. 86–87). The graffiti monument functions through a form of masking and mimicry in which simulation and suppression come not only to repel visibility but so too to directly engage it. It functions through a masking and mimicry in which the image becomes a tool of communication and a tool of veiling (not veillance) at the same moment.