April 22, 2004
Lecture covers camera's effect on world culture
North Texas Daily has an interesting article on guest lecturer Thomas Levin, Princeton University professor, who spoke Wednesday to students on the progression of surveillance and its influence on pop culture.
Excerpts
"He talked about the proliferation of "personal surveillance devices," or camera phones, and how they are affecting the world. Pictures taken with a soldier's camera phone of Saddam Hussein being captured were shown to illustrate the point.
"It's the fantasy of immediate access to any spot on the globe," Levin said.
He talked about "panopticism," the idea that someone will not do something because of the fear of being watched. He related this to cameras on top of traffic lights, which, according to Levin, may not be functioning half the time, but keep drivers from running red lights.
He then discussed how surveillance has been used in art, a practice he called a "brilliant re-functioning of surveillance."
Levin showed one artist that took his family to an automatic teller machine, got a printout of the ATM surveillance picture and used it as a family portrait. Another artist used a surveillance photo as a wedding picture.
As the presentation ended, Levin took questions from the audience. One student asked, "What will surveillance be in the future?"
Levin responded ended with, "At the degree to which public space is being colonized by surveillance, we can not afford to be unaware of the information that is being taken from us and how to control it."
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