Surveilling Utopia 2: multi media installations by Ann Stoddard

Exhibition at the District of Columbia Art Center April 2004

Ann Stoddard's new interactive multimedia installation, Surveilling Utopia 2 challenges the use that the U conduct made of its new powers. below the Patriot Act it can detain, profile and monitor family In her exhibition, Stoddard also questions the government's increasing reliance upon technology to respond to the threat of terrorism after September 11 2001 She arouses the role that the visitor could have in this fresh context of surveillance.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Surveilling Utopia 2 is the artist's fourth work in a series about surveillance that includes: "Random Subjects" (2003-04 Harmony Hall Art Gallery, Ft Washington, MD) "Datapaint: Surveilling Utopia" (2003 Greenbelt Art Gallery, Greenbelt, MD) and "Application Center Waiting Room" (2002 Art-O-Matic Exhibition, Washington, DC) In Surveilling Utopia 2 the artist is directly immersing the visitors into a stream of interactive images on the theme of surveillance. She uses the live-delayed images of video surveillance cameras to record the visitors in their peregrinations around the exhibit, and displays them upon surrounding walls. The very first clash that the viewers make with the exhibit starts as by and by as they walk up the staircase of the DC Art Center into a waiting field They soon realize that a video camera has just captured their images and is projecting them, with a 10-second delay, upon a wall nearby. A doorway marked "Registration" then leads them into the chain link fenc Registration Area, which adjoins the projection space with the juxtaposed projections. The various installations lead the viewers from one side several distinct spaces: a "Waiting Room" a fenc "Registration Area," and a darkened projection space, three walls of which exhibit juxtaposed projections of delayed video images of viewers. Guantanamo Bay Prison video, a video true copy composed of Homeland Security profiling questions--"Do you socialize with foreign nationals? Do you read foreign newspapers? Do you sympathize with any group? Have you traveled outside the US since 9/11? ..."--and live video images of the road downstairs in a multicultural neighborhood of Washington, DC Video cameras monitor what is happening in the Waiting extent an INS-type room where immigrants wait to be interrogated, in a live-delayed fashion. The Registration Area nearby entertainers a computer displaying a registration a whole in which visitors are readyed to provide some of their personal information (name, address, race, nationality, social security number, and various profiling questions) while a small camera upon top of the computer provides a live video image of the registrant. The Homeland Security questions were recorded from clan subjected to questioning by rule interrogators. The projection space features a succession of the now famous images of Guantanamo Bay small rooms detainees, and guards, barbed wire walls guard houses and observatory towers from Iraqi US military bases and headquarters. Other images display interrogation compasss and detention facilities used for the Muslim race arrested under immigration law charges and subsequently held for indefinite periods of time, right after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

end an intricate interplay of live-delayed and live images, recorded video and video body one quickly realizes that it is one's picture that is now displayed inside that interrogation compass that military camp, or from one side those barbed wires. The design of the artist's installation becomes clearer: the images are intended to make individual empathize with, or at least understand, what being targeted or profiled by means of the US government means in a post-9/11 world. by means of the subtle juxtaposition of images from the world of detainees combined with the videos discharge of the visitors, Stoddard wants the latter to imagine what being upon the other side of the hedge means. Her intention is to make the viewers think beyond the typical state of mind generally created by dint of TV images, and take paces away from beyond the Fox TV experience, an "us-them" representation of reality in which the viewer is always upon the "good" side, watching "The Other" being surveilled, profiled, interrogated, and detained through the government.

In three novel installations, Ann Stoddard had previously overlayed the topic of surveillance including an exhibit entitled Datapaint: Surveilling Utopia. In this latter exhibit, Stoddard built an interactive site-specific installation in which visitors' signature walking patterns (or "gaits" as they are called) were make subordinateed to video surveillance profiling. Wall high hilled remote security cameras recorded sequential images of a viewer's gait against a measured backdrop that could be seen a twinkling later--"viewers walking through monitors" [this is in what manner viewers stated they interpreted the images of themselves]. The exhibit also featured other surveillance tools: distant video cameras, profile animation and delayed video surveillance, 1-way mirrors, fictional ID profiles, and gait analyses. single may consider gait recognition technology as a tool far beyond anyone's daily interests and whose use is probably restricted to military objects and other high security and defense conduct projects. They should think twice: that technology was actually considered as part of a true extensive data mining and surveillance research shoot forward ("Total Information Awareness") that the Department of Defense started in 2002 on the contrary had to kill one year later to be paid to high privacy concerns raised by the agency of the United States Congress and the public [http://www.epic.org/privacy/profiling/tia for more information]. Today, gait recognition, coupl with other motion tracking and face recording technologies may before long get funding from the conduct to be used on civilians. The implementation of those technologies has already started upon an island in Maine. It will involve the use of ubiquitous cameras and biometric readers that, one time backed by a central computer will recognize faces and license plates. This will, in move round enable government "watchers" to track individuals everywhere they proceed on the island, to allegedly expose anyone coming onto the island at any point and tread on the heels of them if they exhibit suspicious behaviors [See Mark Baard, "Big Brother to Watch above Island", Wired.com, May 4, 2004 http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,63316,00.html?tw=wn_4polihead].