Between Theory and Practice: Surveillance Camera Players

Regular Monkeyfist readers know that the creation of a surveillance society is a persistent concern here. We've explored surveillance in the streets and on the Web and in the workplace. Our goal so far has been to come to conceptual terms with the embodied experience of being the subject of surveillance. There is a rigorous and growing body of theoretical work that aims at a formal, systematic understanding of surveillance society. We're interested in that theoretical work and the ways it can be used to understand and subvert the lived, embodied reality of surveillance.

We were excited, then, to get an email recently from the Surveillance Camera Players. SCP is a group of anarchist and situationist activists in New York City who've made surveillance the primary focus of their collective action. We responded to SCP's email with a request for an interview, because their works seemed an ideal example of the relation between theory and practice. In seeking to come to terms with and respond appropriately to surveillance as an oppressive social structure, we found SCP's practice and its theory (traces of which can be found in SCP's written works) invaluable. That tandem is rare enough these days that it must be celebrated and studied whenever it can be found.

If you're opposing or analyzing corporate domination, the erosion of rights of privacy and free speech, or the surveillance society, you owe it to yourself to pay careful attention to SCP -- what it does, what it says, and what it says about what it does.

• History and Structure of SCP
• The Reign of Giuliani and NYC Politics
• Situationism and Anarchism
• Surveillance, Society, and Culture
• Social Struggle, Mass Movements, and Fascism

History and Structure of SCP

What is the the history of the SCP?

After the presidential election of 1996, the people who'd formed the New York office of the Unabomber for President Write-In Campaign launched another "prank": the Surveillance Camera Players (or SCP), which was based upon a manifesto written by one of the group's members (who has since left the group). Entitled "Guerrilla Programming of Video Surveillance Equipment," this manifesto sketched out everything but the SCP's name, which was suggested by Bill Brown, publisher of the situationist zine NOT BORED!

The basic concept of guerilla programming is simple: a group of individuals create a scenario and act it out using surveillance cameras as if they were their own, as if they were producing their own program, and as if the audience consisted of security personnel, police, school principals, residents of upper-class high security neighborhoods, and the producers and salespeople of the security systems themselves. The guerilla programming group can pick any camera they find convenient and enticing, keeping in mind of course that some cameras are monitored live, while others record to tape that will probably be viewed only in the event of some crime taking place during the hours of its operation. For this reason, guerilla actions at 24-hour bank machines aren't too productive. The group can choose to emulate the traditional structures of theater, cinema, the TV sitcom or documentary, or just wing it and go free-style. A group could choose a regular time slot, say Thursday nights at 8:30, to air their program or instead choose to put on a big 5 hour gala production... Guerilla programming is production of an action, not consumption of a product.

The history of the SCP to date can be broken down into five distinct periods: 1) founding and first performance (November 1996 to December 1996); 2) dormancy (January 1997 to June 1998); 3) revival (July 1998); 4) transition away from early style of performing and toward a new one (November 1998 to April 1999); and 5) current phase (May 1999 to the present). In periods 1 and 3, the SCP performed scripts adapted from texts by obscure/cult-favorite writers such as Jarry, Poe and Beckett, and relied on pantomime and a few hand-printed boards (names of characters and speech bubbles) to communicate the dramatic action. In its current style of performing, the SCP writes its own plays and almost totally relies on series of large boards upon which simple phrases and images have been drawn.

The group was dormant after its first performance in part because that performance was so successful (it was shut down by the NYPD), and in part because it was a prank and not intended to be anything more than a one-shot deal. At the time of the SCP's founding, surveillance cameras weren't yet being installed everywhere one looked, and the issue was not yet a public one. It was [not...] until January 1998, when the NYPD installed 11 very sophisticated cameras in historic Washington Square Park, that the issue became a public one and that the SCP found itself with a "hot issue" on its hands.

What is the nature of the SCP: formal, informal, consensus-based? How many members?

The SCP is very informal and loosely structured. There are few decisions to make, other than "Do we perform at this time and place or don't we?" There is an instigator (Bill, a.k.a. Art Toad), who writes and directs most of the plays, and schedules the performances. In addition to Bill, there are about five other people who constitute the "hard-core" of the group. Though the number of people in the hard-core of the group has remained approximately the same for several years, the people who make up that hard-core are rarely the same from one performance to the next. There is a lot of turnover. But Susan (a co-founder and sometimes playwright) and Miranda are nearly always there, at every single performance. In addition to them, there are about 13 people are current "members" of the SCP, that is to say, who have performed with the group recently. More than 35 people have performed with the group since its inception.

The Reign of Giuliani and NYC Politics

What is the power structure of left or progressive politics in NYC? Does SCP fit into that structure?

There is indeed a structure to NYC left or progressive politics, but it can't be said to be a "power structure," because both Left and the Ultra-Left are utterly powerless in NYC. Despite being a bastion of the (left wing of the) Democratic Party, the city is ruled by Rudolph Giuliani, an authoritarian prick and nominal member of the Republican Party. Though most of the members of the City Council and most of the Borough Presidents are left-leaning Democrats, the Left has been unable to do anything to stop Giulianism (a kind of Reaganism carried out on the local level), not only because Giuliani himself is ruthless and unprincipled, but also because the Left (with the exception of the Rev. Al Sharpton) is dominated by corporate shills and cowards.

Things aren't any better among NYC's Ultra-Left. Nearly every issue or movement of consequence -- the death penalty, Mumia, police brutality -- has been infiltrated, appropriated or otherwise compromised by the so-called Communist and Socialist parties. Even the "autonomous" Ultra-Left groups and movements -- Reclaim the Streets, the community gardeners and squatters -- are warped by the ideas and actions of people who are actually Socialists or Marxists, but who have learned that it is more effective if you forget all about Marx, and all of the other "theorists," for that matter, and concentrate on "whatever works."

The SCP don't fit into either "structure," that is, [it doesn't] fit... either the mainstream Left or the Ultra-Left. The SCP is an anarchist group, which means that it is truly autonomous and self-directed, at the levels of both theory and practice.

While doing jail solidarity in Philly during the RNC, I noticed that Al Sharpton was the only national political figure from the left with the guts to show up in JFK Park and offer us solidarity and hope. I'm curious, as a leftist in Texas, what kind of impact he has in NYC. Has he been able to blunt Giulianism at all?

Though he has said and done some very foolish things, some of them hard to forget about, the Rev. Al Sharpton is someone I respect a great deal. He's an honest, courageous man and a marvelous speaker. His work in NYC has been excellent. He's been outspoken about police brutality, police murder, and homelessness, and isn't afraid to get arrested. He is the only outspoken critic of Giulianism in the city.

We've written (here and here) about the murder of Amadou Diallo. Giuliani, especially, seemed to deserve scorn for his treatment of Louima, Diallo, Dorismond, and others. How bad has NYC been under his regime?

Depends on who you talk to of course. For people like me -- a politically engaged white, college-educated male who works in an office -- Giuliani's tenure in office has been worse than his predecessors. Giulianism has meant illegal arrest and detention for 24 hours for exercising one's rights to free assembly and freedom of speech; hostility to and injuries sustained by bicyclists in a city increasingly given over to the automobile; vicious crackdowns on buying and smoking small amounts of pot in public; rising rents, gentrification and the destruction of community gardens, old buildings and even entire neighborhoods...

But the people who have suffered the worst are obviously the homeless, the mentally ill, and poor blacks and latinos -- many of whom have been arrested on one charge or another, imprisoned for a period of time or simply murdered by the police forces that act in the names of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, NY Governor George Pataki, and US President Bill Clinton.

Some of the policing strategies used under Giuliani seem to amount to a kind of ad hoc surveillance...

Under Giuliani, a former Federal prosecutor (don't forget), "policy" and "the police" are virtually interchangeable: policy is administered by the police; if the police can't handle the situation, there is no (need for) policy. Since surveillance -- that is, the production and collection of information about criminal activities -- is one of the essential functions of the police, Giulianism necessarily involves the generalization of surveillance. So, yes, your impression is correct.

What is Howard Safir's problem?

Two problems: terminal soul rot and prostrate cancer. Giuliani's got 'em both, too.

Situationism and Anarchism

I see situationist and autonomous essays, reviews, and position papers on the SCP and NOT BORED! web sites. What are SCP's politics?

The politics of the SCP are worked out in the connections and interferences between situationist theory and anarchism. Nearly all of the people who have performed with the SCP have also volunteered at Blackout Books, the only anarchist bookstore in New York. The Situationist International was a revolutionary group active in Europe and North America between 1957 and 1972. A unique and forceful combination of avant-garde art and Ultra-Left politics, situationist theory emphasizes the role of culture in the oppression of the working classes and foregrounds the effectiveness of scandals and pranks. Like the Situationists, the SCP try to "detourn" (divert or re-route the flows of) capitalist culture, but, unlike the Situationists, the SCP are more anarchist than Marxist at heart.

Who are the best guides to the nature of the surveillance society?

Guy Debord, Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Wilhelm Reich, Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, and George Orwell (of course).

Surveillance, Society, and Culture

What are the trends in workplace and Internet surveillance?

All the really new stuff is happening on the Internet, though workplace surveillance is a very important concern because it covers both physical space (the places an employee can visit and the things he or she can and cannot do there) and cyberspace (i.e., the uses to which an employee can put his or her computer and telephone). The Internet is being used and will increasingly be used to facilitate the widespread use of such surveillance devices as webcams, digital implants used for tracking purposes, and biometrics (face and iris recognition software).

The Monkeyfist audience is full of leftist computer programmers, interested not only in Internet surveillance, but also in the fundamental assumption that that privacy and personal information are disposable assets to be relinquished in return for perquisites from corporations rather than, say, inalienable rights. How troubling is this?

Deeply. I think it's safe to say that the Internet will be the arena of the greatest violations of privacy in the future, in part because computers are the perfect surveillance devices, and in part because so much personal information will cross over and run through its many paths.

I've argued that structures and systems of surveillance have a twofold deleterious effect: first, they contract public space; second, they expand corporate-state-police space. What elite interests are served by a surveillance society?

I would agree with your argument totally. As for the interests served by a surveillance society, they could only be totalitarian interests, i.e., the interests of individuals and groups with the worst possible motives: power-mad politicians and business "people" bent on world domination, officially sanctioned paranoiacs and fascists.

Do gentrification and surveillance work together to subvert authentic American urban possibility?

Quite obviously yuppies want to protect their property and use surveillance cameras to do so. And so the answer must be "Yes." But we must keep in mind that, strictly speaking, gentrification concerns residential areas (private property), and that surveillance cameras are used in both residential areas and public areas. Surveillance doesn't know the economic or spatial limits that gentrification does. In New York, there are cameras pointed at rich and poor people alike.

Is aesthetic freedom and authenticity part of a program of political liberation?

Yes, very much so, provided that the "part" assigned to it isn't small, limited or otherwise constrained by "more serious" concerns. Social liberation should encompass both art and politics, and should do away with the artificial separation between them. As for the SCP, the group does everything it can to wield art (performance or street theater) and politics (exposure of and opposition to generalized surveillance) together into a seamless hybrid or a new third form. Art without politics is reactionary, and politics without art is boring.

Does this concern arise out of an understanding of what human persons are like?

Yes. Despite the impression one might get from certain writers (the situationist Raoul Vaneigem, for one), roles, role-playing and disguise are not "artificial" behaviors that only exist because of capitalist oppression. The only way such a thing as "the society of the spectacle" could take root in human life would be if the spectacle attached itself to real, living material. It couldn't attach itself to something that wasn't real if it wanted to perpetuate itself. And thus one should be careful to distinguish between spectacular roles ("lifestyles" and "models") imposed upon us and self-created human roles.

Some films in the horror genre, for example, seem to send the implicit message that people are punished when they stray from the corporate cultural grid: "go into the woods, far from the sterile comforts of corporate advertisement, and you're likely to be slashed to death by a lunatic." Do you think commodified, corporate culture reinforces structures of surveillance?

There are two different issues here: the role of commodities, and the long-standing Puritanical fear of the woods and other "uncivilized" spaces. [Ed. -- The uneasy relation between agora and polis and everything exterior to them goes back at least to Plato's Phaedrus. It was likely taken up by Hellenistic Christians via Philo.] Concerning the first: surveillance cameras are most often used by retailers to prevent or at least discourage the shoplifting of commodities and by bosses to prevent or at least discourage the theft of raw materials or the sabotage of finished products by disgruntled workers. That is to say, the cameras are used to reinforce the structures of both commodified leisure and alienated work. Concerning the second issue: one of the messages of horror films -- which draw upon the irrationality of Puritanism, at work in this culture for hundreds of years -- is indeed "Stray and you pay." But horror films cannot be taken as representative [of] "the commodified, corporate cultural grid," though these films are certainly produced by that grid.

I think it's clear that the commodity-economy actually encourages cultural differentiation rather than curtails it. For example, there is obviously a deepening (not a skimming along the surface) involved in the movement from long hair and beads in the 1960s to piercings and tattoos in the 1990s/early 2000s. This deepening -- the marked variety of "styles" available to young people today -- should not be underestimated. And yet there is obviously a great deal of conformity in society, perhaps especially among the stylishly tattooed and pierced young people I've mentioned. Perhaps there is even more conformity in social behavior these days as opposed to 30 years ago. The point is that there could be other sources for this conformity, sources other than the commodity (beginning to be a very tired Marxist trope!). Those other sources certainly include the State (never a popular topic among Marxists), bureaucratic management and the abstract space it has constructed for itself.

The apotheosis of this kind of trend seems to be Disney World -- and, further, the Disneyfication of public spaces like Times Square. What can be said about this development from a situationist or Debordian perspective?

It would depend if the particular situationist or Debordian in question has actually been to Times Square. If he or she has not, he or she might rail at the Disneyification of Times Square, about the bad architecture built to house increasingly empty cultural productions, and let it go at that. But if he or she has been to Times Square, our situationist/Debordist would have to admit that, despite the bad architecture and the empty productions, the place remains intoxicating or psychogeographically rich, if you prefer. Times Square didn't become "alienated" within the last few years. It's been "alienated" for decades. The only difference is that the poor, the homeless and the mad have been forced to live, testify and die other than within its confines.

Equally troubling seems to be the corporate drive to make all places banal; that is, to corrode all particularity of place, making every (corporate) place look like every other (corporate) place. A key component, I think, of the madness of suburban America. Does this relate to surveillance structures?

Very much so. One of the "cutting edges" in the fields of surveillance and post-modernist architecture is the designing and construction of "intelligent" buildings. (We've got "smart" bombs, so why not, right?) These buildings are "intelligent" to the extent that cameras outfitted with biometric software and security checkpoints are fully integrated into their structure and services, instead of being added on afterwards. The buildings are thought to be capable of recognizing both welcome guests/employees and unwelcome intruders, that is, both friends and foes, with no one in-between.

Social Struggle, Mass Movements, and Fascism

Is SCP or its members involved in other social movements like the antiglobalization work that exploded in Seattle?

As individuals, current members of the SCP are involved with the Independent Media Center, Anti-Fascist Action, Queer Eruption, Blackout Books (which recently closed), and ABC No Rio (a community center in a former squat). The SCP itself performed in front of webcams on the day of the mobilization in Seattle and on May Day 2000, and in front of surveillance cameras in New York during the June 18, 1999 Reclaim The Streets. But the SCP aren't comfortable with and so have refrained from participating in large-scale demonstrations, such as those that took place in Seattle or most recently in Prague. While it is quite true that both capitalism and "state socialism" are afraid of the political power and significance of mass demonstrations (see the example of Serbia), and so try to discourage them from taking place, fascism is not. Unlike both capitalism and "state socialism," fascism uses mass demonstrations to solidify its power, and not just as a way of toppling its rivals.

I am not saying that the demonstrations in either Seattle or Prague were fascist or that they were organized by fascists! But one must be clear about the existence of micro-fascism (about the fact that such a thing exists) and that it plays a central role in the perpetuation of both capitalist society and the false opposition to it (otherwise known as Socialism or Communism) -- even in the midst of the Seattle demonstrations! Weren't the people now dubbed the "peace police" or the "peace Nazis" acting in a fascistic manner when they shouted "Shame" at the rioting anarchists and even tried to prevent them from destroying a few artifacts of corporate property? The members of the SCP want to be around such people as little as they want to be around real police officers.

Does police surveillance of protest events discourage citizens already targeted by the police from engaging in protest? I'm curious about the ways in which police, that is, State surveillance indirectly aids the manufacture of consent by quelling or marginalizing or erasing political dissent.

Two different questions: discouraging already-targeted protesters, and discouraging people who would like to protest but who are afraid to do so. The police surveillance of protest events discourages both groups from getting involved. The two forms of discouragement reinforce one another: it sucks to be targeted, and no one can pretend otherwise.

I want to thank you for the insight you've generously shared with us. Any upcoming SCP events that you want to mention?

Every Sunday in 2000 after Thanksgiving Day, the Surveillance Camera Players will lead a Surveillance Camera Outdoor Walking Tour (or SCOWT for short) of a neighborhood in New York City. Each SCOWT includes a general introduction to the emerging surveillance society as well as a choice selection of video cameras that surveill public space. $10 donation per each person. Each tour lasts about 90 minutes and is undertaken rain or shine. No reservations needed. For more details: see the SCP web site or send email.