Thursday, 02 November 2000
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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.
See also States of Surveillance <http://monkeyfist.com/articles/633>
This is Between Theory and Practice: The Surveillance Camera Players <http://monkeyfist.com/articles/705>