Watch Me Watching: Surveillance Art and the Politics of Observation

Abstract

In the recent decades, with the rapid proliferation of surveillance systems for both political and commercial uses, there is a surge of artistic endeavour –which is often termed as ‘surveillance art’ –that address critical response to the growing surveillance activities conducted by various authorities in different forms.This dissertation focuses on a new trend in the practice of surveillance artist, that is to reflect on the them by means of appropriating, intervening, disrupting, and reconfiguring the very medium of surveillance technology itself.Framed within a tradition of Marxist writing and social history of art, this dissertation aims at exploring of art’s capacity to provoke a rethinking of and enact a resistance towards the contemporary surveillance systems by providing both an analysis of various strategies taken by the artists with a consideration the spectatorship and the position of the audience in surveillance art. Centered on the theme of surveillance and human behaviour, this dissertation addresses issues of gaze and voyeurism, spectatorship, control and state power, censorship, human rights and liberties.