Breaking the Feedback Loop: Experimental Filmmakers Confronting Everyday Surveillance Technologies
An undergraduate honors thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts/Science in University Honors and English/Film Studies.
Abstract
Along with shifts in how surveillance technologies work to control and capitalize on everyday life comes a need to understand and critique them. What past and present paranoid dystopian stories and other pop-culture parables seem to leave out is any thoughtful consideration of how surveillance racializes bodies and consolidates power in favor of racist hegemony, specifically in a post-9/11 context. We often fail to question in what ways popular discourse on surveillance and resistance to surveillance practices reinforce violence against--and consolidate control over--marginalized populations. Part of this almost willful negligence is symptomatic of visibility’s status as a both taken-for-granted and also privileged site of knowledge and as a medium of objective truth and a vehicle for power. Three artists--Ja'Tovia Gary, Basma Alsharif, and Hito Steyerl--bring forth a fresh analysis congruous with our contemporary moment, in which surveillance has shifted from disciplining through visual strategies to combining visual, informational, and affective modes of control.