Course Syllabus

Course Content

This course examines surveillance through cultural and aesthetic perspectives. By asking ourselves why the themes and techniques of surveillance are increasingly present in our contemporary world and imagination, we will trace surveillance culture from early secret camera photography to contemporary artists working within a diverse range of media, including photography, video, film, and conceptual art.

The historical starting point of the course is the emergence of a new urban, modern culture, and the invention of photography in the mid-19th century. We will move along historical lines to today’s participatory “culture of surveillance”, marked by rapid developments in surveillance technologies, the buzz of Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, AI, Facial Recognition Technologies, and the ubiquitous presence of CCTV cameras in the urban landscape.

While examining surveillance art and the aesthetics of voyeurism, exhibitionism, and obfuscation, we will address key questions such as “Who’s watching – for power, or pleasure?”, “How does surveillance affect our notion of the public and the private?” and “What are the bodily, emotional, and sensory experiences of surveillance?” Some of the artworks in question function explicitly as commentary or critique; others work more subtly by using the techniques and aesthetic of surveillance.

A central premise for our analysis will be the ambiguity of surveillance: on the one hand, the controlling gaze from the outside; and on the other, the desire to be seen originating from within. Furthermore, surveillance embodies elements of both control and care, and is becoming increasingly invisible to the human eye as our electronic traces are tracked, traced, and stored. Alongside the study of artworks, we will look at the presence of surveillance in popular culture, film, and literature. The course has a strong theoretical focus, including classics within Surveillance Studies such as Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. We will discuss their relevance for understanding surveillance today.

Objectives

• Analyze the relationship between society, art and cultural productions, leading up to today's surveillance culture.
• Identify the important arguments in the field of Surveillance Studies and demonstrate a familiarity with major works within the field of surveillance studies.
• Examine surveillance from aesthetic perspectives.
• Discuss and analyze art as a medium that negotiates surveillance.

Course Format

Our class sessions are double sessions. They are a mixture of class discussions, small lectures, student presentations and group work. Exercises/assignments on different locations in the city serve to complement class work with concrete experiences.

Slides from classes are posted after class under 'Files' -> 'Slides'.

Field Studies 

Our field studies serve to extend our class discussions to relevant exhibitions sites. For time and details, see the calendar.

Expectations of Participants

The course is discussion-based and requires your active participation and engagement in all class activities. Because surveillance studies is a highly theoretical academic field, students must be prepared for a considerable reading load. Full preparation before classes includes close textual readings, annotation/note-taking and reflection on possible directions for our dialogue once we are together. Always consult the instructions in the individual calendar events on Canvas before you start preparing for a class. In each class, you are expected to comment on and raise questions in relation to the assigned material, to respond to your peers’ contributions, and to collaborate in group work and other kinds of exercises. Besides enhancing your academic skills, our classes and the work we do there serve to extend your network by acquainting you with students from other schools than your own.

For a three credit course like this, DIS generally expect students to work an average of six hours per week outside of class per three hours in class. The six hours include the time students spend on assignments, tests, exams, field studies and seminar nights related to the class.

Accommodations

Students with accommodations should reach out to faculty via email here on Canvas as soon as they wish to use their accommodations. For more information about academic accommodations, please contact Academic Support acadsupp@dis.dk. 

Tech policy

To aid your learning process and class dialogue, use of computers and phones are not allowed in the classroom or during course related activities, including group work, unless you have accommodations or if devises are part of class work, which they sometimes are. Failure to comply with the tech policy will affect your participation grade. After our first session, all readings will be used in hard copy, as books or hand-outs.

The use of AI is only permitted for pre-writing purposes and should always be referenced and used with critical awareness on your part. The content of your assignments should reflect your knowledge, creativity, and critical thinking. As with all sources of information and ideas, ensure that any AI contribution is correctly cited.

Absence policy

Because the course is scheduled in double sessions, you will miss the equivalent of two regular classes by being absent from one full session. For that reason, Academic Support at DIS will be notified without further notice if you miss one double session (or more) due to unexcused absence. Academic Support will also be informed if you are late to class or absent during sessions on multiple occasions. Always reach out to your faculty before class about your absence.

What to do if you miss a class: You are expected to do all preparations for all classes, also classes you miss. If you miss a class, reach out to another student from class to hear if you can see their notes. Also go over the slides from class (and other material, if relevant) in the 'Slides from Class' folder in 'Files.'

Course Requirements 

You are required to complete the following to pass the course (for more info, see ‘Assignments’):

• • An oral group presentation with slides
  • Discussion posts: In response to a number of class exercises and field studies, you are asked to contribute to a discussion thread on Canvas, which will be used for the basis of a midterm essay 
  • A research paper or art project submitted by the end of the semester

Grade Components

Engaged participation: 20%

Oral presentation: 20%

Discussion posts and Midterm: 30%

Research Paper: 30%

Faculty

Christa Holm Vogelius (PhD, English, University of Michigan) is a research affiliate at the University of Southern Denmark. She has held postdocs at the University of Alabama; the University of Copenhagen; and the University of Southern Denmark. She has also been an assistant professor of English at the University of Copenhagen, and is the editor of The Emily Dickinson Journal (Johns Hopkins UP). She is also the author of Original Copy: Ekphrasis, Gender, and the National Imagination (University of Massachusetts Press, 2025). 

Required Readings

Theoretical texts

Browne, Simone. “Notes on Surveillance Studies: Through the Door of No Return” in Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Duke University Press, 2015, 31-62 (book available at book pick-up)

Bauman, Zygmunt, and David Lyon. Liquid Surveillance. Polity, 2013. From this book we will read ch.2. “Liquid Surveillance as Post-Panoptic”, pp. 52 -75.

Cartwright, Lisa, and Marita Sturken. Practices of Looking. Oxford University Press, 2009. From this book we read the chapter “The Myth of Photographic Truth”, pp. 16-26.

Crawford, Kate, and Trevor Paglen. “Excavating AI: The Politics of Training Sets for Machine Learning”. September 19, 2019. https://excavating.ai

Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control”. October Vol. 59, 1992, pp. 3-7.

Farahani, Nita. "Introduction." in Farahani. The Battle for Your Brain, St. Martin's Press, 2023, pp. 1-12.

Foucault, Michel. “Panopticism” (1975). The Surveillance Studies Reader, edited by Hier and Greenberg, Open University Press, 2007, pp. 67-75.

Fussey, Pete, and Jon Coaffee. “Urban spaces of surveillance”. Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies, edited by Kristie Ball et al., Routledge, 2012, pp. 201-208.

Koskela, Hille. “Webcams, TV Shows and Mobile Phones: Empowering Exhibitionism”. Surveillance and Society, vol 2, No. 2-3, pp. 199-215.

Lyon, David. “Exploring Surveillance Culture.” On_Culture: The Open Journal for the Study of Culture vol 6, 2018. https://www.on-culture.org/journal/issue-6/lyon-surveillance-culture/

Monahan, Torin, and David Murakami Wood. “Introduction: Surveillance Studies as a Transdisciplinary Endeavor”. Surveillance Studies: A Reader, edited by Torin Monahan and David Murakami Wood, Oxford University Press 2018, pp. xix-xxxiv.

Phillips, Sandra S. “Looking Out, Looking in: Voyeurism and its Affinities from the Beginning of Photography”. Exposed. Voyeurism, Surveillance and The Camera, edited by Sandra S. Phillips, Tate Publishing, 2010, pp. 11-15.

Phillips, Sandra S. “The Unseen Photographer”. Exposed. Voyeurism, Surveillance and The Camera, edited by Sandra S. Phillips, Tate Publishing, 2010, pp. 19-23.

Schwarz, Philipp. “Street Photography and the Right to Privacy. The Tension Between Freedom of Artistic Expression and an Individual's Right to Privacy in the USA”. Cognitio, bd. 1, Zenodo, marts 2020

Simmel, George. “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903). Classic Essays in the Culture of Cities, edited by Richard Sennett, Prentice-Hall Inc., 1969, pp. 47-60.

Simonsen, Karen-Margrethe. “Global Panopticism. On the Eye of Power in Modern Surveillance Society and Post-Orwellian Self-Surveillance and Sousveillance-Strategies in Modern Art.” In Visualizing Law and Authority, 4:232–250. Berlin, Boston: DE GRUYTER, 2012.

Sontag, Susan. On Photography (1977). Penguin Books Limited, 1979. From this book we will read the chapter “In Plato’s Cave”, pp. 2-24.

Steiner, Henriette & Kristin Veel. "Living Behind Glass Facades: Surveillance Culture and New Architecture." Surveillance & Society 9 (1/2), 2011. pp. 215-232.

Thomsen, Bodil Marie Stavning. "The Performative Uses of the Surveillance Archive in Manu Luksch's Works." Performing Archives/Archives of Performance edited by Gunhild Borggreen and Rune Gade, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2013, pp. 257-263 (extract)

Warren and Brandeis. “The Right to Privacy”. Harvard Law Review, Vol. IV, No. 5, 1890. 

Weibel, Peter. “Pleasure and the Panoptic Principle”. CTRL [SPACE] Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, edited by Thomas Y. Levin et al., MIT Press, 2002, pp. 206 -223.

Weller, Toni. ”The information state: An Historical perspective on surveillance”. Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies, edited by Kristie Ball et al., Routledge, 2012, pp. 57 -63.

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Profile Books, 2019, pp.5-12, 46-55, 93-97.

 

Fiction:

Calle, Sophie. Suite Vénetienne. Siglio, 2015 (book available at book pick-up)

Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Penguin Books, 1989, pp. 3-31.

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Man of the Crowd (1840). Great Short Works of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by G.R. Thompson, Perennial Library, Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1970, pp. 262-272.

The syllabus is subject to change.