Course Syllabus
| Semester & Location: |
Spring 2024 - DIS Copenhagen |
| Type & Credits: |
Elective Course - 3 credits |
| Major Disciplines: |
Art History, Media Studies, Sociology, Literature |
| Prerequisite(s): |
None |
| Faculty Member: |
Nan Gerdes Use Canvas inbox |
| Time & Place: |
Monday 13.15 - 14.35 Thursday 13.15 - 14.35 Location: Fi6-Metro 102 |
Course Content
This course will examine surveillance from cultural and aesthetic perspectives. 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, performance, conceptual art, and installation 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, Facial Recognition Technologies, and the ubiquitous presence of CCTV cameras in the urban landscape, the “icons of our age”.
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 one side, 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 Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and we will discuss their relevance for understanding surveillance today.
Objectives
- Analyze the relationship between society and its art and cultural production, specifically in relation to the emergence of “The Society of Surveillance” and “The Culture of Surveillance”.
- Identify the important arguments in the field of Surveillance Studies and demonstrate a familiarity with major works which comment on surveillance in art, architecture, film and literature.
- Examine surveillance from aesthetic perspectives.
- Discuss and analyze art as a site of resistance to surveillance.
Course Format
We will meet for 23 sessions throughout the semester. The sessions will be a mixture of class discussions, student presentations, small lectures, and exercises/assignments on different locations in the city. The course also includes guest lectures.
Slides from classes are posted after class under 'Files' -> 'Slides'.
Field Studies
Our field studies serve to get hands-on experience with topics covered in class. For time and details, see the calendar.
Expectations of Participants
This course is discussion-based and requires your active participation and engagement in all class activities. Full preparation before classes includes close textual readings, note-taking, writing of discussion posts (see below), and reflection on possible directions for our dialogue once we are together. In each class, you are expected to comment on and raise questions in relation to the assigned texts or other material, to respond to your peers’ contributions, and to collaborate in group work.
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 class activities such as field studies, a number of class exercises, and guest lectures, you are asked to contribute to a discussion thread on Canvas
- A research paper submitted by the end of the semester
Grade Components
Engaged participation 30%
Oral presentation 20%
Discussion posts 30%
Research Paper 20%
Faculty
Nan Gerdes, Ph.D. (Comparative Literature, University of Copenhagen, 2017). Postdocs at University of Copenhagen, Roskilde University and Aarhus University. With DIS since 2018.
Required Readings
Theoretical texts
Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Duke University Press, 2015. From this book we will read ch. 1. “Notes on Surveillance Studies: Through the Door of No Return”, pp. 31-62, and ch. 4. “ ‘What Did the TSA Find in Solange’s Fro’?: Security Theater at the Airport.”
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.
Bentham, Jeremy. Panopticon Or: The Inspection House (1791). Dodo Press, 2008, pp. 1-21.
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
Darnton, Robert. “The Stasi Files”. CTRL [SPACE] Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, edited by Thomas Y. Levin et al., MIT Press, 2002, pp. 170 -177.
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/
Magnet, Shoshana Amielle. “When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race, and the Technology of Identity”. Surveillance Studies: A Reader, edited by Torin Monahan and David Murakami Wood, Oxford University Press, 2018, pp. 116-119.
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.
Remes, Outi. “Pigs Like Pigment: Interview with Verena Kyselka”. Conspiracy Dwellings – Surveillance in Contemporary Art, edited by Outi Remes and Pamela Skelton, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010, pp. 35 -49.
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.
Skelton, Pam. ”Konspirative Wohnungen // Conspiracy Dwellings: A Personal Report”. Conspiracy Dwellings – Surveillance in Contemporary Art, edited Outi Remes and Pamela Skelton, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010, pp. 1- 17.
Steiner, Henriette & Kristin Veel. "Living Behind Glass Facades: Surveillance Culture and New Architecture." Surveillance & Society 9 (1/2), 2011. pp. 215-232.
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.
Artist Book
Calle, Sophie. Suite Vénitienne (1983). Siglio, 2015.
Literary Fiction
Boye, Karin. Kallocain. Penguin Books, 2019, pp. 17-52.
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.
Academic Regulations
Please make sure to read the Academic Regulations on the DIS website. There you will find regulations on:
The syllabus is subject to change
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Course Summary:
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