Lesson One Notes

Critical Studies Lesson One: Surveillance and Voyeurism.

Voyeurism: An invasion of privacy, peeping tom, for your own gratification, usually sexual pleasure.

Surveillance: No enjoyment, usually backed up by an institution, in order to stop bad acts or prevent bad acts from happening.

Vito Acconci, following piece 69. Chose a person at random on a street until they went into a building. In order to document how peoples behaviour changes when they realise they are being followed. Perhaps he was just curious and wanted to see into other people’s lives. \Foucault is saying that everyone has a mini Acconci following them all the time.

Thomas Demand camera 07, re-emphasis the construction of reality.

Wee gee, lovers at the movies 1940, (Arthur H.Fellig)

Merry Alpern dirty windows 1994. Looking into a brothel window at people taking drugs and having sex. Effects the way that you see the images.

Denis Beabois in the event of amnesia the city will recall 96-7.

Sophie Calle used her job as a chamber maid in order to go through people’s possessions and photograph them. Under cover, surveillance in a way. By her taking photographs is not panoptic but by us looking at the photographs makes it almost panoptic to us as we become worried that people might look through our stuff. If there were no interesting objects she would leave, she wanted to satisfy her curiosity.

-She follows her own investigative inclinations to enquire into the lives of others.

-Her mode of presentations is detached and factual; the act is still deviant and came from her own surveillance.

-The work parallels the emergence of surveillance culture in the 80’s.