The Surveillance Camera Players (SCP) use the Internet as an archive for all of their material (videos, interviews, photographs, etc. etc.) and to spread their fight against the use of surveillance technology to control people, manipulate the mass media and injure individual freedom. The SCP are a theatre group and their stage is everywhere: public places (subways, schools, streets). Their audiences are the passers-by and the surveillance cameras that watch them!
The SCP were born at the end of the Unabomber for President campaign, in November 1996, and the original SCP group were part of the staff of this famous campaign. In 1995, one of them had written a manifesto entitled Guerrilla Programming of Video Surveillance Equipment, and it became the inspiration for all of the SCP's subsequent activities.
In their own words, the SCP
protest against the use of surveillance cameras in public places because the cameras violate our constitutionally protected right to privacy. We manifest our opposition by performing specially adapted plays directly in front of these cameras. We use our visibility -- our public appearances, our interviews with the media, and our web site -- to explode the cynical myth that only those who are "guilty of something" are opposed to being surveilled by unknown eyes.
The SCP say they have been influenced by the Situationist International, which between the mid-1950s and the early 1970s used pranks and scandals for revolutionary purposes; by Antonin Artaud's theatre; by Seth Tobocman's comics; and by the anti-WTO struggle in Seattle. The SCP's methods are ironic, and absolutely non-violent. The group wants to catch people's attention, inform them of the presence of the surveillance cameras and make them self-conscious about always being watched. Someone has to entertain the poor, bored guys who watch the surveillance monitors all day, the SCP says, jokingly.
[...]
It sometimes happens (at their first performance, and at their performance of 1984, for example) that the police intervene and ask the members of the group to explain themselves. They refer to the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. And if the police ask them if they have a permit to perform, they refer to the First Amendment. In any event, if the police ask them to move along, the SCP don't disobey. As Bill Brown said, "The police aren't the enemy; the enemy are the people who tell the police what to do."
[Excerpts from a seminar research paper submitted by Irene Giorgi to Professor Pier Luigi Capucci, teacher of the course entitled "Theory and Technology of Mass Communication" and offered at the University of Bologna, Italy, Summer 2001. Translated from the Italian by Mariangela Vallicelli.]
Contact the Surveillance Camera Players
By e-mail SCP
By snail mail: SCP c/o NOT BORED! POB 1115, Stuyvesant Station, New York City 10009-9998
Return to