In Germany last month a much noticed exhibition has opened its doors. Karlsruhe's ZKM (Center for Art and Media), is staging " Ctrl Space", the first large scale event on the rhetorics of surveillance, including 59 artists in one huge show. Wandering through ZKM's atriums, one discovers various ways the artists approach the topic of surveillance [...]
A highly original concept pointing in the same direction was developed by the New York Surveillance Camera Players, performing plays like Alfred Jarry's "Ubu Roi" or an adaption of George Orwell's "1984" in front of surveillance cameras on the streets of New York. In a general way, the SCP are inspired by the Situationist International, a group of artists with a cultural revolutionary background active in Europe and America between 1957 and 1971. Like the Situationists, the SCP are interested in public disturbance and scandals, and the positive things one can accomplish by causing them [...]
(Written by Timo Linsenmaier & Joerg Radehaus and published in English in the December 2001 issue of Shift.)
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