ABSTRACT
In a recent essay, the urban geographer Amy Siciliano recounted a curious anecdote: from the video surveillance control room of a public housing project in Toronto, she observed how two teenagers dismantled and destroyed a surveillance camera – while being recorded by the very device they were in the process of demolishing (Siciliano 2007). Siciliano was not a live witness to this event; what she watched from the safe confines of the housing project’s remote control room was, rather, an archival copy that provided an equally safe temporal remove. Yet, despite this spatial and temporal distance, the tape had an oddly visceral effect on the researcher: watching it, Siciliano suddenly felt implicated in the ‘narrative’ that played out on the screen, and became very conscious of how surveillance technology can distort and invert the social relations and, indeed, the logic of the ‘reality’ it seeks to control. ‘The movements of the youth were methodical and unhurried. They made no effort to conceal their identities … I became acutely aware that as the viewer, I, in fact, was what was “represented” and they – the youth – the “reality”’ (Siciliano 2007: 53–4). The surveillance camera, then, had not simply recorded reality, but instead had somehow constituted it – ‘[b]y destroying the instrument that marked my presence as a viewer, the youth effectively made me present, exposing the mediating agent as a determining factor of the event itself’ (54). How, then, has this camera served the assumed purposes of surveillance technology, considering that all the device was able to document was its own destruction? Can such a recording be accepted as an authoritative, unbiased document, or must it be acknowledged, rather, that the recording is an effect of the presence of the surveillance apparatus – which in turn prompted the action that was being recorded? Who, by extension, is the ‘author’ of the recorded act – the youths who performed the destructive event, or the surveillance apparatus that staged it?
