ABSTRACT
This chapter reflects on two hacktivist projects, an art installation and a performance, which sought to exploit possibilities offered by ubiquitous CCTV cameras in streets and academic campuses in London. Through a challenging experimental visual method of playing with misuse/hacking of surveillance systems, Cardullo and Steven unpack the video surveillance dispositif and the function of control implicit in the surveillance gaze. Two reflections are crucial here. First, Cardullo and Steven highlight the ‘normal’ functioning of the surveillance gaze as a dispositif of control. Secondly, and consequently, art projects can function as a form of critical methodology in security studies. The projects reviewed here make visual surveillance unstable, by not only investigating its apparatus, but also engaging and complicating its capabilities as a security technology. In this sense, art interventions can be inventive methodologies that seek to realize the potential of their engagement in relation to a specific apparatus, here and now, rather than tools to be deployed always and everywhere in the same way.
