The Extended Eye: How Digital Images Problematize Surveillance

At a basic level, surveillance is about certainty. Or a desire for certainty.

As Marshall McLuhan pointed out, electronic media presents itself to us as an extension of the central nervous system. We trust what these tools tell us because they function as prosthetics, gathering details from far away and presenting that data to us instantly. It is because of this apparent seamlessness that we trust these technologies as much as we do. When they’re working as expected, the signals and sleek boxes of plastic and wires that allow us to navigate the world beyond our reach appear to be benign. And this is where we start to run into problems.
People develop surveillance technologies, people use these technologies, and, in the end, people determine what these technologies are telling us. Whether it happens to be a jury viewing closed circuit television in a criminal trial or facial recognition software linking the image of someone captured on camera to an existing security or social media profile, the algorithms and software that produce these results are built by human beings and they are fallible in the same way human beings are.
This matters for us because electronically produced images have become ubiquitous in our culture and they are still a key component of surveillance and the positive identification of people. The more we trust these technologies the less we question them. This is not to say that these tools are unreliable in the abstract, but it is clear that some healthy skepticism is important considering the stakes. It is no longer debated with any seriousness whether surveillant images should exist or not. What is open to interpretation is whether this means that a primary modality of establishing fact has left the confines of the courts and the lab and surfaced in the forms of the CCTV camera, the smartphone, and the drone. The proposed talk will look at visual culture and digital and electronic technologies in the contexts of security and surveillance.