The concept of surveillance, read literally as “watching from above,” implies a particular power dynamic. Bentham’s original conception of the prison panopticon positions the surveillor as having an “invisible omnipresence”: always watched but never watching; the surveilled, conversely, become hypervisible but “hypopresent” – their agency is circumscribed. Contemporary implementations of surveillance make the “surveillor’s” loci of power more diffuse – they have, as Gilles Deleuze articulates, moved from operating as “spaces of enclosure” to “open circuits.” These open circuits often impose power, but they also destabilize the distinctions between surveillor and surveilled, or between subject and object – producing a type of “posthuman difference.” What to do, the, with a text that is published in multiple nations and languages instantaneously, and moreover, is “produced’ not as a physically locatable object, but rather a stream of data one does not purchase and read, but instead accesses and “experiences”? To whom should authorship be attributed when the process of production is shared between multiple individuals? – Warren Liu, “Posthuman Difference: Traveling to Utopia with Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries”

We wanted to implement such an open circuit in our presentation – in which viewers initially code themselves as “users,” each believing they are exercising an individuated “invisible omnipresence” as they navigate through a single implementation of a branching video narrative. Yet their experiences are not truly individuated, their omnipresence is not invisible, and their view is not from nowhere: each viewer’s actions are instantaneously communicated to all other simultaneous viewers. Audio feedback from each viewer’s button clicks are played not just for them, but for everyone, and the virtual occupancy of each of the story’s “rooms” is reported to all viewers in real time. If one of these rooms becomes “crowded” – if its virtual occupancy exceeds that which would be possible in physical, embodied occupancy – a computer-generated audio cue complaining of this “crowdedness” is immediately played for everyone. After reaching the final scene of the story, each viewer is presented with a scoreboard announcing the total number of unique visitors to each of the story’s rooms, which are finally described not in coded abbreviation but in straightforward English. As described by Liu in “Posthuman Difference,” “Programmed interactivity implies that, rather than simply “looking” at an image, users actually “enter” the image, “clicking, zooming, scanning, copying, cutting pasting,” thereby becoming “cybernetic organisms joined in continuous feedback loops and information technologies.” By slowly increasing the visibility of these loops, the viewer is presented with evidence they are not the posthuman-subjective “user” free to observe without being observed themselves; they are instead both surveilled and surveilling, part of the interconnected circuit that enacted key aspects the work they just experienced. The video narrative itself dealt with both the objectification and “subjectification” brought about by the decentralized, multidirectional circuits of the contemporary surveillance gaze, producing quasi-object/subjects. The act of mediated observation can be read as centering the observer and objectifying the observed, but this is incomplete: observing an “object” necessarily separates it from a background, giving it a (subordinated) subjectivity (particularly if defined, as David Barnard-Willis posits, as “identity as content”), and interpreting its “actions” necessarily involves granting it interiority and agency. The collective viewing experience was intended to evoke mass-enacted “surveillance as hobby,” allowing each viewer to track the actions of one of two inanimate objects (inanimate subjects?) through a variety of quotidian tasks and situations. From Reddit threads hoping to deduce who was responsible for planting bombs to the “Mehtologists” described in the epilogue of Transmission¸ there is a mass belief that a group poring over and analyzing a corpus of surveillant information is both pleasurable and productive. But when there is no overarching narrative in that information, no transparent motivation for the (object/subject)’s actions, perhaps not even any agreement on who/what the relevant (object/subject) is at all, this lack of signal amid the noise often results in potent apophenia. Like the hope of a coded message in the “Little Lander” tape, we hoped the bland but discordant canvas of nonhuman objects/subjects conducting boring tasks would lead viewers to embellish with assumptions about their chosen (object/subject)’s motivations, interiority, or purpose. In the navigation links presented by the interface, we hoped to introduce a feeling of “choiceless choice”: two different options that would be understood as legible to many people, but perhaps not the viewer. We wrote roleplaying game-style prompts for each choice of scene, translated each into 10 random languages, and animated the interface so they would change twice per second whenever the viewer moved their mouse. We wanted to prompt viewers to ask whether any choice is truly available if they aren’t able to understand what they’re choosing, and to contemplate the implications of choices rendered choiceless by means of a language barrier. We also implemented these branching choices using a dynamic script rather than through linked HTML pages – meaning it was impossible for viewers to undo a choice by pressing their browser’s back button. This was partially inspired by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’ “Traveling to Utopia,” or the feeling it evoked for us of being limited to only absorbing a subset of a work due to its simultaneous presentation or unnavigability.
As it was presented in class, we noticed how our work enacted an experience that was simultaneously shared and unshared: it was created and experienced collectively, but viewers, separated from each other by the use of headphones, were not immediately aware of the aspects of their experience that were collective. As N. Katherine Hayles notes in “Electronic Literature: What Is It?”, sites of meaning emerge in interactive works through “the differences, overlaps, and convergences of the instantiations compared with one another.” By enforcing simultaneous sharedess and unsharedness, we intended to weaponize both these differences and overlaps in in order to problematize the binary between observer and and observed that permeate discussions of surveillance, of human subjectivity, and indeed throughout all non-interactive media.

Works Cited and Consulted:

Deleuze, Gilles. "Postscript on the Societies of Control." October 59 (1992): 3-7.

Galič, Maša, Tjerk Timan, and Bert-Jaap Koops. "Bentham, Deleuze and beyond: an overview of surveillance theories from the panopticon to participation." Philosophy & Technology 30.1 (2017): 9-37.

Liu, Warren. "Posthuman Difference: Traveling to Utopia with Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries." Journal of Transnational American Studies 4.1 (2012).

Barnard-Wills, David. Surveillance and identity: Discourse, subjectivity and the state. Routledge, 2016.

Abad-Santos, Alexander. “Reddit's 'Find Boston Bombers' Founder Says 'It Was a Disaster' but 'Incredible'.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 30 Oct. 2013, www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/04/reddit-find-boston-bombers-founder-interview/315987/.

Kunzru, Hari. Transmission. Penguin, 2005.

Hayles, N. Katherine. "How we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. 1999." (1999).

Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries. “Traveling to Utopia.” BUST DOWN THE DOORS!, www.yhchang.com/TRAVELING_TO_UTOPIA.html.

Solomon, Dana. "No User Required: Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries and Digital Humanist Inquiry." (2009).

Hayles, N. Katherine. “Electronic Literature: What Is It?” Electronic Literature: What Is It?, The Electronic Literature Organization, 5 Aug. 2005, www.eliterature.org/pad/elp.html.