Visual slight of hand and the narrative format -

The movie “Look” demonstrates the basic fears of technological change– the fear of documentation, the use of our images, but in particular, the idea that they can be integrated into a vast conspiracy of some sort. The concern is not just that ‘our’ images are getting away from ‘us,’ but also those images suddenly become part of a catalogued and indexed centralized machine - that someone takes our casual gestures and removes them from their context to use them against us. The movie trailer uses a visual slight of hand by positioning the viewer behind all the cameras which surround our lives. The assumption is that the technology works in an unhindered, transparent way that reassembles messages in a coherent way for the ‘audience’ of either security systems or other cultures. Video as a format is extremely tied to the movie/television format - narrative coherence, problem/solution, etc. In particular, this lends the impression of videotaping as a breakdown of our ability to manage persona. Essentially, we want to be able to create a school persona (character), a work character, a home character... all these are personas we project towards specific people and places with an eye to their specific interests in us. The fear of surveilence technology, shown in the trailers for the film essentially concern the interruption of voyeurism on activites we normally consider private, because they concern our ability to manage our lives (stealing as subverting power, shopping and the relation of a parent to their child, attempting to get away with murder...). All concern managing our presentation of face to specific people, the camera becomes the third person who subverts this frame. It breaks down the barriers between the presentation of different forms of face, and forces a coherence onto our lives.

Fortunately, the power of the image will be the failure of video surveillance technology. The perception that the image discloses all potentially to an over-reliance on camera technology, which can be subverted in many ways. The Rodney King video demonstrates why this is true - the super-persuasive image which should have been a cinch-win for King, turned against him when reassembled and dissected. Other basic media-theory questions undermine the power of video surveillance - the importance of framing images (both ideologically and physically), as well as the ideological position of the reader as the key to meaning of video.

There are plenty of ideological slights of hand that go into making video surveillance 'work.' Each of them can be carefully undermined in their own way, which is the untold story of media 'progress.'

Duncan