Short Study 1 -
Observer or Observed?: Micro/Macro Surveillance (Due week 2, Jan 26)
Issues:
Who is looking? Why? Where?
Surveillance
has been an object of cultural fascination since the mid-twentieth century. At
first, it was seen as a menacing specter of government or corporate power, but
in recent years surveillance has begun to appear increasingly harmless,
friendly, even desirable. Surveillance is now represented not only as a
technology of military and police control but also as a form of entertainment
(reality TV) and as a way of making life more convenient (dashboard GPS
devices). This shift has paralleled a dramatic rise in the sophistication and
pervasiveness of surveillance through such technologies as Web cams, biometric
identification systems, geographic information systems, and data mining.
On-line study: find images of ways in which
you are being looked at.
History/Theory:
Contol of the gaze. Jeremy Bentham
The Panopticon
Does privacy exist?
Visionary, 1997
Sally Weare
Macro:
The Iconos space satellite was bought by the US Military- this private company
had supplied views of the earth to the public worldwide. It has 1 meter
resolution - that is 3 feet - enough to see what you are wearing! "The
world's most powerful civilian spacecraft", built by Lockheed Martin for
Space Imaging is now a US Military craft.
What are
the ramifications of this purchase? Why do some want to see, while others want
us not to see? During the 1960's & 70's, activists used the saying
"the whole world is watching" when photographic and video cameras
were used for documentation of events for civil and human rights. We now have
the tools to see almost everywhere on the face of the globe, but we do not have
access to the visual data.
http://terraserver.homeadvisor.msn.com
http://www.nasa.gov/gallery/index.html
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/
Articles of interest:
http://www.artistsnetwork.org/news/news47.html
http://www.eomonline.com/Common/currentissues/June01/thierry.htm
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/space_sentinels_011010-1.html
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/planetearth/satellite_firefighters_010821-1.html
INTERNATIONAL / ASIA PACIFIC
Flexing
Muscle, China Destroys Satellite in Test
By WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER
The successful test of an antisatellite weapon
signals China’s resolve to play a major role in military space activities.
Micro:
Wherever
humans go microbes will surely follow, and the Space Station is no exception.
The National Library of Medicine's
Visible Human Project
The Visible Human Project is the creation of anatomically detailed,
three-dimensional
representations of normal male and female human bodies. The Visible Human
Project has generated over 18000 digitized sections of the body.
The Visible
Human Project - Visible Gallery
... Visible Human Project ® Gallery. The collection of images appearing here is
a small sample of images from the Visible Human Project ® male dataset. ...