Short Study 1 -

Observer or Observed?: Micro/Macro Surveillance (Due week 2, Jan 26)

Concepts: Surveillance- macro/micro, the digital gaze

Issues: Who is looking? Why? Where?

History/Theory: Contol of the gaze. Jeremy Bentham The Panopticon

Does privacy exist? Using an image from either global surveillance satellites or internal visualizations of the physical body create a visual statement about a specific geographic or physical area that has personal significance to you. Use scale- take two different photographs (for instance one of a satellite image and one of you or your house or residence). Scale them unusually so that new meanings emerge which challenge our perception of the accepted world. Color - selectively recolor specific aspects of this image for emphasis.

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.

Image resources:

http://terraserver.homeadvisor.msn.com

http://www.terraserver.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://english.pravda.ru/main/2001/07/14/10131.html

http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/space_sentinels_011010-1.html

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/planetearth/satellite_firefighters_010821-1.html

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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. ...