I’ve been heavily expressing my ideas and questioning the idea of a utopia, can we essentially attain a utopian future? Are we destined for a dystopia like science fiction portrays? My surveillance art is influenced by sci fi fiction like, A Clockwork Orange, 1984 and A Brave New World. My intention for this piece is to ask these questions in hopes that participants will create their own narratives and ideas about surveillance in relation to their own lives. We have all encountered surveillance cameras and have even grown somewhat accustomed to them, not giving them a second thought, but through my exploration and research into the surveillance art movement; I’ve opened my eyes to new ideas and concepts to explore. Surveillance art is not simply an aesthetic category; it is a thematic mode of creative engagement.

The motion graphics in the piece are meant to give viewers a glimpse into my aesthetic; bright, colorful and even playful compositions are used in a hypnotic and enticing way. The ideas of techno-social control and screen therapy; like the “Ludovico Technique,” from A Clockwork Orange, or the artwork Julia Scher Always There – Surveillance Bed, 2000 can be considered as jump off points in this exploration of Surveillance Art.     

Other narratives begin to emerge as I go deeper through the landscape of the surveillance art movement; personal data, privacy, ephemeral archives and media are also more aspects of the broader topic that I’ve only begun to touch on, stirring up even more questions and examining methods of how we are being monitored. New technologies strongly influence utopian and dystopian stories when they are unusual or powerful enough to change how people see the world or understand reality. I want to take the affordances of interactive systems to focus on the creative aspects of surveillance art.