Omniscience Co.Taken from the didactic for Laresa Kosloff’s Stock Exchange, currently on display at the Buxton Contemporary Art Museum:
//Laresa Kosloff’s [[Super 8]] video works juxtapose human movement with the geometries of the built environment. Screened on a circular loop, Stock Exchange roves across the hard vertical planes of Melbourne’s [[stock exchange building]] like an omniscient surveillance camera. Scanning across internal glass walls, the [[egalitarianism]] and efficiency of the open plan office is reframed by a sense of [[Foucauldian panopticism]] that highlights the ever-present observation of corporate culture, and the never-ending cycle of capital and sleeplessness of the [[finance sector]]. Though human interactions are taking place, time and narrative are dissolved, recalling the legacies of an industrial era where clock and labour time became interchangeable units, and the personal identities and experiences of individual workers were subsumed by the systems and processes of the [[productive organisation]].//
(set: $location to false)
(set: $microphone to false)
(set: $email to false)
(set: $camera to false)
(set: $files to false)The Super 8 film format was released in 1965 for feature film and home use. Compared to its predecessor and close relative, Regular 8, Super 8 film has cells that are both wider and taller by nearly 1 mm, meaning it’s able to capture much larger pictures in much higher quality.
The camera is a tool of surveillance. The camera draws a line in the sand and calls you a voyeur. You cannot ever know who is going to be watching on the other side of the line, not forever.
[[You are watched.|Cycle One]]
Egalitarianism means the belief that all people are equal and deserve to have equal rights or opportunities. Here, it implies that everybody in the office is granted equal amounts of desk space, sunlight, and privacy. Of course, it doesn’t mean everybody gets all the privacy they need: it means they get none at all. They are constantly being watched: by their peers, by their superiors, and by anybody with a [[Super 8]] camera peering through the window.
[[You are watched.|Cycle One]]Stock-straight steel-beamed skybreakers and coked-up cold-cocked risk takers. Outside, Kosloff’s [[Super 8]] camera watches them like the boss man up in the penthouse office. Bet on the horses or bet on the stocks, both are going to take you running on a rollercoaster rail ride that’ll blow back your tie and dampen your crotch. The associations between stock traders and the wild high life run as deep as cocaine can be piled onto a glass ceiling being broken through. Films like The Wolf of Wall Street solidified this image into toxic masculinity canon. Being a day trader was suddenly the aspiration of all sigma males everywhere: something to be sold to you by Hollywood and Jordan Belfort or whichever multi-level marketing scheme huckster you were fool enough to fall for.
The thing about masculinity is that, like femininity, it’s a performance: it has an audience ([[society|Foucauldian panopticism]]) and a performer (anybody unlucky enough to be pressured into it). To be masculine or feminine is to be watched.
[[You are watched.|Cycle One]]//Money// (Pink Floyd, 1973)
Money
Get away
You get a good job with more pay and you're okay
Money
It's a gas
Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash
New car, caviar, four star, daydream
Think I'll buy me a football team
Money
Get back
I'm alright, Jack, keep your hands off of my stack
Money
It's a hit
Don't give me that do goody good bullshit
I'm in the high-fidelity first-class traveling set
And I think I need a Lear jet
Money
It's a crime
Share it fairly, but don't take a slice of my pie
Money
So they say
Is the root of all evil today
But if you ask for a rise
It's no surprise that they're giving none away
Away, away, away
Away, away, away
[[I was in the right|Cycle One]]
Yes, absolutely in the right
I certainly was in the right
Yeah, I was definitely in the right, that geezer was cruisin' for a bruisin'
Yeah!
Why does anyone do anything?
I don't know, I was really drunk at the time
Just telling him it was in, he could get it in number two
He was asking why it wasn't coming up on freight eleven
And after, I was yelling and screaming and telling him why
It wasn't coming up on freight eleven
Paul-Michel Foucault is possibly the most influential thinker of the 20th Century. A philosopher (amongst other things), he spent most of his life theorising about and interrogating the innate power structures that govern society as we know it. His theories have influenced all manner of academic fields, from feminism to criminology and from Marxism to psychology.
Foucauldian [[panopticism]] is the theory that the power that oppresses us is internal: that we are the instruments of our own surveillance, and that under that surveillance we act as we feel we are expected to.
[[You are watched.|Cycle One]]
There's a lot to unpack in this passage. Annotations have been provided for your illumination and education, for better or worse. Adding layers to a piece can change the way you see it: it might not even be the same piece after you read them.
[[I'm watching.|Cycle Two]]
The panopticon is a prison. Specifically, a style of prison designed by English philosopher [[Jeremy Bentham]]. It features a ring of cells, with the openings facing inwards, and a tower in the centre of the ring. Inside the tower presides a single guard, charged with watching the prisoners. However, due to the nature of the tower and the cells, the prisoners in said cells cannot know at any time whether they are being watched by the guard or not. The theory goes that the prisoners will constantly behave as if they are being watched, because they cannot know they aren’t.
The prisoners in a panopticon are being watched.
[[You are watched.|Foucauldian panopticism]]
[[Pages seen: {x}|Cycle Two]]
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) was an English philosopher. His most notable contribution to the field of philosophical study was founding of utilitarianism, the idea that “the greatest happiness of the greatest number [of people] is the true measure of right or wrong”. Even by today’s standards, he would be considered remarkably politically progressive, advocating for equal rights, the abolition of slavery and capital punishment, separation of church and state, and the decriminalisation of homosexuality.
As part of his campaign against capital punishment, he campaigned fiercely for penal reform. His saw the panopticon as key to the new prison system, borrowing the design from his brother — who had imagined it as a new layout for labour sites.
[[You are watched.|panopticism]]
Taken from the didactic for Laresa Kosloff’s Stock Exchange, currently on display at the Buxton Contemporary Art Museum:
//Laresa Kosloff’s Super 8 video works juxtapose [[human movement]] with the geometries of the built environment. Screened on a circular loop, Stock Exchange roves across the hard vertical planes of Melbourne’s stock exchange building like an omniscient [[surveillance camera]]. Scanning across internal glass walls, the egalitarianism and efficiency of the open plan office is reframed by a sense of [[Foucauldian panopticism|Microphone]] that highlights the ever-present observation of [[corporate culture]], and the never-ending cycle of capital and sleeplessness of the finance sector. Though human interactions are taking place, time and narrative are dissolved, recalling the legacies of an industrial era where clock and labour time became interchangeable units, and the personal identities [5] and experiences of individual workers were subsumed by the systems and processes of the productive organisation.//Grant {Website Name} access to location tracking services? (Website Name) may be able to:
* Track you
[[Yes|Speaker]]/[[No|Speaker]]
(set: $location to true)
(set: $microphone to false)
(set: $email to false)
(set: $camera to false)
(set: $files to false)Grant {Website Name} access to camera? (Website Name) may be able to:
* Watch you
[[Yes|Speaker]]/[[No|Speaker]]
(set: $location to false)
(set: $microphone to false)
(set: $email to false)
(set: $camera to true)
(set: $files to false)Grant {Website Name} access to your email address? (Website Name) may be able to:
* Read your private correspondences
[[Yes|Speaker]]/[[No|Speaker]]
(set: $location to false)
(set: $microphone to false)
(set: $email to true)
(set: $camera to false)
(set: $files to false)Grant {Website Name} access to microphone? (Website Name) may be able to:
* Listen to you
[[Yes|Speaker]]/[[No|Speaker]]
(set: $location to false)
(set: $microphone to true)
(set: $email to false)
(set: $camera to false)
(set: $files to false)Grant {Website Name} access to internal files? (Website Name) may be able to :
* Edit your personal files
[[Yes|Speaker]]/[[No|Speaker]]
(set: $location to false)
(set: $microphone to false)
(set: $email to false)
(set: $camera to false)
(set: $files to true)Grant {Website Name} access to your speakers? {Website name} may be able to:
* Play music, sound effects, or other sound files
[[Yes|Permissions granted]]/[[No|Permissions granted]][[Permissions Granted|Cycle Three]]Taken from the didactic for Laresa Kosloff’s Stock Exchange, currently on display at the Buxton Contemporary Art Museum:
//Laresa Kosloff’s Super 8 video works juxtapose human movement with the geometries of the built environment. Screened on a [[circular loop]], Stock Exchange roves across the hard vertical planes of Melbourne’s stock exchange building like an [[omniscient surveillance]] camera. Scanning across internal glass walls, the egalitarianism and efficiency of the open plan office is reframed by a sense of Foucauldian panopticism that highlights the ever-present observation of corporate culture, and the never-ending cycle of capital and sleeplessness of the [[finance sector|sector 2]]. Though human interactions are taking place, time and narrative are dissolved, recalling the legacies of an industrial era where clock and labour time became interchangeable units, and the personal identities and experiences of individual workers were subsumed by the systems and processes of the [[productive organisation|productive 2]].//
A common trick of the TikTok video, editing your videos to loop seamlessly is a design of content creators intended to get you to watch their videos again and again, pumping up engagement and potentially earning them more money. Of course, the algorithm notices when you fall for this trick and tracks your rewatches, storing that data (the video content, the time spent watching it, when in the video you liked it, when you scrolled away) and selling it to the highest bidder. Popular theories hold that TikTok watches you through your camera or listens through your microphones to surveill you constantly, but they don’t need to do that: you are far more predictable (and careless) than you think.
[[You are tracked.|Cycle Three]]
A cookie is a little piece of software that gets installed on your computer every time you open a website. Ostensibly, these are to help offload the computing cost of running said website onto your personal device, thereby ensuring a more seamless navigation experience. In reality, the cookie is a tracking device that personalises your ads by harvesting your personal data and selling it to advertisers. Some more intrusive cookies even go so far as to allow the website access to your (if: $location is true)[location] (if: $camera is true)[camera] (if: $files is true)[files] (if: $email is true)[email] (if: $microphone is true)[microphone] and speaker, a right that that website has no use for and no real reason to ask for, beyond the incessant obligation of the modern era to surveil.
[[You are tracked.|Cycle Three]]//Money// (Pink Floyd, 1973)
Money
Get away
You get a good job with more pay and you're okay
Money
It's a gas
Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash
New car, caviar, four star, daydream
Think I'll buy me a football team
Money
Get back
I'm alright, Jack, keep your hands off of my stack
Money
It's a hit
Don't give me that do goody good bullshit
I'm in the high-fidelity first-class traveling set
And I think I need a Lear jet
Money
It's a crime
Share it fairly, but don't take a slice of my pie
Money
So they say
Is the root of all evil today
But if you ask for a rise
It's no surprise that they're giving none away
Away, away, away
Away, away, away
I was in the right
Yes, absolutely in the right
I certainly was in the right
Yeah, I was definitely in the right, that geezer was cruisin' for a bruisin'
Yeah!
[[Why does anyone do anything?|Cycle Three]]
I don't know, I was really drunk at the time
Just telling him it was in, he could get it in number two
He was asking why it wasn't coming up on freight eleven
And after, I was yelling and screaming and telling him why
It wasn't coming up on freight eleven
The ultimate goal of surveillance is advertising. No more, no less: the complete destruction of privacy is an unfortunate symptom of the eternal pursuit of putting together complete and comprehensive psychological and informational profiles of every single possible target an advertising agency can have. As with global warming, we are suffering from the side effects of the pursuit of profit.
There’s another side effect to this level of surveillance, this lack of privacy: homogeneity. Without privacy, people do not have the space to cultivate individuality. If every move you make is scrutinised, you begin to make the least offensive ones: the ones that others can and do make without reprimand or fear. In a corporate culture, these also tend to be the most productive ones. [[Isn’t that fortunate.|The end]]
[[Clock back in?|Cycle One]]
