If I have to be brutally honest with myself, I must admit that I was not and am not satisfied that we had really advanced inquiry into the questions that really intrigued me within Surveillance Studies. I neither think nor feel that we really troubled the questions that animate my research (“How are data made to mean?” “Where is queer pleasure and queer power?”). Putting aside, for a moment, the question of whether my sense of success or failure has any real bearing on the project’s value as research, I’d like to explore how the method may have been improved.
There were at least three impediments to this project attaining the status of “research.” The first was the simple lack of time. Under duress to produce a show, to have something “finished” in two weeks, we torqued the research process to fit the theory. Instead of allowing new concepts to emerge from the collaborative generation of scenes, scenarios, and events, we imposed dramatic form on good old standbys of surveillance theory. For example, we imposed rather than discovered the outsiders’ pleasures in the spectacle. That is, we structured the spectacles so that the outsider could have a critical view, rather than an immersive experience. I’m not at all sure that this is really how surveillance positions the vagrant, the unclassifiable, the unknowable. But it seemed theoretically justifiable and we had to do something. With more time, with less pressure from the opening night curtain, we could have spent more time developing theoretically informed play, and allowed that play to reflexively inform the theory.
We fell back not only on established theory, but on established disciplinary power relations. I was able, as the professor, the Principal Investigator, the signer of the checks, and the oldest man in the room, to have my will. The title and the structure of the piece were negotiated among us all, but they were negotiated on my terms. I like to think that given more time, I would have welcomed more robust conflict.
The second impediment was that the team lacked a necessary element of domain knowledge of data capture, analysis, and visualization. We wanted to explore how data are given voice and made to speak by interested social actors within institutions using a certain set of economic, cultural, and technical resources. But we found it beyond our ability to actually work with real time data, so we made it all up to illustrate relations and phenomenon we had already theorized. All data gathering and analysis ended up as smoke-and-mirrors theatrics. We had originally intended to collect some kind of simple biometric in real time from each audience member. One thought was to place pressure sensitive resisters under the seat cushions, collect and display the data produced, then ask the audience to engage in arguments over its meaning. But we couldn’t figure out how to set that up to reliably produce and deliver any kind of data to argue over. We then tried to set up timers at the entrance to each of the spectacles, measuring how long each audience member spent there. We could, perhaps, have produced and gathered that data in real time, but not nearly in time to do any kind of useful analysis. So we relied on cheap theatricks: we gave much show of gathering data, but the categories we produced, and the privileges we granted or denied on the basis of those categories, were determined beforehand and chosen for theatrical effect.
This was not a fatal flaw to the project’s legitimacy. There was a great value in simply playing with, extrapolating on, and making ridiculous the quite familiar everyday categorizations were are all subject to. We were able set up moments to confuse, disorient, and re-orient the audience, but with more skill, we could perhaps have given the audience agency to intervene.
Having statistical expertise on the team would also have given us another source of creative friction. During the rehearsal process, the multidisciplinary composition of our team frequently offered a frisson of creative dissonance. As we explored in our own languages and through our own expertise in the processes of disciplining – of being read, judged, and corrected within imposed and extracted grammars – we engaged productive conceptual conflicts. Michael described his “Blind Painter” spectacle as an exploration of the idea that “all surveillance is haptic.” I didn’t know what he meant by that, and the rehearsals gave us an opportunity to negotiate that meaning and contextualize it within the piece as a whole. Monty pushed back continually on my expertise with his own sense of how surveillance worked – of, for example, the aims and techniques of Google. And I pushed back to see the problems he was having getting his equipment to “read” the movements of the dancers’ bodies was exactly the issue we were seeking to explore. Speaking solely for my self, at this point in my surveillance research I would have loved to have that sort of conflict with someone who was really trained in data analytics.
Finally, I believe that the project would have fared better as surveillance research if it had been more carefully designed. Were I to do this again, I would try to engage a research team of improvisors and clowns, develop more precise research questions that addressed specific areas of tension and conflict, and develop the gaming structures to elicit and elaborate those tensions, perhaps using the I Ching.
Using the I Ching
Before this project, I had used the I Ching in an attempt to knock myself off-kilter and to create a process that demanded that I approach surveillance situations in unfamiliar and uncomfortable ways. I developed scenarios by invoking random processes. I used these random techniques first to create characters who were amalgams of theoretically informed proclivities and subject positions, then to set those characters in conflict. I drew cards to determine why each character wanted to be seen, why they wanted to watch, and how they liked to see and be seen (that is, in which space or mode of surveillance they were most at home). I then consulted the I Ching for the shape of the scene – the settings, motivations, events, and trajectories of the characters. My hope was that this would mobilize theoretical constructs in a formal but novel way and see them through conflict using the disciplines of playwriting. If the scene “worked,” then a kind of validity would have been attained. However, I found the form too constraining. I found myself contorting credibility in my attempt to be faithful to the trajectories suggested by the I Ching. Although I abandoned this particular attempt at using this technique, I still found it full of rich possibility, and I intend to take it up again, perhaps as a framework for improvisation rather than playwriting.
Work and Play at the Threshold of Legibility 