You Are Here & Surveillance Is Everywhere! [2013]
From the series State Spectrum

Two photographs (with related video and performance work)

This work looks at the architecture of power: the systems, spaces, and invisible networks that shape how we move, behave, and understand ourselves. It began in 2013 and follows a question that has only grown louder since: what happens to a person when they are treated as data?

Surveillance doesn’t only watch from the outside. It also trains us to watch ourselves. When visibility becomes constant—through cameras, platforms, and automated systems—we start to adjust: what we share, what we hide, how we speak, how we appear. The work asks what it means to become a node in an algorithmic calculation, and how that shift changes our sense of self.

Who designs these systems of observation? Who benefits from them? And when surveillance becomes ordinary, do we begin to police our own visibility—and each other’s?

“I am vigilant of my ideas and yours, and how we spread them.”

The work is in dialogue with Michel Foucault’s thinking on surveillance, discipline, and power, and connects to present-day questions about data control and algorithmic governance.

Further reading:

• Naomi Klein (The Guardian, 2020)
  
• Colin Koopman (Aeon, 2016)
  

Keywords: Surveillance, Panopticon, Power, Discipline, Biopolitics, Data, Algorithmic Governance