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By Olga Panades Massanet
There is a fine line between mounting a campaign based on legitimate political dissent and demonstrating a heretofore unknown level of paranoia-induced madness. If Olga Panades Massanet has not crossed that line, she is certainly dancing on it...naked...while howling at the full moon.
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Beginning with authentic concerns regarding the societal effects of the surveillance state, Massanet's work veers into the realm of utter absurdity when she posts signs warning of vomiting cameras and spreads goo on the sidewalks beneath their watchful lenses.
"Cameras vomit for excess of data. Excess of data produces slime, malformations, transmutation of matter. Beyond a threshold there is a qualitative jump. Video files turn cellular, creatures begin to form and cameras start to puke. The fear they generate is transmuted. Cameras are poisoned," she explains. Ummm, no.
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Additional photographs, of a series of fish lanced through with colorful pencils and "invading" toy parachuetters hanging about the city, acheive little more in the way of making any coherent point regarding the intrusive nature of an ever watchful authoritarian state. With her fake vomit, dead fish and toy parachuetters, Massanet trivializes an extraordinarily consequential argument. Constant surveillance creates a poisonous atmosphere of tension and fear -- an atmosphere government agents feed upon to further the ever-expanding power of the body politic. However, the seemingly psychotic ramblings of individuals who position themselves on the fringes of societal norms only serve to facilitate the ease with which officials manage to marganilize dissent.
1 comment:
Vomiting CCTV cameras was an attempt to work on the fact that surveillance cameras have a power that goes beyond their effectiveness. Like in the panopticon, whether there is someone watching or not, whether the camera is actually recording or not, the system of surveillance is always working. The intervention do work on the absurd, I have to admit, but I tried to detonate those security systems by pointing to their weakness. Surveillance fails. I wanted to move away from the all-seeing-eye boring discourse.
The fishes on barbed wire tried to work on the attack of the impossible, to exacerbate the constant warnings about unlikely disasters. I'm glad you picked on the project anyway and it made me think what you said at the end: that this project contribute to acceptance. That's something I hadn't thought of, thanks for that.
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