[ISEA2015] Paper: Tom Kohut – Towards an Autopoiesis of Surveillance

Abstract (Short paper)

Keywords: Surveillance, autopoiesis, networks, new media art, Foucault, Deleuze, Maturana & Varela, cybernetics, protocol

Surveillance has now become a ubiquitous phenomenon that envelops the globe in an uneven and non-transparent manner. While the work of Foucault (the panopticon and the administration of subjectivities) and Deleuze (the control society with its reliance on communication and marketing) provides powerful tools for understanding the surveillance apparatus, closer attention to its digitally networked nature must be given. To this end, the work of Nancy Paterson’s IXMaps and Julian Oliver and Danja Vasiliev’s PRISM: The Beacon Frame provide morphological samples of the autopoiesis of surveillance. Autopoiesis, a concept related to cybernetics and developed by Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Valera, posits the existence of self-sustaining and regenerating unified systems of relations that are indifferent to their components. Autopoiesis, they argue, is a necessary and sufficient condition to consider a particular system living or otherwise. We speculate at the end of this paper the degree to which the global surveillance apparatus might be considered a living organism, albeit one of our own accidental design, and what the possible implications might be.

  • Tom Kohut, Independent critic and curator, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Tom is an author, critic and curator living in Winnipeg, Canada. He holds an M.A. in English from Queen’s University (Kingston, Ontario) where he specialized in cultural theory and the twentieth-century avant garde. He has written on film, video, new media theory, sound art and bio art in books and journals across Canada and the U.S., as well as for exhibition catalogues for PLATFORM Centre for the Digital and Photographic Arts, Gallery 1C03 (University of Winnipeg) and Video Pool Media Arts Centre. His curated film/video programs have screened in Canada, Europe and Turkey. He is co-editor of Marshall McLuhan and Vilém Flusser’s Aesthetic and Communication Theories Revisited and co-curator of The Age of Catastrophe (Video Pool Media Arts Centre and Actual Gallery, November-December 2015).  independent.academia.edu/TomKohut

Full Text (PDF) p. 239-244