On the way to Muskoka, sharp-eyed drivers might spy trees that aren’t quite trees. They’re too tall, too straight, too green, and for a good reason: they’re actually cell phone towers, designed to blend into the natural landscape.
In the city, cell towers are on buildings, topping off towers, even barnacled to church spires, and the Department of Unusual Certainties knows where they all are. As part of their City of Total Awareness project, Christopher Pandolfi and Simon Rabinyuk mapped every cell tower in the Golden Horseshoe area, creating a physical map of the digital world. “Maps aren’t just about what you see,” they claimed. “They’re about what you understand.”
Pandolfi and Rabinyuk were part of Inter/Access Gallery’s three-part brunch series on location, which wrapped up this past weekend with a look at the culture of surveillance. Inter/Access, which Programming Coordinator Marissa Neave describes as “a gallery and a studio dedicated to the cultural space of technology,” hosted both the Department of Unusual Certainties, as well as artist and architect Scott Sorli, in a two-hour about how surveillance—its practice, aesthetic, physical spaces, and how people behave when they’re being watched—interact with art.
Sorli’s presentation focused primarily on the interaction of surveillance technologies with the people it surrounds. As an example, he offered the requirement that passport photos present a neutral face because it makes those photos easier to machines to scan in search of potentially incriminating “micro-expressions” as people pass through border crossings. He also discussed Google’s practice of deliberately fuzzing out certain areas of their popular Google Maps, and compared a grainy aerial shot of Ramallah’s downtown bus station with an image of Toronto’s bus station that was so clear that individual people could be seen. Sorli seemed most interested in where seemingly neutral technology had been mitigated by human control, and examining what those incidents—what he called “glitches”—for clues about who controls the technology.
The Department of Unusual Certainties focused on their recent interrogation of where digital spaces meet the physical world: those cell towers, for example, or images of Toronto’s Internet Exchange. “It’s not interesting to think that these worlds are separate,” Pandolfi said. Their exploration of mapping where tools of surveillance are located in the physical world “helps us understand what was being tapped.”
“It’s important to present discourse like this in an inviting and informal way,” says Neave. “It’s an endless topic, and surveillance will always exist.” Throughout both presentations, the room was full of thoughtfully nodding heads, the questions from audience members after ranged from asking about aesthetic implications to artistic process. The brunch series, which started last year, is part of Inter/Access’s larger mandate to make art accessible to a larger audience. “The topic of conversation wasn’t always explicitly about art, but if you’re interested in art and ideas, they can kind of percolate in people’s minds.” This final event dovetails nicely with Inter/Access’s upcoming
month-long workshop about drones and drone art, during which Neave anticipates will raise questions about how the new technology can be used in cities. “I really want to make a space for people to be curious and learn more.”