JULIA SCHER Julia Scher, Wonderland, 2018 | Page 45

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TAPING THOUSANDS OF HOURS […]
M. DIETRICH
“Your warm data harvesting is
important to us. We appreciate
the attention.”
– Julia Scher, Predictive
Engineering3 at San Francisco
Museum of Art, 2016.
Aiming at the exposure of dangers
and ideologies, as well as the
need of monitoring systems, Julia
Scher’s work explores social
control dynamics in the public realm
and takes the forms of interactive
installations, reformulated surveil-
lance, site tours, interventions,
performances, photography, writing,
web work, linear video, and sound.
She addresses the psychosocial
implications of surveillance,
the poetry of power, seduction and
control, and why we are still
taping thousands of hours of park-
ing lots “just to be sure.”
Growing up in Hollywood, Julia Scher is a professor of
Multimedia Performance and Surveillance Architectures at KHM
in Cologne. Scher recently exhibited Occupational Placement as
part of the group exhibition Enemy of the Stars at KW Institute
for Contemporary Art in Berlin. Originally shot in 1990 for the
Wexner Center for the Arts the work juxtaposes sequences from
live, permanent security systems, temporary cameras as well as pre-
recorded videos.
MAURIN DIETRICH
In France, there was a recent trial where a concerned father in-
stalled video cameras in his home to survey the babysitter of his
young son, since he thought she didn’t treat him well. What the
tapes showed was that she was having her boyfriend over while she
was supposed to watch the son. She later found out that she had
been videotaped and went to court with it. E.M. Forster wrote that
it’s “a serious thing to have been watched. We all radiate something
curiously intimate when we believe ourselves to be alone.” Is it still
a “serious thing” to have been watched in a time when we have mul-
tiple cameras constantly around us in our private rooms, as well as
in public spaces?
JULIA SCHER
For me the question that I ask myself in relation to being watched
is the nature of privacy and how that term is defined relative to sur-
veillance. Privacy was never a kind of guaranteed raw material of
urban life and our expectation of privacy might change as surveil-
lance technology moves on. The old civil law was: You can’t have
a space surveilled unless you are notified. You can survey if you put
up a sign saying, “Warning: This space is under surveillance,” but
without prior notification it was illegal, depending on the nation-
state location. Now, I expect everywhere I am there is going to be
at least a camera and a microphone, but in the future every place
will have that inherent expectation of surveillance. This also relates
to technology and the form it takes. Thirty years ago, the cameras
were so large that you could not easily overlook them, and they
were also pricey. But there is also an issue raised by lawyer Themis
Michos that I know which is: There never was privacy. Privacy is
a middle-class construct and development. In the cave human’s
time, you did not have an expectation of privacy, but you could go
somewhere (hide behind a rock) with a presumption of privacy.
In a constructed space, in architecture, in urban space, that notion
has changed. Now surveillance is socially acceptable. It’s packaged,
it’s advertised, it’s sold. Furthermore, we see that we play a role in
it by being “responsible users.”
MD
One of the oldest fables associated with being surveilled or
watched is Boy with Thorn, a Greco-Roman bronze sculpture of a
boy withdrawing a thorn from the sole of his foot. It shows a boy,
maybe the age of twelve, who graciously sits on a stone, bending
over to pull a thorn out of his feet. At that moment, he looks up and
realizes he is being watched. Kleist writes about that as the moment
of the boy losing his unconscious grace upon reflection. Your work,
however, is not that one-sided, but ambiguous about the realization
of being watched and also considers that a potentially productive
moment. Looking at younger generations who grew up with the
constant presence of a gaze, do you consider the notion of cameras
has changed? Do you think a younger generation will be more edu-
cated with that moment of being watched?
JS
I don’t think they are more educated in the older analog way.
The are just more familiar with the machines. The devices no longer
disrupt anything, since the tools are so present that no one could
potentially notice the moment of grace before reflection, before
seeing oneself being seen. It’s also uncanny that none of those ma-
chines have sharp edges that could hurt you. All our devices, our
iPhones, laptops, tablets are smooth with their soft edges. They are
harmless; they are all easy for children to use. This is a great thing
and a horrible provocation. That it seems they can’t hurt anyone—
too big to swallow and too soft to be injured if they fall on our face.
I see that as a kind of perversity, that it’s harmless to take a position
where you are effortlessly in a flow of images and sounds that are
not only yours but are shared by a community you don’t know and
might never know.
I see this as the moment you can’t undo. I don’t know if we are
being out-clevered by the machines, but it’s the path into artificial
intelligence. Larger subjects, communal—maybe freundlich, maybe
not—with the same kind of characteristics of good and evil, high or
low. But somehow I imagine it more like the Wild West. Your im-
age may travel, will be reproduced, violated, and used without your
permission in ways we cannot imagine now.
MD
Your body as a battleground. Did the gaze—someone watching
you—ever have a positive connotation?
JS
I saw this on television! On television there were positive in-
stances of being watched and being seen. There were positive
outcomes for people being seen by a camera. Growing up in Los
Angeles, there was a strange mix of television, film, and contem-
porary art. The idea of being scrutinized came up in music in the
1960-70s all the time. Being surveilled a certain way, being watched
by non-benevolent forces and how to counteract that. At the same
time, the government introduced surveillance as a tool to record and
prevent crime. I grew up in a context between watchfulness to pro-
tect, to hurt, to stop action, and watchfulness to kill.
I also had an obsession with watchfulness much earlier since my
mom did surveillance on me when I was a child. The notion of being
surveilled is one of my early childhood memories, but from a very
young age, I remember that this gaze was unlikeable.
MD
Throughout (art) history, the gaze has been that of a male
looking at a woman. In what way does your work appropriate
and disrupt that? We still mostly have images produced that speak
about and for male desire with very few ideas of what form a fe-
male gaze can take. Could the gaze of a camera potentially be a
non-gendered one and how is vision and watching re-organized
in your work?
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