Thursday, April 22, 2010

A Sight for Power.


*Downtown Santa Ana Art Walk
Ohi Rucecky Collective Installation


our new installation featuring nothing shocking, upsetting, or offensive for any self respecting institutional square. do you still look up to your big brother?


*MaNifEsTO - Official Propaganda:
(Available in print and hand touched, for la escuela vieja.
Us PpD):


“the new methods of power whose operation is not ensured by right but by technique, not by law but by normalization, not by punishment but by control…”

-Michel Foucault

A Sight for Power is an exploration of the camera specifically employed as a mechanism for surveillance. Interactive, live, site-specific closed circuit video feeds feature appropriated footage containing situations of institutional power actively forcing itself upon the individual interspersed with that of routine social behavior. This dynamic of visual disparity between scenes of brutality and banal watching is indicative of surveillance's potential to be a site for power in the vein of knowledge production and information gathering commonly exploited by the institutional apparatus of the state.

By exposing and appropriating this means to control, it is our goal to re-direct the flow of power stemming from the use of surveillance by engaging in a critical unmasking of an apparatus typically utilized for coercion. We aim to question, subvert, and comment on the dominant use of the camera as an implied panopticon which silently enforces conduct and behavior based simply on the presence of its gaze.