Big Brother is Watching You

For our Visual Research Methods course, Elaine and I worked together to uncover the experiences and reactions of people who are filmed without consent – examining the aspect of video surveillance.

We followed three groups of people around with a camera until the point where they were consciously aware of the camera.  At this point we stopped and asked them three questions.  We asked them: If they were aware of being filmed? How they thought they were being represented? And as soon as they were aware of the camera what they changed about they moved/looked.

We first interviewed Pablo, mainly because he was sitting next to us.  It took him a few minutes to realize the camera was on him before visibly getting flustered looking at and away at the camera as in embarrassment.

 

The second interview was with the ‘guy from the cafeteria’ . Interestingly, even though he said that he was not bothered by being filmed, there were blatant instances of him fixing his glasses, wiping his shirt, and shrugging away form the camera.  His body language alone was symbolic of his discomfort. He also immediately thought he was doing something wrong and that the purpose of our filming was surveillance as a type of secret police – a fear that we had found something amiss and were sure to report it with our footage.

Our third interview represented self-reflexivity. While being interviewed ourselves by another group, we were ‘secretly’ filming them. Elaine, in answering the questions of the interview, told them straight out that she was using her camera to interview them, yet they did not notice until after our interview part was over.  After realizing they were being filmed, the group was visibly flustered, although Jung-Hsien stated that she was impressed we were reversing the gaze.

After completing this project we were left to reflect…

What is the purpose in recording people without their consent? What does it prove, investigate, answer?

When would we use tactics such as this and what concerns are there to think about such as ethics – are we putting anyone (us included) in danger? What is happening to the subject in terms of representation? Are they being realistically portrayed or are we sublimating some form of representation on them in the way in which we frame the “hidden” camera and then in editing?