The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part I: Filters
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Philip Tabor
In Voyeur, an interactive video, the viewer plays the part of a snooping
private eye. 30 Any young boy, peeping through a window at the halfdressed
girl next door, is preparing to confront the enemy, maybe years from
now, and acquit himself well. So is she, if she knows or imagines she is surveyed.
The surveillance camera scans time as well as space for trace of future
trouble. Foreseen is forearmed.
We are gun/cameras. Our heads swivel on our shoulders and from
our eyes dart—familiarly aggressive tropes—piercing and penetrating
looks. Photographers say the camera loves some people but not others. We
need no cyborgian robo-erotic fantasy to feel flattered and stimulated when
the camera lovingly tracks us. A famous newspaper photograph shows an
unconscious man lying on the ground, attended by doctors. He has been
pulled from the sea and may die. Kneeling by his side is his fiancée. In the
photograph she’s just noticed the camera, so she smiles brilliantly at it and
adjusts her swimsuit. 31
THE SHIELD
The videocam is a shield. The eyes of Medusa turn to stone those who look
directly at them: her gaze objectifies its target. The three Graeae (literally,
“the gray ones”) are her old sisters, with just one eye and tooth between
them. Age, that is, holds in fragile monopoly the instruments of aggression
and surveillance. To augment his strength, Perseus forces them to reveal
where the technologies of speed and concealment may be found: Mercury’s
winged sandals and Hades’ helmet of invisibility. Thus equipped he counters
Medusa’s gaze with indirect surveillance of his own, taking care to track
Medusa only in her image reflected in his shield. And he wins. 32
Detective and spy fiction is based on this archaic mythology of the
chase. Novel readers or film audiences vicariously reenact the rituals of surveillance,
imagining themselves at once both the concealed watcher and the
exposed watched. Anxious that an unaided body and mind might not suffice
to unbalance the game in their favor, the audience in fantasy adopts the
logic of the arms race and seeks prosthetic help in technology. Thus the central
role played in fictions by the hardware of surveillance and countersurveillance:
The Conversation, Blade Runner, Blue Thunder, The Silence of the
Lambs (remember the nightsight glasses), Sneakers, Demolition Man, and so
on. 33 Thus, too, the first commandment of street tech: “Use technology before
it’s used on you.” 34