2002 | Multi ATM, BLOCK Gallery, Sydney

Posters on 90gsm A2 poster stock.
Invented warrant “posters” using digitally manipulated images, news articles. Wire, lighting. Multi ATM is concerned with the invisible observer and the observed; the interrelationship between the watcher and the marked. As with the experience of the prisoner within a contained, controlled and artificial environment, we are manipulated and affected thus changed by the visibility of, and indeed surveillance by, street and mall cameras. Surveillance thus becomes a means of social and political control. It is a way for those in power not only to observe but also to control. Whether it is a case of a real or imagined terror is irrelevant; it’s the relationship between the observer and the observed, the oppressor and oppressed – it’s the (imagined) scrutiny that invokes a sense of terror.

Networked societies are surveillance societies – dependent on information infrastructures (networks, databases, cross-referencing, online collection, networks for digital imaging). This means that no one is exempt from the gaze that records, checks, and sorts. At the monitor, in the taxi, street, at work – everywhere we are tracked “…like the surveillance camera that pans to catch a number plate or a lone figure scrabbling in the bushes alongside your favourite tolled road.”

Gianni Wise, “Hoxton Park”, 2002, Inkjet and inks on cardboard signage, 80 x 110.5 cm. Photo courtesy of the artist

Gianni Wise, “Hoxton Park”, 2002 (detail). Photo courtesy of the artist

Gianni Wise, “Cards Club”, Inkjet and inks on mountboard, 59 x 84 cm. Photo courtesy of the artist