Search: An Artist Project for Television

There are an estimated 4.5 million CCTV cameras installed on the streets of the UK. More than in any other European country, this accounts for 20% of all the world’s CCTV cameras. Walking in the streets your image could potentially be captured on camera up to 300 times in one single day.

In 1992 Newcastle upon Tyne was one of ten local authorities in the UK to pioneer a CCTV network installed by the police authority. Most other towns did not develop similar systems until after the James Bulger murder case in 1993. As part of this scheme, Northumbria Police, in partnership with the City Council and local businesses, installed a 16-camera surveillance system in the commercial centre of the city of Newcastle. This was to be the first within a city centre location, and the most advanced technological system in Europe at the time.

Developed in direct response to the knowledge that this surveillance system had recently been installed in the commercial centre of the city of Newcastle upon Tyne, 'SEARCH' was a project made for Television. Accessing video footage from the CCTV network of the artists Pat Naldi and Wendy Kirkup executing a choreographed walk around the city centre, 'SEARCH' consisted of twenty-ten second sequences transmitted during the commercial breaks. It was broadcast on Tyne Tees Television between June 21st and July 4th 1993.

City centre CCTV systems, as in Newcastle, conceptually echo Jeremy Bentham’s eighteenth century Panopticon. This technological monitoring of space makes possible a panoptic practice proceeding from a place where the eye can transform foreign forces into objects that can be observed and measured and thus control and 'include' them within its scope of vision. The cameras 'neutral' vision deals with unedited time; it records rather than intervenes, its real purpose being one of replay & reconstruction 24 hours a day.

This chapter explores through the artist project 'SEARCH' the complex political, psychological, and gender loadings of surveillance technologies in the control of city spaces. As we relinquish control over our own images that are legally classed as public, the chapter analyses the activity of the phenomenon of surveillance, in itself not a new phenomenon, to address current debates of privacy and public spectacle.