<underfire> ecologies of suspicion

[caleb]

Scenario

You are on vacation.  As any good tourist you have your camcorder and  
are filming everything in sight.

-cut-
You dump your video to your computer after arriving to your hotel.   
While watching the footage you notice that you accidentally left the  
camera running.  It captured your shadow traversing the sidewalk and  
intersection as you crossed the street.  You laugh at yourself, close  
your computer for the night to get ready for the long plane ride home  
tomorrow.

-cut-
At the airport you check your bags and prepare to go through  
inspection.  You've worn slip-ons. Keys and change are stashed in  
your bag. You’ve already pulled your laptop out, and are ready to  
pass quickly through security.  As you meet the first in a series of  
security guards your ID and boarding pass is held upright and ready.   
You smile innocently, if not somewhat guiltily waiting to be passed  
to the next step.  The security guard tells you to go stand to the  
side and wait.  Your boarding pass has been marked and you must go  
through further inspection. You are taken to a small cubicle and  
asked a series of questions.  You explain that there must be some  
mistake, you were just on vacation and returning home.  The officer  
ignores your claim and decides that he needs to look through your bag  
and your computer.  He boots up your computer, and notices a movie  
file on your desktop titled "site-seeing.mov."  He opens the file and  
begins to watch.

-cut-
A pan upwards of a tall building.  A long shot of a hotel.  A group  
of children playing around a monument.  Another tall building.  Your  
shadow across the pavement as you walk.
the clip ends.

The officer plays it back, pausing on innocuous frames...stopping on  
a moment that looks no different than any other - a blurry figure  
here, an entrance there, etc.

He asks you why you shot footage of these specific buildings, why you  
left the camera running while walking.  You answer innocently enough  
and apologize for the poor camera work...

The officer closes your computer. Slowly he turns and fixes his gaze  
upon you. He pauses. You are then told that this is a surveillance  
video for a plan of attack.  The sequence of your footsteps was a  
marking off of the distance for a suicide bombing.  He tells you that  
you wanted it to appear as an accident so no one would suspect you.   
In reality you are using the conventions of the vacation video as a  
means to mask your true intentions.

----------------

What is the relationship that arises in this scenario between the  
subject, the officer, the camera and the image? The perceptual  
modality embodied by the officer viewing the vacation video emerges  
from a post-9/11 culture of fear in the United States. Codes of  
suspicion, diffused throughout society, are deployed to identify  
threats and regulate subjects.  As we have been told repeatedly, the  
war on terror is one with no clear end.  It carries with it the logic  
of preemption and creates an environment where everyone can  
potentially become an enemy. Codes of suspicion transform the ways we  
see the innocuous.


The attached stills are traces of "performances." I enact the tourist  
becoming terrorist, playing out my potential doppelganger self. I  
track the spaces that could be identified as tourist locations and/or  
targets.  Within these spaces I redeploy visual conventions of the  
“home movie” and point to their re-valuation through the codes of  
suspicion. What I attempt to do here is embody these various  
positionalities – body/apparatus/officer - and demonstrate the ways  
we modulate between these roles. In effect, I’m attempting to act  
out how a way of seeing also becomes a way of thinking…the tourist  
becomes terrorist, the citizen becomes police, the police becomes  
media theorist.



caleb waldorf
calebw at ucsd.edu
www.calebwaldorf.net
(858) 405-1658




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