Re: [-empyre-] Panic

["Renate Terese Ferro" <rtf9@cornell.edu>]

Linking together panic and technology has an interesting history dating
back to 1947 when President Truman delivered a message stating that the
value of the cold war?s atomic bomb?s military power was psychological.  
More specifically that the bomb had the ability to terrorize an opposing
nation into panic.  It was agreed that the nation who most efficiently
handled this panic would be the victor.  Therefore the United States
government put money into sociological studies investigating human
behavior especially as it related to panic.  In 1950 the  Federal Civil
Defense Act was passed whose mission  was to protect the United State
against the panic that  would disable the US in case of a Soviet military
nuclear offensive.  Later in 1951 "Panic, Control and Prevention" was
published by the Office of Civil Defense because it was agreed at that
time that the devestation would occur not from atomic fall out and
radiation but from the panic and terror of the masses.  By simply hiding
out for a few days the radiation would simply disapate.  However, the
panic of the society would devestate it.

That misguided assumption prompted the government to spend research
dollars on sociological studies whose mission was to learn ways to
understand human behavior but even more importantly how to change and
control that behavior.  The Office of Civil Defense published millions of
copies of an propaganda article titled:  ?Survival Under Atomic Attack?.

Print, Radio, television  relayed these messages but what i found to most
interesting were the Civil Defense films that were designed to reach
certain demographics of the population:  "Duck and cover" animations for
children, how to save data in the event of a nuclear strike for
businesses, how to use a community shelter designed to convince community
leaders to organize and build shelters and how city residents could become
civilian soldiers in an event of a nuclear strike.  The important message
of the day was that each and every person needed to do their part to keep
the country going_economically, socially, politically.

Fast forward forty-five or fifty years later.... Where have we heard this
rhetoric before?  From a President who responds a few days after the 9/11
tragedy by reminding the country  that we must return a sense of normalcy
to our country?we must get back to work?.or to ?get down to Disney World
in Florida? and to ?enjoy life?. From Homeland Security Director who
encourages the population to protect itself from dirty bombs with duck
tape and plastic sheeting?

Take these tidbits as well as the high definition web-directives from the
white house and homeland security like those from http://www.ready.gov and
you've got the underpinnings of what prompted me to create "Panic Hits
Home", a four channel video/audio installation that juxtaposed the panic
of 1950's/60's cold war panic with the that of 9/11.

Renate


>
> Thanks for the intro, Tim and Renate, and for organizing this month's
> discussion. I am new to the list, although searching the archives I saw
> many
> familiar "faces."
>
> The work I have been doing the past 7+ years on my own and with my group
> Preemptive Media generally fits into this theme of terrors + technologies.
> This "speaking back" to security interests by appropriating many of the
> same
> technologies for political and artistic action (as Tim and Renate write in
> their intro) has been one of the main missions of Preemptive Media (which
> includes Beatriz da Costa, Jamie Schulte and myself). For those of you not
> familiar with our work, you can go here: http://www.preemptivemedia.net/.
> Particularly related to this discussion are the projects Swipe and
> Zapped!.
>
> I started along these lines prior to 9/11, mainly focusing on data
> surveillance and information collection practices in the US. My interest
> has
> always been in social sorting, rather than individual privacy matters,
> whether conducted by business or government (and often times both in
> tandem)
> for the purpose of selling more product, protecting capital, subjugating
> minority groups, controlling behavior, repressing free speech etc. What is
> concerning to me is the discreet/invisible nature of these practices, the
> lack of subject awareness and consent, the deeply intertwined business and
> government interests and the "wild west" mentality in the absence of an
> omnibus data privacy law (again specific to the US).
>
> As we all know, after 9/11 the floodgates opened and the dystopian and
> invasive technologies that had been written off by many as distant or
> sci-fi
> were given legs in the US and allowed to explode out of the labs and into
> the markets to forever change lives across the world, some more than
> others.
> I came across this image again recently (http://bsing.net/times_2002.jpg)
> which I had saved from the front page of the New York Times in early 2002.
> For me it hailed a turning point, the moment fictive nightmares became
> everyday realities. The rapid acceleration of development in the data
> surveillance field after 9/11, with huge surges of money and the
> permanent-war mentality, was--and still is--mind boggling. There are far
> too
> many to keep abreast of and fully understand their implications: Total
> Information Awareness ==> Matrix ==> Advise programs, RFID in every US
> passport, NSA warrant-less wiretaps, GPS in every taxi cab in San
> Francisco
> (soon coming to NYC...) and so forth.
>
> For Preemptive Media, we tried to keep up with the US datavallience
> industry
> for nearly four years. Our actions were mainly about sharing and
> distilling
> the information we amassed, creating platforms for dialogue and symbolic
> resistance. I say symbolic because we never particularly expected results,
> although it is always a pleasant surprise when a material change does
> occur.
> As artists and technologists, we emphasized hands-on learning and visual
> and/or performative methods for communication. A large part of the work
> was
> to sort through the hype -- was there reason for panic?
>
> The work lives on through the web although we are not actively developing
> either Swipe or Zapped! at this point. We still receive frequent requests
> for information and code, so it's apparent the need for work like this is
> still there, maybe more so than when we first started.
>
> In the last several years I have seen the rise of work termed "Locative
> Media" and my own work is sometimes grouped in that category. I usually
> ignore labels but this one is particularly bothersome to me because there
> is
> a trend here to collapse this ever-growing field of terror technologies
> into
> infotainment objects. This gets to the issue of what Tim calls the
> "ambivalent attraction to technologies of terror" and, as Horit questions,
> "what is the relationship between the production of art by means of
> digital
> technologies and the production of terror by the same?" Locative Media (as
> with the term Web 2.0) is deceptive in its appearance of being simply
> shiny,
> fun and new. Yet, do we question computer art for its use of the digital
> computer, originally designed to quickly crunch numbers to project
> missiles
> more accurately -- wherein lies the difference? Is it only distance from
> inception?
>
> My newest work and research considers the thousands of abandoned toxic
> sites
> that scatter the US landscape -- how did they end up that way, who is
> responsible, why do they perpetuate, what is the harm and what is being
> done? There are many links here to my surveillance research like finding
> close ties between government and business interest, cover-ups and
> disregard
> for "right to know" programs, layers of scientific jargon to protect
> against
> public scrutiny and burden of damage falling upon weak political blocks.
> These places, many caused by the chemical industry, must be considered
> casualties of techno-terror too?
>
> I hope I have not digressed too much but I am left wondering about this
> term
> panic -- which I have pretty much ignored till now. Can it be a productive
> force, undermining technologies of terror, or is it always a distraction
> in
> support of more terror? Can it be re-channeled by artists not to follow
> the
> whims of mass media but rather in support of a more democratic need or
> process?
>
>
> --
> Brooke Singer
> www.bsing.net
> brooke@bsing.net
>
>
>
>
>
>
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