the cultural amalgamation which produced mare tralla’s protected

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Z Amber Richter, ID: 13585181

Final Essay

MODULE: 1VIS7A9.1 - Creative Digital Technology

Course Leader, Alison Craighead

January 19, 2012

The Cultural Amalgamation Which Produced Mare TrallasProtected

The first GPS satellite was launched by the US government in 1978, completed in 1995, and by the

year 2000 there was a large civilian demand for the use of GPS technology1. CCTV was first used in

Germany in 1942 to observe a V-2 rocket launch, then again in the UK at Trafalgar square during 1960

with the visit of the Thai royal family, and to surveille Guy Fawkes activities later that year2.

In a similar vein of military orientated workings rather than peaceful creative inspiration, U.S.

presidentDwight Eisenhowers desperation to stay technologically on par with the SovietSputnik I

satellite in 1957 spawned the establishment of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network and

governmental research commissions therein, leading to the merging of private commercial entities with

those research projects during the 1960s. During the 1980s the National Science Foundations funding of a

backbone network lead to the standardization of Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) in 1982, which in turn

led to further commercial expansion spawning Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and other worldwide

networking technologies. Ultimately the web was commercialized by the1990s3, allowing Lefebvre's

leisure machines4 part of traditional media, to rise up and join with new media5 technology

metamorphosing into a cultural deluge of state, utilitarian, social and artistic applications of new media.

To contextualize, by various estimates it took radio somewhere between thirty five and thirty eight years

1Randy James, A Brief History of GPS, Time Magazine (online edition), 2009:

.2

Wikipedia.org, .3

Bill Stewart, et al. contributors, LivingInternet.com (date unlisted): , Wikipedia.org: .4

Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Volume One, translated by John Moore (London & New York: Verso, 1991), p.

33.5See new media as defined by Martin Lister, Jon Dovey, Seth Giddings, Iain Grant and Kieran Kelly, New Media, A

Critical Introduction, Second Edition (Oxon, New York: Routledge 2009), p. 9-99.


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to capture an audience of fifty million, thirteen years for TV to reach an audience of the same amount, but

only four to five years to reach fifty million users via the internet6.

It is against the backdrop of this technological boom of the 1990s when we find Estonian artist,

Mare Tralla, whose roots lie in establishing a feminist art scene in Estonia with several of her

contemporaries. Tralla, born in 1967 in Tallinn, was working to establish herself as an artist as Estonia

was gaining its independence, and at a time when it seemed to these artists that gender issues were

culturally ignored by a society which had considered itself to be genderless in a communist 'comrade'

context7. If the field of cultural studies affirms that cultural myths8 abound and reflect popular ideology,

then the cultural myths of Estonia were no exception, and some were particularly problematic for women.

In Private Views, Barbi Pilvre writes of the problematic of myth in Estonian culture as far as women were

concerned:

At times when their whole life is upturned, people hang on to the grand narratives of their

culture. The myth of the powerful Estonian woman constitutes such a narrative in

contemporary Estonia... To shake the foundation myths of a culture is an unappreciated

and rank exercise.9

Pilvre goes on to specifically address the myth of this so-called genderless society:

During the Soviet period, as is well-known, class provided the exclusive focus of state andacademic discourse. Consequently, gender never rose to be a significant category for the

analysis of social relations. There were neither women nor men; just comrades, the

working class and its historical opponents. Gender was practically eliminated in theory

while it also fell outside the parameters of political discourse... Gender was mainly

understood as a personal trait akin to other personality attributes and was not therefore

considered constitutive of ones identity.10

But the absence of gender identity threatens to foster a certain level of social denial leading to the neglect

in the unique needs of women, and Pilvre goes on to suggest as much, broaching the social problems of

poor reproductive healthcare and workplace biases against those women who might elude or defy the

established working mother archetype.

6United Nations, Global Teaching and Learning Project, UN Cyberschoolbus (date

unlisted):, also Ondi TimonersWe Live in Public, (2009).7

Angela Dimitrakaki, Pam Skelton, Mare Tralla, Private Views: Spaces and Gender in Contemporary Art from Britain and

Estonia, (London: Women's Art Library, 2000), p. 60-61.8

Roland Barthes,Mythologies, Translated by Annette Lavers (New York: Noonday; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972).9

Dimitrakaki, Skelton,Tralla, Private Views, p. 60.10

Dimitrakaki, Skelton,Tralla, Private Views, p. 61, 62-63.


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Tralla, in writing about the motives offellow artist, Eha Komissarov, with respect to Estonias first

feminist art exhibition, Est.Fem, which took place at three different Tallinn galleries: Vaal, City Gallery, and

Mustpeade Maja in 1995, underscores their urgency to establish a feminist art scene during a given socio-

political climate void of representation for women, let alone LGBT people:

[Eha Komissarov] became convinced of the need for feminist art in Estonia regardless of

what others thought. She wrote about that time in the exhibition catalogue: My first

experiences with feminism became soon a conviction, that the questions of gender and

identity are completely alienated in Estonia and dealing with feminism would mean to

voluntary banish oneself from society.11

Mare Tralla,A Toy(1995), video installation still and Toomas Volkmann, David and Warren (1994) photography print, Est.Fem

source: www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/european/Estonian-Artists.html

A socio-political climate poised to ignore the spectre of an unacknowledged phantom under the

cloak of accepted ideology is difficult for invested parties to defeat. Potential opponents to popular

ideology would be pressed to find novel ways to transform their resistance and gain support. The new

frontier of cyberspace essentially transformed the ways in which politically active artists might express

their agendas and communicate with a far broader artistic community through this novel medium.

11Mare Tralla,Disgusting Girl,Moscow Art Magazine, No 22, 1998:

.


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It is a foregone conclusion that the internet provided social anonymity where desired, but

subsequently, considering Listers foundational definition of the virtual12 as a characteristic of new

media, and Balsamos description of the transformative properties of the (female) cyborg body13, the

sheer virtue of the properties of the cyberspace medium then enabled Tralla and other emerging artists,

particularly hegemonically targeted artists, to embrace the ability to transcend their physical bodies and

concrete environments.

Following Est.Fem, Tralla established herself as a performance, video, and cyberfeminist14 artist

breaking out with such works as Love-Line.Advisor. and my very first webpage- it does not have a name (all

circa late 1990s) and the her.space CD-ROM (1998), which she produced while earning her MA in

Hypermedia Studies at University of Westminster in London during 1997.

Screenshot from Mare Trallas Love-Line. Advisor. (circa late 1990s)

all ss. sources: http://artun.ee/~trimadu/www.html

12Lister, et al.,New Media, p 13, 35-37.

13Anne Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body, Reading Cyborg Women, (Duke University, 1996), p. 11.

14Susan Hawthorne and Renate Klein, Cyberfeminism, Connectivity, Critique + Creativity, (North Melbourne:

Spinifex,1999).


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Screenshot from Mare TrallasLove-Line. Father. (circa late 1990s)

Screenshots from Mare Trallasmy very first webpage- it does not have a name (circa late 1990s)

(clicking male or pervert leads to the second screen; clicking female, transsexual, or secret leads to the third)


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While the internet hardly represented a gender-friendly utopia, as Cutting Edge, The Womens

Research Group underscores when they trace the emerging cyberflneuse15 during the early 2000s;

navigating virtual boulevards which were male dominated, and held possibilities of verbal abuse and

harassment towards women, yet cyberspace enabled unprecedented opportunities for raw creative and

political expression, breaking through barriers of the physical body, cultural boundaries and taboos, and

censorship.

Simultaneously, the late twentieth century also marked the rise of routine public surveillance.

Though mainstream western culture generally and increasingly acclimatized itself to the presence of

CCTV, some construed this shift with critical and suspicious consciousness, conceptualizing routine

surveillance as a threat to personal freedom at best, and mass hegemonic control at worst; not unlike

Foucaults examination of Benthams Panopticon16, that man-made structure designed to watch every

action of prisoners, students or any group under institutional governance:

The panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly

and to recognize immediately. In short, it reverses the principle of the dungeon; or rather

of its three functions - to enclose, to deprive of light and to hide - it preserves only the first

and eliminates the other two. Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than

darkness, which ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap.17

Mismatched though it may seem to compare any late twentieth century apparatus to one of the eighteenth

century, similarities were construed. As live and captured video, and location and navigational tracking,

became increasingly commonplace, discourses and in particular, artistic responses, to public and private

surveillance became plentiful and varied paradigms emerged.

Some artist embraced personal surveillance; self surveillance, by some estimations actualizing a

form of voyeurism for art's sake and life as performance art, like the long-term lifecasts web projects from

15Cutting Edge, The Womens Research Group (Editors), Digital Desires, Language, Identity, and New Technology,

(London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 2000), p. 90-102 for a description of this digital age femaleflneur.16

Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, Ed. Miran Bozovic (London: Verso, 1995), p. 29-95.17

Michel Foucault,Discipline and Punish, the Birth of the Prison, Translated by Alan Sheridan, Second Edition, (New

York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1979), p. 200.


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webcam girls like Jennifer Ringley withjennicam.com18 and Ana Voog with anacam.com, in 1996 and 1997

respectively, thus introducing the micro-celebrity19 phenomenon.

Jennifer Ringley onjennicam.com (circa late 1990s)

source: http://art110.wikispaces.com

Ana Voog ofanacam.com

source: http://ana.livejournal.com/

18Defunct as of 2004; see BBC News Channel: .

19See Terri SenftsMicro-Celebrity: Questions and Answers with Reporters, 2009:

.


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Some blurred the lines of surveillance as art, experiment and some claim, exploitation20, like Josh

Harris' infamous Quiet: We Live in Public (1999), whose goal seemed to float along the lines of a Warhol-

esque exhibitionist hedonist party, and spawned Ondi Timoners popular documentary21 a decade later.

Others like Natalie Jeremijenko, Kate Rich, and Daniela TiganisBureau of Inverse Technology

project (1991), Eva and Franco Mattes Vopos (2000), and the Track-the-Trackers project (circa 2001)

utilized Foucauldian discourses on surveillance capabilities through counter-surveillance and

sousveillance, merging tactical technical savvy with irony, or theatrical means. Surveillance Camera

Players (founded 1996) actually performed for the CCTV cameras on the streets of New York .

Surveillance Camera Players promo(circa 1996), source: notbored.org

and sousveillance camera necklace, source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance

These projects broached general questions concerning privacy, human rights, hegemonic control and

some, like Hasan Elahi's trackingtransience.net(2004) sought to expose the profiling and subjective

criminalization of people of colour through the use of surveillance technology.

20See interrogation artist, Ashkan Sahihi and documentary cameraman, Max Hellers comments in scenes in Ondi Timoner,

We Live in Public (2009).21

Timoner, We Live in Public (2009).


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In the tradition ofTrack-the-Trackers, we can look to Mare Tralla's Protectedseries (2008) for an

outright rejection of being surveilled through a basic form of counter surveillance: actually painting the

tools of surveillance. Protected, embarked upon in Edinburgh, wasn't a cyber art project per se, but a by-

product of public surveillance technology.

Mare Tralla, Protectedstreet installation, Edinburgh (2008)

source: ARC Projects photos

Protectedshifts the artist from surveillance, or 'self surveillance' subject, to surveilling the

surveillancer and CCTV cameras become the subjects in a two prong process: the first part transpired as

performance art 'happenings' where Tralla set up easels across locations around Edinburgh22 where CCTV

cameras were located, tracked the subtle movements of these CCTV cameras and, as Art Research

Communcation put, it in an almost16th century tradition23, painted the images of these CCTV cameras.

The second phase of the process represented the gallery presentation of these works, plus a floral

embellished CCTV camera, and conspicuous soft sculpture; the bottom half of a female torso with a photo

placed in a hole at the crotch (photography and video were added at later exhibitions). Protected showed

in Mutatis Mutandis, at Edinburghs Embassy Annex, Tallinn Art Hall Gallery (solo), and atHack.Fem.EAST,

Berlin throughout 2008.

22See .

23Art Research Communication (blog, author unlisted) (Aug. 24, 2008 entry): .


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.

Mare Trallas Protected, paintings on canvas and soft sculpture with photo insert,Mutatis Mutandis, Embassy Annex, Edinburgh (2008)



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Mare Trallas Protectedsoft sculpture floral embellished CCTV camera,

Mutatis Mutandis (2008)


Protectedin its entirety falls squarely within the discourse of how media technology has affected a

traditional arts concept. This is post-surveillance era subject matter, again shifting the watched to the

watcher, the observer, and the capturer of images of the tools of surveillance. This acts as an affront to the

surveillers, particularly when one considers that in some locations, it frowned upon or potentially illegal

to photograph CCTV cameras24. Futher, the particularity of a female artist embarking on this theme points

toward a feminist version of the double consciousness25 theory explored by W.E.B. Du Bois and later by

Gilroy26, which addresses the double identity, the problematic of existing as both a member of society and

as a person of colour within a hegemonic society. In this tradition, Tralla represents not only one of the

surveilled, she represents the female, the object of surveillance on a far more extensive level and in this

instance she does not offer herself up to be an object of voyeurism or surveillance. Tralla, in the first part

of her installation may want to be seen publically painting, but she moves beyond being observed and

24See British Transport Police site: .

25See W.E.B. Du Bois, Brent Hayes EdwardsThe Souls of Black Folk(originally published 1903) (Oxford, New York:

Oxford University, 2007).26

Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London, New York: Verso, 1993).


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objectified by her ability to be present and interact with passers-by as she acts in a direct response to

surveillance.

In revisiting Foucaults assessment of the Panopticon:

...the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious andpermanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things

that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that

the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary... The

Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring,

one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without

ever being seen27

one construes the seductive nature of contemporary public surveillance facilitated by its omnipresence

and simultaneous camouflaged presence.

Trallas act of publically capturing the images of the tools of surveillance marks the potential of the

artists presence to act as a catalyst for spontaneous discourses on how everyday citizens feel about being

surveilled. The staging of such an event defies surveillance being accepted or ignored and literally draws

attention to our social acclimatization, even apathy, towards surveillance, which has the potential to

reignite ambivalence at least, and social rebellion at best.

Overall there seems to be a deficit of critical analyses and discourses directly pertaining to

Protected, butone doesnt wish to launch into a metadiscursive diatribe here. Rather, let it serve to

construe the Tates Surveillanceand Control Symposium28 as evidence that discourses on surveillance as

a social problematic entered the mainstream quite some time ago and have been in our cultural

consciousness for decades, perhaps to the degree that contemporary artists, critics, scholars, and many

ordinary citizens inherently comprehend Protecteds thematic language having already witnessed the

cultural amalgamation which shaped Mare Trallas Protected series.

27Foucault,Discipline and Punish..., p. 201202.

28See Tate Channels Surveillance and Control Symposium, 2002:

.


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