CfE 49 - Surveillance Art and the Politics of Visibility: Critical Practices in the Age of Algorithmic Governance

In the past two decades, the increasing delegation of perception to computational systems has profoundly transformed the conditions under which visibility is produced, circulated, and governed. From facial recognition technologies and biometric identification systems to predictive algorithms, automated image classification, and AI-driven forms of machine vision, contemporary societies are witnessing the emergence of new regimes of visuality that operate at scales and speeds beyond human perception. Scholars working across surveillance studies, critical data studies, science and technology studies, and visual culture have highlighted how these systems do not merely observe reality but actively participate in shaping it through processes of classification, prediction, profiling, and behavioral modulation (Lyon 2018; Zuboff 2019). As surveillance increasingly permeates everyday life through digital platforms, networked infrastructures, environmental sensing, and automated decision-making systems, questions of visibility, power, and agency have acquired renewed urgency. Yet control cannot be understood solely as a mechanism of domination or observation. As Velotti (2024) suggests, it may also be conceived as “a constant tension between the will to govern and the inevitable emergence of the uncontrollable.” Contemporary surveillance systems continuously aspire to render the world transparent, predictable, and manageable, while simultaneously generating zones of opacity, uncertainty, resistance, and excess that escape algorithmic capture.

In parallel with these developments, artists, activists, and media practitioners have increasingly engaged with the infrastructures, imaginaries, and material conditions of surveillance. Surveillance art has emerged as a heterogeneous field of aesthetic experimentation and political inquiry that investigates how contemporary technologies of vision and data capture reorganize the relationship between visibility, power, and subjectivity. As Elise Morrison (2016) argues, surveillance art encompasses “the wide variety of ways in which artists and activists have tactically utilized technologies of surveillance to create new and different ways of interacting with and understanding surveillance technology.” Rather than simply representing surveillance, these practices intervene directly within its dispositifs, exposing their operations, appropriating their tools, subverting their logics, and reconfiguring regimes of visibility and invisibility.

The growing relevance of surveillance art reflects broader transformations in contemporary visual culture. In a context shaped by algorithmic governance, platform capitalism, biometric monitoring, and ubiquitous data extraction, artistic practices have become crucial sites for interrogating how power is exercised through images, interfaces, infrastructures, and computational processes. Surveillance art renders visible what often remains hidden: the architectures of control that underpin contemporary life, the biases embedded within technological systems, and the political consequences of automated forms of classification and recognition.

Yet surveillance art should not be understood solely as an oppositional response to surveillance regimes. Contemporary artistic practices frequently operate within complex zones of negotiation, participation, appropriation, and ambivalence. Rather than positioning themselves entirely outside technological systems of control, many artists engage them from within, exposing their contradictions and opening spaces for what has been described as forms of “integrated resistance” (Cesaro 2024). Such practices challenge binary distinctions between domination and resistance, visibility and opacity, participation and refusal, generating new ways of thinking about agency, subjectivity, and technological mediation.

Within this framework, surveillance art can be understood as a privileged site for investigating the politics of visibility under conditions of algorithmic governance. Visibility today no longer coincides with what can be seen by human observers; rather, it is increasingly produced through computational processes that determine what becomes legible, measurable, and actionable within digital infrastructures. Machine vision systems, predictive analytics, biometric technologies, and algorithmic classifications establish new forms of visual politics by deciding who is rendered visible, under what conditions, and for what purposes. Artistic practices engage these transformations by questioning not only the expansion of surveillance itself but also the epistemological assumptions embedded within contemporary regimes of visibility. Through strategies of exposure, camouflage, opacity, counter-visualization, data obfuscation, speculative design, and critical intervention, surveillance art reveals how visibility functions simultaneously as a mechanism of governance and as a contested terrain where forms of agency, dissent, and collective imagination can emerge. Rather than treating visibility as an inherently emancipatory condition, these practices invite critical reflection on the right to remain invisible, the politics of opacity, and the unequal distribution of algorithmic recognition across different social and geopolitical contexts.

This special issue aims to provide a platform for interdisciplinary dialogue between visual studies, media studies, surveillance studies, philosophy of technology, political theory, contemporary art history, critical algorithm studies, and digital humanities. We are particularly interested in contributions that examine surveillance art as a field in which aesthetic practices intersect with broader questions concerning governance, identity, technological power, and political imagination.

Particular attention will be devoted to perspectives that challenge assumptions of technological neutrality and investigate how surveillance systems and regimes of algorithmic visibility intersect with questions of gender, sexuality, disability and geopolitical inequality (Browne 2015). Drawing on feminist, queer, postcolonial, decolonial, and posthuman approaches to technology (Haraway 1988; Braidotti 2013; Chun 2021), the issue seeks to explore how surveillance art can expose the asymmetries embedded within contemporary infrastructures of control while simultaneously imagining alternative regimes of visibility, practices of opacity, new forms of agency, and modes of collective life that exceed the logics of algorithmic governance.

We invite contributions addressing, but not limited to, the following topics:

Aesthetics of Surveillance and the Politics of Visibility 
Contributions may explore surveillance as a regime of visibility and knowledge production, examining artistic engagements with machine vision, computational perception, algorithmic visuality, and the aesthetic strategies through which visibility, opacity, exposure, and concealment are negotiated.

Technological Appropriation and Critical Resistance   
We welcome analyses of artistic practices that appropriate, subvert, or repurpose surveillance technologies—including facial recognition, biometrics, computer vision, and GPS systems—through strategies such as hacking, spoofing, camouflage, obfuscation, glitch aesthetics, counter-surveillance, and other forms of embedded or integrated resistance.

Surveillance, Identity, and Differential Visibility           
Submissions may investigate how surveillance technologies participate in the production of subjectivity and social difference, addressing issues of gender, race, class, sexuality, disability, profiling, algorithmic recognition, exclusion, and intersectional approaches informed by feminist, queer, postcolonial, and decolonial perspectives.

Genealogies, Infrastructures, and Materialities of Surveillance          
Contributions may examine the historical development of surveillance art and its relation to conceptual art, performance, activist media, and media archaeology, as well as the material infrastructures of surveillance, including platforms, databases, sensors, satellites, data centers, and their environmental and geopolitical implications.

Artificial Intelligence, Posthumanism, and Machine Agency   
Topics may include artistic engagements with artificial intelligence, neural networks, autonomous systems, drones, machine perception, distributed agency, and posthuman or new materialist perspectives on surveillance and technological mediation.

Surveillance Art and Political Imagination         
We encourage contributions that investigate surveillance art as a space of political critique and speculative experimentation, exploring alternative technological futures, practices of opacity and refusal, digital commons, collective agency, and new ways of imagining democracy, governance, and social life.

This special issue welcomes theoretical, methodological, and practice-based contributions that critically engage with surveillance art and its capacity to interrogate the relationships between vision, technology, control, and subjectivity in contemporary societies.

 

Submission Details

Please send an abstract between 300 and 400 words with bibliographic references and a short biographical note to laura.cesaro@uniud.it, deborah.toschi@uninsubria.it and berna@jhu.edu by 30th September 2026.

Authors will be notified of the outcome of the selection by mid-October.
If accepted, the author(s) will be asked to submit a full article by 30th March 2027.

Articles must not exceed 6000 words (including bibliography) and must be accompanied by 5 keywords, author name(s) and a 100-word max bio, institutional affiliation(s) and contact details.

Guidelines for submissions can be found here: https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/about/submissions

Articles will be submitted to double blind peer review. Submission of a paper will be taken to imply that it is unpublished and is not being considered for publication elsewhere. Authors who are not native English or French speakers are asked to have their manuscripts proofread by a native speaker before submission.

The publication of this thematic issue is scheduled by November 2027. 

For any queries do not hesitate to contact the editors at the email addresses listed above.

 

References

Amoore, L. (2020). Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others. Duke University Press.

Benjamin, R. (2019). Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity Press.

Browne, S. (2015). Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Duke University Press.

Cesaro, L. (2024). Geografie del controllo nella scena audiovisiva contemporanea. Bulzoni.

Chan, J., & McKnight, S. (2023). Disruptive Exhibitionism: A Performance Methodology for Surveillance Art. In “Media Practice and Education”, 24(2), 160–181.

Chun, W. H. K. (2021). Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition. MIT Press.

Haraway, D. (1991). Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge.

Lyon, D. (2007). Surveillance Studies: An Overview. Polity Press.

Id. (2018). The Culture of Surveillance: Watching as a Way of Life. Polity Press.

Id. (2024). The New Surveillance. Polity Press.

Morrison, E. (2016). Discipline and Desire: Surveillance Technologies in Performance. University of Michigan Press.

Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York University Press.

Paglen, T. (2014). Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes. Aperture.

Steyerl, H. (2017). Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War. Verso.

Velotti, S. (2024). Sotto la soglia del controllo. Pratiche artistiche e forme di vita, Laterza.

Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. PublicAffairs.