Watch Me Watch You

Intention & Context

I decided to explore the concept of mass surveillance with a piece that resembles the works of street art exposed in “Exit Through the Gift Shop”. I was inspired by Banksy’s ‘Flower Girl’ mural, which depicts a surveillance camera perched atop the stem of a flower while a small child watches, stunned. Thus, I decided to imitate Banksy’s stencil style and ‘steal’ his commentary on the prevalence of cameras in modern society. I even incorporated his camera ‘rat’ into my own piece.

Process & Product 

I chose to use Photoshop for this product, mostly relying on the threshold tool to convert images into stencils. Since I am not proficient in Photoshop, I struggled slightly and turned to various tutorials to get the effect I wanted.

I knew I wanted to incorporate flowers into my work so I first experimented with flowers in vases before settling on the field of flowers below:

I also utilized the following stencil of a security camera, and edited-in Banksy’s camera creature:

I enjoyed working on this project because the stencil style was easy to create using Photoshop, and thus I was able to create what I had imagined.

My final product:

Critique

My piece is characterized by the juxtaposition of flowers, which embody nature and its inherent freedom, and three scrutinizing cameras. Innocence clashes with the ominous control of surveillance, a contrast emphasized by the striking black and white. The first security camera is quite evident in the piece; it blossoms out of the stem of a flower in the foreground. The other two, however, seem to hide among the flowers. The surreal additions morph the meaning of the image from one that celebrates the beauty of a field of flowers to one that comments on mass surveillance’s ability to mar. With the advent of social media, among other technologies, this type of surveillance has become almost natural. We accept it without question, electing to give up our freedom to have accesses to certain services and a higher sense of protection. Mass surveillance is our landscape.

Reflection

I like my final product, but I feel that if it were to be used as a stencil for street art the bottom left corner of the image would be too hectic and the upper right would be too lacking. Furthermore, I am not certain that my image conveys the themes I wanted it to; perhaps, I should have included an element that would more closely relate it to humans, like the small girl in Banksy’s work. I also thought about adding blinking red lights to the cameras, but decided against it since that would not make the piece transferable to a stencil.

Overall, I enjoyed this assignment because it gave me the opportunity to explore a non-traditional aspect of art that I had typically written off as graffiti.