Performance and participation in the panopticon: Instruments for civic engagement with urban surveillance technologies

While there is a plethora of surveillance technologies in public space, they are hard to see, as they are sometimes literally hidden, or they have become such a common part of everyday surroundings that they escape conscious observation. Through this invisibility the smart city and its surveillance technologies escape public awareness, critical reflection and democratic debate. In this chapter we discuss several ways of raising awareness about surveillance technologies. We show how artists and activists have engaged in cultural performance to bring surveillance in sight; we review a number of instruments of participatory action research that critical scholars have introduced. These performative and participatory instruments to expose surveillance technologies do have an immediate effect, however it is a temporal one and one would need additional efforts to move discussions away from individual responsibilities to collective ones and from individual awareness to political agenda-setting. This directs us, as participatory action researchers, towards examining how the few political conflicts around urban surveillance technologies have emerged and played out, and towards designing new interventions for political representatives and their constituencies