This section includes photographic stills and video clips taken from the re-enactment video. These are analysed as both aesthetic documents of the work and data providing additional evidence for behavioural findings made within other methodological domains. Svetlana’s character is a playful take on an oppressive state presence, where individual liberty is compromised in exchange for collective security, reflecting the social contract legislated through the Australian Government’s Data Retention Act. She wears a white lab coat and, later in the performance, allows participants to see her donning surgical gloves, props that are absolutely unnecessary for an eye-tracking-study but suggest power and control. As a character, Svetlana developed stark contrasts between verbal directives that apparently offered information and clear choices, with body language and tone that implied invasions of privacy, such as standing to the side of the participant, very close but not touching, and using the participant’s name more often than is customary.

Looking Back at Svetlana Looking

Figure 6 depicts Svetlana issuing instructions, displayed without any additional information provided by the Tobii Pro software. Svetlana’s look is a gaze of direct address that demands the participant, who in this case is the object of the look, enters into a parasocial relationship with her (a typology of gazes is explored in the ‘Drama of the Gaze’ section). The image commands the participant’s attention by hailing them face-on, with Svetlana’s mouth open, mid-instruction. Svetlana’s performance purports to offer information and choices whilst subtly limiting the participant’s empowerment, much as online surveillance does. The very ubiquity of surveillance in our lives demands individual compliance, meaning that the choice to participate or not is marked by systems of power and control.

Figures 9 and 10 depict Svetlana with two varieties of data visualisation. The gaze effects captured in the photographic stills can be compared with the visual representations of data generated by the Tobii Pro software. Gaze plots, as seen in Figure 9, record a point each time a viewer fixes their gaze. Each fixation is numbered in order, and the size of the dot represents how long that particular gaze lasted. Heat maps, such as that seen in Figure 10, are an average of the gaze plot, representing time compressed into single images. Detail is sacrificed in order to illustrate the main areas of attention, averaging the gaze of a participant into areas that are ‘hotter’ (represented by red) and ‘cooler’ (represented by yellows and greens), where the gaze is less frequent. 

These images offer an apparently objective measure of the participant’s obedient attention to Svetlana, indicating a strong focus on Svetlana’s face and name badge; a representation of viewing behaviour that says ‘I’m listening attentively’. We might question whether attention would be as focussed in a genuine social relationship. Indeed, interpretations drawn from Svetlana’s surveillance notes find that participants in OTE responded to her invasive observation techniques by becoming increasingly intent on the task they had been invited to undertake: watching Telephone. Participants were explicitly reminded of their freedom to stop watching the video at any time, yet most (71%) chose to watch the entire video (10’ 47”) and appeared to engage deeply, or apparently wished to appear to engage deeply. Such obedience to authority figures is familiar to us from the Milgram experiment (1963). But OTE involved no deception; rather, findings here accord with research suggesting that most users of digital technologies willingly consent to surveillance in exchange for access to those technologies. For example, Kirsty Best’s paper ‘Living in the Control Society: Surveillance, Users and Digital Screen Technologies’ looks at three theses of Deleuze’s control society. These theoretical constructions are compared with evidence from a qualitative study into digital screen users’ perceptions of surveillance. Best finds that users appear unconcerned about data surveillance, accepting greater usability for decreased control.[8]   

The images and interpretations included on this page demonstrate OTE’s findings regarding general compliance from other methodological domains, such as the quantitative and qualitative analyses of behaviour captured by Svetlana as digital video files and in her observations. Yet the artistic research context of this exposition offers a modest opportunity for subversion that enhances OTE’s ironic performance of faith in technological science. According to the company website, Tobii Pro’s data representations are ‘data visualizations that can communicate important aspects of visual behavior clearly and with great power’.[9] In Figure 6, the scientist Svetlana is presented in a typically powerful way, but in Figures 9 and 10 that power is undermined by obscuring her face and name badge. 

Moreover, this sequencing of images and additional information illustrates the recursive nature of data capture and performs a powerful act of counter-surveillance. The artist-as-participant looks back at Svetlana while the eye-tracking software provides data visualisations that obscure Svetlana’s face, which the authors then frame as artwork. In some ways, this is comparable with Joachim Sauter and Dirk Lüsebrink’s interactive artwork Zerseher (1992), which employed eye-tracking technology to alter a (digital reproduction) of an Old Master painting based on the movement of a viewer’s gaze. The difference here is that OTE explicitly connects this act to surveillance and data retention.[10]

The participant experience of OTE did not allow them to wear the eye-tracking device until after they had given consent, meaning the activity of counter-surveillance did not occur explicitly. However, the artist’s re-enactment of the participant experience makes it possible to imagine, represent, and discuss such an act of subversion. The looking back that obscures Svetlana may also be considered a manifestation of sousveillance, a term that addresses the counter-surveillance activities of political activists, or any act of ‘watching from below’.[11] Steve Mann and Joseph Ferenbok point to the ‘increasingly complex constructs between power and the practices of seeing, looking, and watching/sensing in a networked culture mediated by mobile/portable/wearable computing devices and technologies’. The proliferation of cameras in personal devices, and in desktop and corporate telecommunications devices, complicates the power of the gaze: a complexity seen in OTE.