surveillant pleasures
digital exhibition, cross-"canada" tour, and workshop series
​Cam Hunters is partnering with five artist-run centres across so-called Canada this summer, bringing together a constellation of equity deserving artists, to produce artwork about surveillance and pleasure. To do this, we are travelling across the country in a motorhome, visiting artist-run centres and hosting workshops on how surveillance technologies may be used in disruptive, pleasurable and care-full way. By making artwork with surveillance technologies, we are responding to the disproportionate targeting and policing of 2SLGTQIA+, BIPOC, disabled, and classed peoples.
About Surveillant Pleasures
Surveillant Pleasures is a research-creation project that brings together an interdisciplinary constellation of 2SLGBTQIA+, BIPOC, disabled, classed, and gendered artists, curators, and scholars in so-called Canada to engage with theories of both pleasure and surveillance—in particular, exploring how using surveillance technologies and practices in relation to “pleasure activism” may create forms of healing, care, and radical empowerment (brown 2019).
We ask
How can 2SLBGTQIA+, BIPOC, disabled, classed, and other marginalized artists subvert and co-opt surveillance technologies to produce pleasure, empowerment, care, and radical healing through research-creation methodologies (i.e., art-making) in so-called Canada?
&
How can pleasure itself be a methodology within surveillance studies and research-creation?
Our aim is to create a community centred and alternative approach to research and art making in the field of surveillance studies, through play, experiential learning, and healing practices.
our aim is to create a community centred and alternative approach to research and art-making in the field of surveillances studies through:
Experiential learning
Hand on workshops with community members
PLAY
Engaging with various technologies, equipment, and toys, as a form of learning and art making
healing practices
Engage with surveillance theories and ideas, while prioritizing mutual aid and community focused approaches to world building
THE WORKSHOP
Driving across the country in a RV, Cam Hunters will be stopping at five different artist run centres across 4 provinces. With us, we will be carrying a range of surveillance technologies (such as drones, hunting, cameras, spy tech, and more), digital equipment, crafting materials, as well as a resource library participants can consult during the workshop.
In each workshop, participating artists from the ARC’s community will use pleasure as a methodology to create art using surveillance technologies and practices. Workshop participants will be encouraged to create an art piece using this equipment and technologies and/or incorporate play and experimentation into their own artistic practice. The artwork created during these workshops may be documented and a published in a pending zine.
Pleasure and care are central to the organization and execution of the workshop itself, so we aim to create as pleasurable an atmosphere as possible.
Surveillant Pleasures is funded by the New Frontiers in Research Fund (Exploration)
