Surveillance Studies and Visual Art: An Examination of Jill Magid's Evidence Locker

It is now commonplace to refer to the contemporary world as a surveillance society. The tremendous proliferation of surveillance over the late twentieth and early twenty-first century has been met by a continually expanding body of scholarly work on the topic. However, such work remains largely based in the social sciences, specifically in the fields of sociology and criminology. While this work has been invaluable in many ways, it tends to emphasize empirical investigations of surveillance programs. By contrast, a growing body of work by artists and activists on surveillance questions the larger, more abstract issues associated with life in a surveillance society. The article examines Jill Magid’s Evidence Locker to argue that analyzing works of visual art not only complements the existing academic literature on surveillance, but that it raises distinctly new questions about citizens’ own roles and responsibilities in a surveillance society.