[Reader-list] :::::::::nungu project launched::::::::::::::]

hi all

nungu has just launched its telematic surveillance project and we'd love
some feedback. take a peek! some explanatory blurb below

www.gaisecurity.com // telematic surveillance.

The willingness to watch and to be watched is perpetuated by capital. The
intersection of spectacle and surveillance evident in contemporary
postmodern phenomena like the cult of the celebrity and reality TV is not a
new idea. Surveillance has already been sold. The events of September 11 and
December 13 (attack on the Indian Parliament in New Delhi) merely clinched
the deal. Within hours of the attacks the surveillance industry had
mobilized itself. Cloaked behind vague global security rhetoric, it set out
with the aim of profiting from a new and improved anxiety economy.
The surveillance industry sees India as one of its most lucrative potential
markets, with a growth potential of 25% in an industry that already has a
turnover of close to US $120 million per annum. On an everday level, CCTVs
are cropping up in all the usual places. There is growing excitement about
electronic security devices. As Shuddhabrata Sengupta observes, modernising
elites in the so-called Third World are often better placed (due to lack of
constitutional safeguards to privacy or lack of awareness at the public
level of privacy issues) to put in place technologies of mass surveillance.
It comes as no surprise then when www.tradeport.org states on its website
that "installation of security devices has gained popularity among the upper
segment of Indian society, including the very rich and celebrities who
experience security threats. It has become a status symbol to install
high-tech safety equipment in homes and residential complexes."
Surveillance is creeping into India almost invisibly, with little discussion
and an alarming lack of public awareness. Telematic Surveillance as a
project is operating in the context of a country on the periphery of late
capitalism. As such its reach is numerically limited but the significance of
those numbers is incredibly wide ranging. Technologies are always, to some
extent, linked with capitalist interests and often function as tools of
oppression. This makes it increasingly crucial to expose the wired Indian
consumer to the underlying power relations inherent in new technologies–in
short, to a politics of information.
GaiSecurity.com is an intelligent surveillance solutions provider (cum
tactical entity) based in Mumbai, India. By offering surveillance as a
commodity, Gai attempts to satirise the banalization or popularization of
global surveillance. Gai wants to demonstrate the sheer strangeness of this
emerging global tele-surveillance market in the public (market) domain and
the mechanisms of power that lie behind it by playing it back to itself in a
distorted and exaggerated remix. Gai attempts to adopt a pedagogical role,
informing its customers of exactly what they might be buying into, by
subliminally(?) linking surveillance industry jingle to contesting voices in
the network.
In subscribing to Gai's Service, Gai's customers implicitly turn from
tele-spectators to tele-actors. They become voyeuristic electronic agents
and their PC–a personal domestic device–is turned into an apparatus of
behaviour control. They may gain permanent direct access and thus control
over events, but at a price. They simultaneously become subject to control,
and are willingly(?) entered into a spectacular, viral, surveilling loop.
Gai, then, is also about digitized subjectivity. Being watched in the
information age means more than simply screen. It means database. Both
screen and database or digital profile are part of a larger genre of vision
technologies that essentially operate by abstracting bodies and/or spaces
from their territorial settings and transforming them into abstract flows of
data. These flows of data, these images, become the locus of social control;
identity becomes locked in reductive, repressive data systems more real than
their fleshy referent. People are classified primarily in terms of potential
risk, the most obvious being the profiling of those with Arab or Islamic
backgrounds.
Gai wants to function as a subtle tactical entity exposing the skewed agenda
of the continued and uncontested transformation of public bodies into
scanned and controlled grids. Technology is not ahistorical; it has dubious
modes of power inscribed within its nodes and questionable values encoded in
its software. Gai tries to make visible to its customers the collective loss
of sight perpetuated by the surveillance society.

Credits
Collaborators: Sejal Chad, Shefali Chad, Beatrice Gibson, Rahul Guha and
Vivek Sasikumar


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