Reconnaissance: Inside the Panopticon
A low-tech visit to Mexico City’s high-tech urban surveillance center.
By Hillary Mushkin, February 2016
Mexico City’s C4I4 is a fantastically overdetermined work of architecture: a concrete bunker, three stories high, that resembles a row of giant surveillance cameras aimed at the city. You can barely see the building from the street, as it rises above a 20-foot perimeter wall. But it can see you.
This is the nerve center for
Ciudad Segura, billed as “
the world’s most ambitious urban security programme,” and it wouldn’t matter if it were buried underground. Its eyes are 13,000 cameras arrayed throughout the Federal District. Built in 2011 by the Mexican telecommunications company Telmex and the French multinational military contractor Thales, the building consolidates municipal agencies and provides state-of-the-art tools for urban surveillance and crisis response.
In 2014, I visited the surveillance center with a team of 19 artists, architects, and ethnographers. We found ourselves in the middle of a panopticon, where the observers are themselves observed. The C4I4 control room is a three-story cylinder, with dispatchers’ workstations in the middle, arrayed in rows without walls or cubicles. Overhead screens display key events under active surveillance, so that all can see. There are private offices for investigators on the first floor and for administrators on the upper floors. Supervisors have an unobstructed view of the dispatchers, but the dispatchers do not have a clear view of them. As the upper levels lack transparency, both literally and figuratively, these areas afford power to control the gaze without being subjected to it in turn.
View of the central control room from the observation room. [Sketch by Miguel Ángel Estévez Calderón]
Incendiary Traces research team in the C4I4 lobby. [CAEPCCM staff photographer]
Surveillance images shows on the main array of the command center. [Sketch by Hillary Mushkin]
C4I4 exterior and surveillance camera. [Sketch by Paulina V. Pulido]
Spatial arrangement of municipal agencies. [Sketch by Ilana Boltvinik]
Full article here
Hillary Mushkin is a visual artist and researcher. She leads “Incendiary Traces,” an art and research initiative that considers how landscape imaging helps authorities and the public visualize conflict zones. She frequently collaborates with other artists, architects, poets, scholars, and technologists. Mushkin’s projects have been exhibited internationally at the Freud Museum (London), the Getty Museum (Los Angeles), and White Columns (New York). She has also worked in non-art contexts, including the 29 Palms Marine Base, a fishing boat, and the Mexico City surveillance center. Mushkin is Research Professor of Art and Design at California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
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