Bill Brown (co-founder) — Surveillance Camera Players

1996

Artists: Bill Brown (co-founder), Art Toad (co-founder), Various rotating members · Year: 1996 · Medium: Guerrilla street performance — plays performed for visible surveillance cameras in public spaces · Substrate: Public surveillance cameras (CCTV, police cameras, private-corporate cameras); cardboard signs with play text; live performance on New York streets · Place: New York, USA · Institution: Self-organized street-performance collective The Surveillance Camera Players were founded in 1996 in New York City by Bill Brown, an activist with a long-running practice of urban street interventions. The project's method was relentless and deliberately silly: groups of four or five performers, in hand-made costumes and with hand-lettered signs, performed short (10- to 15-minute) plays in front of publicly-visible closed-circuit surveillance cameras in Manhattan. Private security guards, police officers, and whoever else was watching the camera feed became the involuntary audience. The plays — Ubu Roi, Waiting for Godot, Poe's The Raven, original scripts about surveillance — were performed entirely in plain view, for no one specifically, and often for no one at all. The conceptual move is precise. If a surveillance camera is watching, then anything performed in front of it is, by definition, being broadcast to someone. The Players were not protesting surveillance by avoiding it; they were protesting surveillance by absolutely embracing it as a theatrical channel, and by insisting that the people on the other end of the camera feed were now, whether they wanted it or not, an audience obliged to sit through a full-length staging of Waiting for Godot. The logic was tactical-media in the CAE sense: the existing apparatus is the medium, and the artist's work is to redirect its operation in ways its owners did not intend. The Players operated through the late 1990s and into the 2000s, performed at least fifty documented plays at cameras across Manhattan, Brooklyn, and in occasional solidarity actions at cameras in Berlin, London, and Prague, and maintained extensive documentation at notbored.org. The project's visibility peaked around 2001–02 when several major US newspapers published features. Brown remains active, lives in New York, and continues to run walking tours of the city's surveillance infrastructure as a form of public pedagogy. Every subsequent surveillance-art intervention in this archive — from Hasan Elahi's Trackingtransience to Trevor Paglen's Limit Telephotography to the Forensic Architecture collective's 2020s work — engages the same diagnostic that the Surveillance Camera Players articulated in 1996: that the cameras are performing a theatre, that the theatre is political, and that the artist's job is to make the theatre visible. Lore Bill Brown built the Players' initial costumes and props from thrift-store finds and recycled cardboard. The group was non-hierarchical and rotating; members came and went as availability permitted, and performances were typically organized on 48 hours' notice via the notbored.org mailing list. The Players were arrested several times for disturbing the peace or disorderly conduct, usually in cases where a passerby had complained, and Brown himself has been arrested roughly a dozen times. In each case charges were dropped because the group was demonstrably not doing anything actually illegal. The notbored.org documentation archive contains photographs, scripts, and performance-date records for most of the roughly 200 actions conducted between 1996 and 2008; it remains one of the cleanest documented records of tactical-media performance work of its era. Sources • Surveillance Camera Players — http://www.notbored.org/the-scp.html (primary archive). • Marcuse, Peter — "Surveillance Camera Players: An Interview with Bill Brown" (Social Justice, 2002). • Brown, Bill — We Know You Are Watching: Surveillance Camera Players 1996–2006 (Factory School, 2006).