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As a critical studies fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program she wrote extensively on the relationship between art and document, and the unconscious or conscious witnessing of historical events through photography and film. Her book Supervision: On Motherhood and Surveillance is forthcoming in 2022 with Orbis Editions. She currently teaches at Maine College of Art & Design.
MONITOR: A FILM SERIES PROGRAMMED BY SOPHIE HAMACHER
Seeking to update and renew the conventional “image” of surveillance, the film series MONITOR revisits surveillance in relation to its actors and techniques of observation and control. This surveillance is not limited to oppressive and authoritarian settings; instead, the films and videos included here underscore the ambiguous and contradictory nature of the surveillance we experience, as well as the indeterminate relationships it fosters. The artists and filmmakers navigate and negotiate these relationships while exploring issues of authenticity, discrimination, privacy, and depictions of power and identity. The eighteen films and videos in the series respond to being surrounded, meditating on the ways in which our lives are shaped and regulated by watching and being watched. As a noun, “monitor” references an instrument or device—a receiver—used for observation; as a verb, it addresses the proliferation and normalization of surveillance technologies. The series includes four short programs (Oversight Machines, Modes of Enclosure, Sentenced by Sound, and Cross Examinations) and one feature length film that offer a wide spectrum of filmic approaches—from the distanced ocular perspective of a military drone to intimate interrogations of online socializing and digital anonymity —each questioning, in their own way, the systems of power entangled with the visual. The history of the moving image is closely tied to the history of policing. One of the first instances of a camera’s use as a policing device dates back to the year 1935. 1 In Chesterfield, England police recorded a crime with a hidden 16mm camera. In the trial that followed, 14 men were convicted because of what that camera captured. Seven years later during World War II, military research yielded the first closed circuit television
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INTIMATE INTERROGATIONS
MONITOR
Sophie Hamacher is a filmmaker and teacher who has directed, edited and produced projects ranging in genres from full-length documentary to art videos and experimental films. She received her BA from The School of the Art Institute in Chicago, holds a Meisterschüler degree in Film, Video, New Media (MFA) and an MAT in Art Education from the University of Arts in Berlin.
