This essay originated from the anthology DATA browser 04: Creating Insecurity: art and culture in the age of security edited by Wolfgang Sützl and Geoff Cox. The book was published by Autonomedia this year and is licensed under Creative Commons:

"First we should consider how security systems are installed in reality. Attention is focused on every point where an environment, conceived as ‘secure’, comes into contact with its outer edges. Typically, these edges are doors, windows, property lines, borders, coasts, air-space – every place of ingress or egress. At each of the edges, a catalogue of known and present dangers is established. An analysis is conducted to determine the most effective responses to these dangers; and then locks, barriers, fences, warning devices, surveillance personnel, armed guards, etc. are positioned at the system’s boundaries to repel the threat."

"In short, what happens in a contested environment where threats can arise from within? The response is clear: what happens is vertiginous paranoia."

"The problem of the system’s edges suddenly multiplies: the boundary to be secured is now the entire volume of the system, its width, its breadth, its depth, its characteristics and qualities and most damnedly of of all, its human potential for change. The resulting proliferation of eyes, ears, cameras, snooping devices, data banks, cross-checks and spiraling analytical anxiety in the face of every conceivable contingency is what defines the present security panic. Under these conditions, no form of precaution could appear superfluous. Statistical models of equilibrium are checked constantly against real-time deviations. Nascent trends are examined for potentially hostile extrapolations. Endlessly ramifying if-then scenarios are extended preemptively into the future. An aesthetics of closure striving toward mathematical certainty becomes the tacitly nourished ethos of the security system."

"Yet there is one further complication that merits our attention, particularly in what is called a democracy, where surveillance of the state by the citizens is an historical norm. This is the fact that security measures, in the face of a proliferating internal enemy, come rapidly to be shrouded in a veil of secrecy. The veil is not only cast to preserve their immediate effectiveness, though that is obviously an issue. But there is more at stake. Secrecy, from the viewpoint of the security system, is required to keep the initial security measures from backfiring and producing greater insecurity."

"What this means is that an aesthetic system must be constituted as a fully operational reality: a project, a team, an alliance or network that can probe the contours of the secret, dissimulating system, and at the same time, reveal those hidden outlines mimetically, through its own outer forms, its own vocabularies and images, its characteristic modes of appearance and communication. What you get then, in art, are elaborate fakes, doppelgängers, double agents, fictional entities that strive to produce outbreaks of truth at their points of contact with the hidden system. What you get, in other words, are counter-models, the virtual outlines of rival systems. This is the principle of some of the most advanced art of our day. Jack Burnham understood it in 1968. But there’s just one problem: later generations of critics did not read him.1"

"To define the boundaries of an aesthetic system is to determine both a threshold of visibility and a potential for interaction."