Stanza

Urban Generation brings together interior and exterior, making visible the systems that invisibly and silently track our movements, habits and preferences. Live images from the city’s surveillance cameras are reworked into a series of grids, re-controlled by Stanza’s own software and presented back online, offering ‘a real time experience of the city from multiple perspectives.’ The result is a constant, evolving view of the urban landscape and its inhabitants, and of the controlled state of the metropolis. Stanza calls this parallel reality ‘panoptic aesthetics,’ a term that recalls the panopticon, Jeremy Bentham’s design for a prison in which inmates could be watched at any moment without knowing when. Made in 2002, as networked surveillance was rapidly expanding, the work asks whether pervasive surveillance is inevitable, and whether it is enough for ‘these billions of hours of stored data’ to serve as evidence after the fact rather than as prevention. More than two decades later, its questions feel more urgent than ever.