Despite the disciplinary power of surveillance, I argue artistic performances may also provide a space of resistance and selffashioning. Discussions on artistic performance emphasize the ambivalence and uncertainty of art to resist existing power structures and create alternative meaning. However, how concretely, and when, do artistic performances challenge these structures often remains uncertain. Their popularity does not guarantee the depth of their engagement with surveillance practices, and apparent resistance may hide blatant reproduction of existing inequalities and power structures. To understand the political effect of artistic performances, I argue one needs to look at how they participate to the redefinition of individual and collective selves. This must include attention to spectatorship as a different category from state and corporate surveillance. Spectators actively engage with performers, reinforce or deny their claim to self-fashioning. By looking at spectators we can better understand how a performance can be (or fail to be) self-fashioning not only for the performer but also for the spectators.
The war in Ukraine sees local and foreign civilians play active roles in the conflict, mainly through the participatory gathering and sharing of intelligence and open-source investigations of alleged human rights violations and war crimes. These surveillance practices seen in the war in Ukraine are not novel. Vigilantism campaigns have normalized since the War on Terror, while open-source information is increasingly recognized as a legitimate tool for human rights and international criminal justice investigation. Yet, their importance in the war in Ukraine highlights the agentic power of civilian surveillance. The proliferation of digital technologies empowers civilians to become inevitable actors in all spheres of politics, including war. However, across these practices, I argue that the Ukrainian government and its Western allies harness this agency as operational and narrative weapons. Patriotism and morality are pushed forward to mobilize individuals to participate in the war despite the risks that vigilantes and open-source investigators have to assume: risks of retaliation by Russian forces and lost independence.
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