Number 23: August 2017: Discipline and Punish Today
Cover photo: "Mister Security" © Lukasz Chrobok, Christoph Faulhaber, 2007
Frieder Vogelmann & Jörg Bernardy writes about the photo:
The cover picture, entitled "Performance", is a compositing which is part of the catalogue "MISTER SECURITY - To Serve and to Observe" by the two German artists Lukasz Chrobok und Christoph Faulhaber. From 2005 to 2007 they ran Mister Security, a fictional security company with the self-proclaimed duty to safeguard public spaces, long before the NSA scandal shocked the world in 2013. With their work, the two artists want to show how the globalised culture of security and surveillance technology creates a new aesthetic regime and influences a whole new lifestyle. Taking its visual and emotional cues from worldwide car advertising campaigns, the picture refers to the global power and uncertainty in the wake of new surveillance technologies. Christoph Faulhaber is well known for his provocative art and has been under surveillance by German intelligence services and the FBI because of it. In his film "Every picture is an empty picture" (2014), he describes his projects in a blend of documentary and fiction.