Last week I took two books out of the library. Now, like most people I pick my research items through a threefold criteria if it has neither been recommended to me or I have no previous knowledge of the author, publisher etc. Firstly I go to the library and type in a key word, this time it was ‘surveillance culture’, secondly I browse the titles to find the most intriguing, and thirdly make my selection from these titles, mainly, it has to be said, and being a highly superficial individual, on the front cover.

My selections were these:

1. The Intensification of Surveillance: Crime, Terrorism and Warefare in the Information Age edited by Kirstie Bell and Frank Webster, Pluto Press 2003

2. Welcome to the Machine: Science, Surveillance and the Culture of Control by Derrick Jensen and George Draffan, Chelsea Green Publishing 2004

The first I am yet to explore, the second I picked up immediately for its front cover image which I recognised from an article about the artist from some newspaper this week. This artist is Nick Veasey, who uses the radiographic machine to take x-rays of machines themselves, humans and animals, and most interestingly, humans within machines to analyse what really lies beneath the surface. The book starts with a wonderful quote by Antonio Machado, “The eye you see isn’t an eye because you see it; it’s an eye because it sees you.” The book traces what its authors believe as the point at which the eye of surveillance took over from the eye of God in our contemporary situation for the creation of fear. Science, they argue, is not about one unitary truth; it comes from the same literary root as scire, scindere, schizein... schizophrenia, “a mind split into pieces.” I am yet to fully explore this book but am already drawn into the seemingly sci-fi descriptions of real, physical creations, the mapping of brain waves associated with thinking specific words or sentences, fabricated technologies that will allow materials to be inserted with energy packs to make people move faster, be stronger, go invisible. As Donna Haraway predicted in her Cyborg Manifesto of 1985, it is no longer a case of not surviving without, it is a case of morphing into.