The Surveillance Studies Counter Archive is a chance to think critically about Oberlin’s history in regards to criminalization, activism, and surveillance. Our project represents a series of collections, historical searches, conceptual categories and creative reworkings of Oberlin’s most expansive, public collection of internal and external documents. Through our project, we use reorganization, manipulation, redaction, and recasting as means to shed new light on the ways the school watches students, community members, and even itself. As a whole, the project can be thought of as a countervisual; a way of utilizing our power to rework the history of the college from a more surveillance conscious angle. While the college finds a host of ways to surveill students, as captured throughout the project, the countervisual activities of our project reject the power dynamic embedded in this surveillance relationship. As Nicholas Mirzoeff, a visual culture theorist reminds us, “Countervisualities produces both a sense of what is at stake in present-day visualizing and a means to avoid being drawn into a perpetual game in which authority always has the first move” (Mirzoeff, 28). Utilizing the archive to make a countervisual product, the counterarchive, we want to disrupt the apolitical assumptions involved in archiving, making the effective “first move” towards thinking critically of Oberlin’s surveillance practices. To help give context to the website’s contents, here is a brief description of the various methods and practices utilized in constructing our final products.

Redaction:

“Although it may seem that redacted documents disallow close examinations of texts, paradoxically, they can provoke contrapuntal readings…” (Nath 23).

“This experience of reading the redacted document is not unlike what Barthes (1982) once called punctum: The unintended ways images can bruise us, puncture us, and disrupt our ways of experiencing and perceiving” (Nath, 26)

While the highlighting of heavily redacted government documents has been central to surveillance art and studies, our project engages with redaction from a more creative standpoint. The documents we have chosen to redact range from 1967 to 1981. Some read as illegible, marked heavily to obscure the who/what/where of their contents. Others, read like poems, weaving together selected words and themes to highlight hidden or counter-meanings. In both cases, the emphasis on redaction forces the reader to think complexly about what they are looking at, what they think they should be reading, and the meanings produced after reading the redacted texts.

Creative Collections:

“...the right to look is not censorship, then, but “visuality,” that authority to tell us to move on, that exclusive claim to be able to look” (Mirzoeff 1-2).

The Oberlin Archive, while being an amazing resource for students and members of the college, has its limits. As we searched for documents relating to surveillance, the documents selected were filtered through a pull-and-organize system. The final folders of documents collected covered topics of Security, Campus Protests, and Oberlin College’s “No Trespass List”. In an attempt to counter the institutional framing of these documents, we have reorganized selected documents along new topic areas that engage with surveillance more critically. The documents discussing alternative policing, were highlighted and organized to show the ways that student’s become agents of the school’s surveillance agenda. The documents gain new meaning when recontextualized by our sorting. More importantly however, this process of recontextualizing helped our group participate in a counter-visual process, in which we reasserted the right to view documents under our frames.

Security Documents:

No Trespass List Documents:

Campus Protest Documents: