24 Hour(s of) Security, (2026)
24 Hour(s of) Security, 2026. Performance and installation: security camera, live feed, the Bijou Theater.
California Institute of the Arts, March 23 - 27, 2026
24 Hour(s of) Security, 2026. Performance and installation: security camera, live feed, the Bijou Theater.
California Institute of the Arts, March 23 - 27, 2026
The installation of security cameras at California Institute of the Arts has been a longstanding yet largely private conversation, primarily reserved for administration and faculty rather than within the broader community. 24 Hour(s of) Security was an attempt to make this discussion public in response to ongoing rumors of cameras being installed throughout the institution.
The argument surrounding security cameras is often framed through the language of safety. However, the introduction of surveillance does not only alter the physical space. It changes the relationship between individuals and the environment they occupy. A watched room is a suspected room.
For over fifty years, the absence of cameras at C.I.A. contributed to a particular understanding of community responsibility. That absence did not produce the disorder commonly used to justify these systems. It produced shared responsibility between students, faculty, and the institution itself. The cameras will end that.
Surveillance is never a neutral perspective. As Michel Foucault describes through the concept of the Panopticon, surveillance functions not only by observing individuals but by creating the possibility of observation, producing behavioral changes through the awareness of being watched. The power of surveillance exists not necessarily in what is recorded, but in the psychological response to this potential.
The Bijou Theater was chosen because of its own institutional history as a space intended for student use and interdisciplinary exchange. After requesting permission to use the Bijou for this project and being denied by the film department, I was instructed not to use the theater.
Instead, I did.
And good thing there were no security cameras on campus.
The project became both an investigation of surveillance and a demonstration of what changes when surveillance is introduced.
At the entrance to C.I.A., beneath the evacuation map, I labeled the wall plainly with a decal reading:
THIS AREA IS UNDER PERIODIC SURVEILLANCE
In the Main Gallery, in my thesis exhibition, another decal informed visitors of the screening schedule:
Bijou Theater
Monday - Thursday
10 PM - 4 AM
Monday - Thursday
10 PM - 4 AM
Everyone was welcome to come watch something, but more likely nothing, happen. Unlike conventional surveillance systems, which distribute multiple camera feeds to a singular observer, this project reversed the relationship. A single camera feed became the object of collective observation. A theater full of people, mainly students and occasionally faculty, watched a concentrated perspective produced by a security system.
Initially, the response from viewers was understandably unsettled. Upon entering the theater, participants encountered an audience of peers and found themselves in a familiar but displaced position of watching others through surveillance while remaining physically removed from the space being observed. Often, in response to the situation, audiences assumed they would maintain a sense of separation, allowing belief that they would not act in line with the expectations of a surveillance system from the position of a “guard.”
However, this separation quickly dissolved.
Observation rapidly became suspicion. The theater’s position just below the entrance meant that at times the dampened sound of footsteps would precede an appearance on camera or a reflection captured in the sliding glass door would predict the arrival of a figure. Viewers began assigning narratives to those who entered the frame. Ordinary movements became threatening. Individuals walking through the entrance were no longer simply peers moving through a space. They became potential subjects of interpretation.
The presence of a security camera changes our relationship to ambiguity, meaning the primary result of surveillance is not an evidentiary exchange but a social relationship. The absence of significant events became central to the work. 24 Hour(s of) Security was not about what the camera recorded, but what the camera changed. The people walking through the frame did not themselves transform into suspects -the transformation occurred within the viewer, who began interpreting ordinary actions through a framework of suspicion.
24 Hour(s of) Security briefly introduced surveillance into California Institute of the Arts. My security camera did not reveal an existing problem, nor did it produce meaningful evidence of wrongdoing. Instead, it revealed the social and psychological effects created by the possibility of observation.
What is gained by the installation of security cameras on campus relies on a promise of disaster. What is lost is the ambiguity that allows a particular form of community and artistic exchange to exist.
This subjection of individuals through an evidentiary lens implies their need for defense to wrongness. In a place that historically encouraged failures and wrongdoing for the artistic development of individual practices, this new position between C.I.A. administration and students is now shown to be not neutral.
When this performance was made, the installation was a rumor. It is no longer.
As a result of the installation of security cameras, the once unique, non-hierarchical pedagogy of California Institute of the Arts -fails.