Surveillance Panorama
Jules Spinatsch

The Surveillance Panorama project shows panoramic photographs obtained by combining a multitudeof still shots, taken with a computer-programmed web camera and assembled in a chronological pattern. In “Temporary Discomfort” and “Fabre n’est pas venu”, Jules Spinatsch is concernedwith politics: the World Economic Forum in Davos, the G8 summits and a meeting of the Toulouse Municipal Council. In each case, the camera records images at regular intervals, between three andfour seconds. The only preliminary preparations made by the artist concern the duration of the shot and the placement of the camera. From the spatio-temporal puzzles this produces, the density ofthe visual information cannot reconstitute the proceedings in their entirety. A key moment surrenders to a more general overview produced by piecing together a string of arbitrary moments.

The photographer distances himself from the spectacular and the controlled image which the spectator passively receives from other forms of media. Every part of the action is treated in the same manner,granted the same weight, and this incites the spectator to really look at the image and interpret it. In his second panorama (“Heisenberg’s Offside”), the artist links his way of approaching informationand facts to the uncertainty principle formulated by Werner Heisenberg, which stipulates that calculating the precise position of a point implies an approximation of its position in time. Thus, in theimages created by Spinatsch, the cameras never focus on the principal actor in the football match, the ball, which remains offside. Its absence from the field is due to a division of time which, contraryto the images projected in the media, is not erased from the final result; a loss of control is accepted in order to account for the speculative dimension involved in the recording of an event.

Surveillance Panorama Jules Spinatsch

Jules Spinatsch

Current edition

Youth of the Island Field

Tamara Eckhardt

Stammtisch

Collectif Le Salon & guests

Algues Maudites, a sea of tears

Alice Pallot

A Spasso

Luca Massaro

Surveillance Panorama
Jules Spinatsch