The graffiti artist Banksy has pulled off one of his most audacious stunts - an enormous protest against Britain's surveillance society painted just feet from a CCTV camera.
The guerrilla artwork appeared on a wall above a Post Office yard off Oxford Street in central London on Monday morning.
It features a boy in a red jacket painting the slogan "One Nation Under CCTV" in stark white capitals. His actions are filmed by a policeman next to a barking dog.
The secretive artist's achievement is made more impressive by the fact that the piece is several stories high - meaning he had to erect temporary scaffolding before slipping away unnoticed.
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ReplyDeleteI think this is a wonderful piece. I can only imagine how much worse the surveillance society has gotten in London with the coming 2012 Olympics. Things are getting tense over there:
Delete1) The largest mobilization of military forces since WWII are planned to stay there after the olympics are over
2) The mascot himself will have a camera mounted in it's eye socket (and some of the plush dolls they're selling of him have him in full police gear)
"As a metaphor for the London Olympics, it could hardly be more stark. The much-derided "Wenlock" Olympic mascot is now available in London Olympic stores dressed as a Metropolitan police officer. For £10.25 you, too, can own the ultimate symbol of the Games: a member of by far the biggest and most expensive security operation in recent British history packaged as tourist commodity. Eerily, his single panoptic-style eye, peering out from beneath the police helmet, is reminiscent of the all-seeing eye of God so commonly depicted at the top of Enlightenment paintings. In these, God's eye maintained a custodial and omniscient surveillance on His unruly subjects far below on terra firma."
3) They're putting up anti-air batteries around all the performance stadiums
Information from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2012/mar/12/london-olympics-security-lockdown-london
It really is getting quite undeniably Orwellian over in Air Strip One - I mean London.
ReplyDelete*shiver*