See you in the funny pages: penal sites, teletechnics, counter-artifactualities

Abstract

© 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. A 2016 image by cartoonist Chris Kelly powerfully brings together two regimes of detention in Australia, one ‘domestic’ and directed largely at Indigenous prisoners, the other ‘offshore’, and directed at refugees and asylum seekers. In both cases, it was CCTV footage which provided the means of exposure of violent abuses in these detention systems, although this exposure simultaneously exposes the very failure of CCTV, as a mechanism deigned precisely to magnify the state’s powers of surveillance. This paper traces the interactions between inmates, advocates, activists and artists in these two campaigns of exposure. It reprises James Der Derian’s 2001 concept of MIME-NET (Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network) to explore the possibilities of a new social activism of images.