In the article, I will present a project by the American artist Jill Magid entitled Evidence Locker (2004), which is not a conventional film work but a conceptual multimedia installation composed of short films edited from public surveillance camera footage. By walking the video-surveilled streets of Liverpool and writing diary love letters to the City Watch police, Magid attempted to develop an indirect relationship with the surveillance officers and to subvert or question, on an intimate level, the power structures embodied by the video surveillance at the time. I will present the relationship she forged with the surveillance ‘watcher’ or the ‘Big Other’ in relation to Lacan’s theory of the four fundamental discourses, through which I will attempt to understand the idea of resistance. I will situate the project in the context of the development of surveillance capitalism, which is the subject of Shoshana Zuboff’s work.

The integral version of this article can be found in the printed KINO!