Surveillance Logics in Contemporary Art, the 16th CRISP online seminar is a panel discussion featuring Susan Cahill (University of Calgary), Stefy McKnight (Carleton University) and sava saheli singh (York University). The seminar takes place on Wednesday 22nd April 2026 at 2pm BST. To join the seminar, click on the 'Join the Seminar' link at the bottom of this page. The link will become live 15 minutes before the start of the seminar.

Abstract

This panel examines an ongoing collaborative project that explores how creative practices generate new forms of knowledge about surveillance. By bringing together a range of critical, creative, and scholarly works that engage the aesthetics, politics, and logics of surveillance, we position artistic production as central to broader debates about surveillance as a system of power and control. This project situates creative practices in relation to the belief systems, value structures, and institutional frameworks that authorize and normalize surveillance technologies, particularly within contemporary social and political contexts. The panel will feature three interventions followed by questions from the audience. 

Susan Cahill, Associate Professor (Art History), University of Calgary

My discussion examines the foundational methodologies of our project, highlighting art as a critical approach that enables both creative and analytical engagements with surveillance structures and the epistemologies that underpin them. It asks: How does art trouble, reveal, challenge, and resist surveillance systems? To address this central question, I focus on two key objectives that guide our work as an editorial and curatorial group: first, to theorize surveillance as a logic and belief system, and second, to assert art as a productive methodology for engaging with and interrogating these logics.

Stefy McKnight, “Art, Surveillance & Territory” Associate Professor (Media Production & Design), Carleton University

My contribution speaks to the close relationship between surveillance and colonialism, particularly in relation to settler land management practices such as border-making, Indigenous displacement, resource extraction, and undermining Indigenous sovereignty and Traditional Territories. The art I discuss here centres on surveillance as an embodied and colonial structure, visualized from the perspective of artists, scholars and creative practitioners. With this discussion, I ask: how does surveillance re-enforce settler beliefs of land management, extraction, and control? I explore this question through the artistic practices referenced in this talk. In these works, art becomes both a method of resisting surveillance and its logics, and a way of re-seeing the land, challenging the surveillant-settler-colonial gaze from the standpoint of those most targeted by its logics.

sava saheli singh, “Art, Surveillance & Carcerality” Assistant Professor (Digital Futures in Education), York University

My contribution will consider how artistic approaches can locate the work of surveillance as a tool of the prison industrial complex. Showing how punitive and racist these systems are, art can highlight and engage with carceral logics and carceral aesthetics embedded in seemingly mundane surveillance systems, showing how this mundanity serves to normalize and extend carceral logics into our everyday lives. This in turn can open up the space to engage with abolitionist approaches towards dismantling carceral systems, both in our environments and in our minds.

Biographies

Susan Cahill (she/her)is a white settler scholar who lives and works in Moh’kinsstis | Calgary. She is Head of the Department of Art & Art History and Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Calgary. Her research examines the intersections of art, surveillance, belonging, and colonial state-making in Canada. Her book, States of Observance: Contemporary Art and Surveillance Logics in Canada, is forthcoming with McGill-Queen’s University Press (2026).

Dr. Stéfy McKnight (they/them/iel) is a white settler, non-binary, artist-researcher and Associate Professor at Carleton University in Ottawa. They are Director of  surveillart: care-laboratory for research-creation and disruptive exhibitionism. Their current research looks at care-laboration and care-centric research-creation; surveillance and pleasure, and settler colonial logics of rural land management, territory and property.

Dr. sava saheli singh (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Digital Futures in Education with the Faculty of Education at York University in Toronto. An interdisciplinary scholar and filmmaker, sava works at the intersection of education, technology, surveillance, speculative futures, critical digital literacy, labour, and abolition. Supported by funding from the OPC and SSHRC, she conceptualized and co-produced the award-winning Screening Surveillance series of short, near-future fiction films that speculate technologically mediated surveillance futures. She is currently working on research and research-creation projects that examine the impact of generative AI products on education.

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