Picked up this interesting bit of news via “BLDGBLOG”:http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/stranger-tv-and-world-of-cinemapolis.html

“Asbo TV helps residents watch out”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1974974,00.html

RESIDENTS of a trendy London neighbourhood are to become the first in Britain to receive “Asbo TV” — television beamed live to their homes from CCTV cameras on the surrounding streets.
As part of the £12m scheme funded by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, residents of Shoreditch in the East End will also be able to compare characters they see behaving suspiciously with an on-screen “rogues’ gallery” of local recipients of “anti-social behaviour orders (Asbos)”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASBO.

Viewers will then be able to use an anonymous e-mail tip-off system to report to the police anyone they see breaching an Asbo or committing a crime.

Obligatory “Big Brother”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance paranonia and “Privacy Advocacy”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_surveillance#Privacy aside, BLDGBLOG sees this from a different perspective:

The 24-hour closed-circuit voyeurism we impose upon the voidscape of empty car parks and untraveled motorways all around us is already a response to the directionless sprawl of 21st century space. As such, security cameras are the next phase of an advanced urban sociology, a vanguard attempt at understanding the limits, contents and directions of our cities; these cameras have nothing to do with security – unless, of course, cognitive security is the issue at hand.

And he calls it…

to introduce a new term here, we would find ourselves discussing not “psychogeography”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychogeography but *psychovideography*, the videographic psyche of the city. If security firms are the new providers of our urban unconscious, a hundred thousand endless films recording twenty-fours a day, indefinitely, then we should perhaps find that the outdated methodologies of the psychogeographers have hit an impasse. The ‘geo-’ is now in the ‘video-’, as it were, and the ‘-graphy’ survives just the same. Throw in some 24-hour ‘psycho-’, and we begin to see the city through the lens of an unacknowledged avant-garde: a subset of the film industry whose advance front has taken on the guise of security.

The security industry, in this case, finds itself a (presumably unwitting) heir to “John Cage”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cage. As Cage himself wrote, ‘There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear.’

Pretty interesting.