Tango Panopticon
A Worldwide Sensual Incursion on Video Surveillance
Go to Tango Panopticon Live Streaming Video Page
All around the world, hundreds of people will dance on May 1, 2010 in front of surveillance cameras in a synchronous international public art event of unprecedented scale. Using our free open source software, the dancers and the public at each location are invited to participate by streaming live video from mobile phones to the Internet, connecting the participants in a live, virtual global dance party.
Tango Panopticon is a new international series of Tango Interventions in public spaces that are surveilled by government or private video cameras. Tango is a breathtaking act of intimate connection between two people. Tango Panopticon brings this sensual intimacy to unlikely settings to reclaim urban space, and to expose and unsettle the panoptic machine of public surveillance. Together, worldwide, we will confound the machine by acting through a networked community celebrating sensuality, intimacy, play and the cumulative power of individual gestures of beauty.
Tango Panopticon Beta Version was launched May 1, 2009 with Tango Interventions under public video surveillance in 15 cities around the world, from Maui to Krakow to Johannesburg South Africa, and 12 stops in between. A year later on May Day 2010 Tango Panopticon 2.0 will reprise this historic event in a greatly expanded and networked version. Tango Panopticon 2.0 will provide groups of tango interveners with open source software that will allow them to use cell phones to stream live video from their event to our server where it will be instantly visible to public and participants in other cities and anywhere in the world via the Internet. There will also be large screen projection of all live video streams in several cities.
Leading up to Tango Panopticon 2.0 will be a series of smaller Tango Panopticon interventions in cities around the world. I welcome collaborators for these interventions and of course everyone is welcome and encouraged to produce their own Tango Panopticon actions wherever they are.
Be a part of this Historic Series!
Click on one of the two links below to get more information about participating in Tango Panopticon 2.0 anywhere in the world, either as part of Tango Panopticon 2.0 on May Day 2010, or on any day of your choosing before that day.
THE IDEA...in context. In action...PARTICIPATE
Tango is a practice already ready for struggle. It knows about taking sides, positions, risks. It has the experience of domination/resistance from within. Tango, stretching the colonized stereotypes of the latino-macho-Catholic fatalism, is a language of decolonization. So, pick and choose. Improvise. Hide away. Run after them. Stay still. Move at an astonishing speed. Shut up. Scream a rumor. Turn around. Go back without returning. Upside down. Let your feet do the thinking. Be comfortable in your restlessness. Tango.- Marta E. SaviglianoTango and the Political Economy of Passion