1984 in 2016: The unblinking electronic eye.
Every month, more or less, I go and pick up my daughter at the San Jose Airport, and then I send her back to her mother the same way after a few days or a week. Again we drive to the airport. We stand in the security line where we are informed we must remove our shoes and divest ourselves of any liquids, that if we see something we must say something. We are apprised as we wait of the newest regulations devised by our guardians to keep us safe. I grit my teeth. I put her on the plane.
At the top of the stairs beside security and the exit for all gates at this particular airport is a piece of what I suppose could be called modern art: a very tall white machine with a rotating camera and monitor apparatus spins constantly round and round, giving the once and future passengers and their waiting friends and family a quick flash of themselves in the huge rotating eye of the white giant.
Last month I stood there beside this monstrosity and awaited my daughter’s emergence from the throng of holiday travelers, and a young man (too young to remember the world before 9/11) passed me wearing a 1984 t-shirt. The famous year of Orwell’s bleak dystopia was fairly bulging with accusatory eyeballs, and as the kid shuffled passed he aligned for the briefest instant with the towering camera/monitor, and further on with the brimming security line.
I try to attend to moments like these, because they are perfect in their way. For a moment art, literature, fashion, history and geopolitics converged before my eyes as I stood alone in the crowd and watched it happen. The surveillance is overt at this airport and most airports across the United States; the security measures are deliberate and audacious, and our collective willingness to submit ourselves, electronically denuded and in our stocking feet, to TSA’s gestures toward competence and authority in exchange for a nebulous, demonstrably false promise of safety simply goes without saying after 15 years of living with it. It almost feels redundant to call the moment I experienced “Orwellian.”
And so, I recorded the moment as best I might: snapping a few pictures with my internet-connected camera/phone, though it has until recently been subject to datamining by the NSA– for I have learned to love surveillance. 
