Chatroulette has been getting a lot of buzz lately, and while I do have a webcam, I haven't checked the site out (yet). Chatroulette connects you to a video chatroom with a random stranger. And from all reports, it is bizarre, if not disturbing.

In 2003, I wrote an essay on the activist/performance groupSurveillance Camera Players (click here to read: http://audreywatters.com/scp.pdf), and while Chatroulette doesn't involve surveillance cameras per se, it does seem like many of us enjoy performing before a camera.

The SCPs' performances were meant to draw attention to the ubiquitous surveillance cameras in New York City and attempted to (I'll quote myself here) "defamiliarize and denaturalize surveillance in the hopes of shocking the audience into thought and action." The group would perform theater (such as Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi) in front of cameras -- both for the cameras and audience passing by.

Some seven years after my essay was written and some fourteen years after the SCP was founded, surveillance has only grown. It's not merely cameras that monitor our physical movements; a whole series of tools can be used to track us: what we buy, who we call, where we go -- on- and offline.

The focus of much of my research was on political street performance. I have to wonder how our every-increasingly digital world has changed both the "performance" and the "street." After all, we can sit at home on our computers and still actively participate in a "public space" online.

I want to think more about how political performance can be used to call attention to digital surveillance.

And I wouldn't mind doing something "theatrical" about it.