Stephen and I were (of course) delighted to have the opportunity to join BLDGBLOG and Edible Geography (as well as many others) over the weekend for the concluding presentation from the Landscapes of Quarantine studio they’ve been conducting this fall.  The work that’s being produced (for a forthcoming book and exhibition at the Storefront for Art and Architecture) is every bit as diverse and omnivorous as one would expect.

If you’d like an overview of the work, BLDGBLOG and Edible Geography have written posts on the topic; I’d like to talk about Daniel Perlin‘s project.  Perlin, a New York-based DJ and sound artist, derived the inspiration for his project from a recent visit to China, where he saw systems set up (if I recall correctly, in a hotel lobby) that use infrared technology to screen for humans with abnormally high body temperatures (i.e. the sick).  The system is composed of a camera, an automated interpretative computer system, a screen on which the computer displays a live feed from the camera overlaid with data points tagging people in view with temperature readings, an attendant, and an alarm (heard by the attendant through an ear piece), all of which appears senseable at first pass, as it seems reasonable that one could use an infrared camera to measure body temperatures and thereby locate (and quarantine) those running fevers.   But Perlin noted a variety of ways in which the system can and does malfunction, from operator error (Perlin noted that the attendant was not, in fact, wearing the warning ear bud and so would have missed any warning tones the system generated) to mis-measurement.  This sets the system up for two kinds of failure: the inappropriate extension of quarantine (the system mistakenly identifies healthy people as sick and so actually participates in spreading disease, which Perlin, with good cause, described as the most horrific consequence of quarantine he could imagine) and a failure to protect the population (the system fails to identify and quarantine the sick).

Though Perlin’s project explores the former possibility, the latter fascinates me, as it reminds me of the concept of “security theater”, coined by Bruce Schneier to describe the ways in which the public apparatus of security (at airports, government buildings, schools, transit stations, etc.) exists primarily not to provide security, as those measures are demonstrably ineffective, but to provide a fearful public with the illusion of security.

Is there, then, a subset of quarantine practices that ought to be termed “quarantine theater”?  Practices which exist not to protect the public from contagion, but to illegitimately pacify the public?  As Schneier notes in a recent post on security theater, this has both sinister implications (the practices of quarantine theater might divert important resources away from effective quarantine practices, or produce a false sense of security leading the public to ignore simple but vital practices) and more benign implications (providing a sense of security is not necessarily a bad thing, even if it illusory, if it permits normal life to continue in the face of potential threat).

Of course, this raises the nasty possibility that some of the other participants’ projects or project topics (Front Studio‘s fascinating quarantined city-within-a-city, for instance, or, more extremely, deep geological waste repositories such as Onkalo in Finland, which Smudge Studio’s project explores) are themselves instances of quarantine theater, perhaps necessarily subject to the same sorts of systemic breakdowns.  I’d love to see a project which explores what would happen if, for instance, one combined Front Studio‘s key insight (that quarantine could be a distributed condition interspersed within the city) with Perlin’s key insight (that quarantine might be inherently failure-prone), and sought to design a quarantine that is both distributed and redundant.

[You’ll find lots more on security theater in James Fallows’s archives at the Atlantic, though you’ll have to dig around within the “terrorism/security” tag]