CCTV OSTRICHT

CCTV Ostrich

Two ostriches stand against a pale London wall. One bends its neck downward, apparently burying its head, while the second stretches an impossibly long neck upward. Instead of a head, however, it terminates in a real CCTV camera mounted on the building. Banksy supplies the bodies; the existing surveillance equipment completes the image.

The mural appeared in late 2011 and was circulating publicly by December. Contemporary photographs place it among the group of London interventions Banksy produced toward the end of that year.

Watching and Not Seeing

The choice of an ostrich creates a particularly effective contradiction. Popular mythology associates the bird with burying its head in the sand to avoid seeing danger. Banksy pairs that symbol of deliberate blindness with a technology whose entire purpose is supposedly to see everything.

The real camera is therefore both watchful and blind. By incorporating an object that Londoners routinely passed without noticing, Banksy also makes the surveillance apparatus itself suddenly conspicuous. What normally disappears into the architecture becomes the most important part of the picture. Academic analysis of the work has similarly emphasized how the intervention forces viewers to notice a CCTV camera that would otherwise blend into the urban environment.

Like One Nation Under CCTV, the work questions the promise that ubiquitous observation necessarily produces greater security. But CCTV Ostrich does so with considerably less confrontation: one bird refuses to look, while the other can apparently see everything. Neither seems to know what is happening around it.