Counter-Visual Artifacts: Negotiating Surveillance and Carceral Visuality in Public Housing through Videovoice

Paper Title

Counter-Visual Artifacts: Negotiating Surveillance and Carceral Visuality in Public Housing through Videovoice

Publication Info

• Topic area: Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and critical visual studies in the context of public housing surveillance.
• Keywords: Counter-visuality, carceral visuality, public housing, surveillance, videovoice, participatory research, racialized surveillance, community-based research, critical HCI, digital storytelling.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Dominant carceral visual regimes in public housing reinforce surveillance, racialized control, and stigmatization, rendering the lived experiences and knowledge of residents invisible or unintelligible. HCI has under-theorized how visual artifacts participate in structuring these ways of seeing.
• Significance: Addressing carceral visuality is crucial for challenging systemic inequalities, reclaiming visual agency, and enabling alternative ways of seeing and knowing for marginalized communities.
• Motivation and related work: Prior research in HCI has focused on visual artifacts as tools for coordination and collaboration but has not sufficiently addressed their role in reproducing power dynamics and dominant ideologies. This paper builds on critical visual culture studies and introduces the concept of counter-visuality to disrupt these dominant visual regimes.

Solution

• Proposed approach: The paper introduces "counter-visual artifacts" as visual materials created by impacted communities to disrupt dominant visual regimes and reclaim the right to see and be seen otherwise.
• Novelty:
  1. Development of the concept of counter-visual artifacts to challenge carceral visuality.
  2. Introduction of videovoice as a counter-visual participatory research method extending photovoice.
  3. Analysis of resident-produced videos to theorize their political and disruptive roles in visuality.
  4. Proposal of counter-visual methodologies and sensibilities for HCI research.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Conducted a multi-year videovoice project with public housing residents in Detroit.
  • Residents used smartphones to create videos documenting their experiences with surveillance and carceral power.
  • Four-phase process: onboarding, education and training, video creation and editing, and reflection and community action.
  • Analyzed videos using situational analysis and participatory methods to identify counter-visual orientations: seeing back, seeing around, and seeing self.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Residents produced 27 video clips (1 hour and 14 minutes total) and final edited videos ranging from 54 seconds to 8 minutes and 42 seconds.
  • Three counter-visual orientations were identified:
    1. Seeing Back: Residents interrogated surveillance devices, reversing the gaze onto tools of institutional power.
    2. Seeing Around: Videos documented everyday sociomaterial practices, highlighting the labor required to navigate and survive in carceral spaces.
    3. Seeing Self: Residents rearticulated their subjectivities, challenging stigmatizing narratives and asserting agency.
• Advantage over baselines: Counter-visual artifacts disrupt dominant visual logics rather than stabilizing meaning or facilitating institutional collaboration, offering a political intervention into carceral visuality.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Conducted participatory workshops, interviews, and group reflections with 11 public housing residents.
  • Videos were showcased in a community movie night attended by over 80 stakeholders, fostering dialogue and advocacy.
• Limitations and future work:
  • The project focused on a single public housing community, limiting generalizability.
  • Future work could explore counter-visual methodologies in other contexts and integrate them into HCI design practices.

Summary

This paper introduces the concept of counter-visual artifacts to challenge dominant carceral visual regimes in public housing. Through a participatory videovoice project with Detroit residents, the study identifies three counter-visual orientations—seeing back, seeing around, and seeing self—that disrupt surveillance and reclaim visual agency. The findings highlight the potential of counter-visual methodologies to expand HCI’s engagement with visuality as a political and epistemic terrain. By centering the lived experiences of marginalized communities, this work invites HCI scholars to rethink the role of artifacts in unsettling dominant frameworks and envisioning alternative ways of seeing and knowing.