Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1974: the surveillance imaginary of the New Mexico Civil Liberties Union Campaign for privacy awareness.

This article maps the surveillance imaginary of a unique public awareness initiative by the New Mexico Civil Liberties Union and Godfrey Reggio's Institute for Regional Education in 1974 that consisted of two parts: a situationist-inspired campaign using and surrealistically subverting popular media to raise awareness of surveillance, paired with a newspaper supplement documenting detailed intrusions on the privacy and liberty of citizens on a number of fronts, representing an encroaching society of social control. Taken as a whole, the surveillance imaginary of the campaign combined images of eyes, computers, and rats in mazes with detailed discussions of databases, militarized policing, and direct behavioral control justified by stories of rising violence in society to critique both state surveillance and the growing corporatization of the public sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]