© The author(s), 2010 | Licensed to the Surveillance Studies Network under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license.

The dissemination of surveillance cameras grows in public and semi-public spaces, yet simultaneously restrictions on the use of cameras by artists, filmmakers and independent media-activists increase. In this dispute for the production of visibility in urban space, surveillance cameras have assumed a role of regulating behaviour and access, producing effects like social exclusion, standardization and gentrification. In our understanding it is necessary to be attentive to the political and poetic dimension of the image as a common construction, and the performance “Composição para Circuito de Vídeo-vigilância ” (Composition for Video Surveillance Circuit), presented in this article, is an artistic answer to the ubiquitous phenomena of video-surveillance practices. The performance is designed as a Live Cinema show, where images of a CCTV are projected in a theatre in the same way as a silent movie: accompanied by a sound track performed on the stage. Mixing sound archives collected and recorded for the screening, and a voice over performed live on the stage, we are expanding the fictional quality of every image, and questioning the value of reality attributed to CCTV images. The audience can watch the spectacle in two different ways: as a classic movie spectator sitting in front of the screen, or “entering ” into the movie, by circulating in the space under surveillance, located near the projection area. With this project we try to understand how the activity of watching surveillanc