Veillance flux, vixels, veillons: An information-bearing extramissive formulation of sensing, to measure surveillance and sousveillance

The word “surveillance” comes from the French word “veillance” which means “watching” and the French prefix “sur”, which means “from above”. Thus “surveillance” means “to watch from above” (e.g. guards watching over prisoners or police watching over a city through a city-wide surveillance camera network). The closest purely English word is “oversight”. A more recent phenomenon, sousveillance (“undersight”) refers to the less hierarchical and more rhizomic veillance of social networking, distributed cloud-based computing, and body-worn technologies. Sousveillance forms a reciprocal power balance with surveillance, both being understood in the context of not just technology, but also complex human social and political relationships. In this paper we derive a precise theoretical and mathematical framework to understand, interpret, quantify, and classify “veillance” (“watching”) as to its directionality (i.e. surveillance versus sousveillance). While veillance can occur in a variety of sensory modalities, such as auditory sur/sousveillance, dataveillance, etc., we will focus especially on optical (visual) veillance. We define new physical concepts: the veillon, the vixel, and the veillance vector field, to provide insight into the measurement and demarcation of surveillance and sousveillance and their interplay.