We have created a new media project that plays with the concept of surveillance in a performative and interactive manner. We used three cameras to capture multiple perspectives of a live performance. This documented performance positions the subject as unaware of the multiple cameras stalking him, in what is usually a private place.
With the rapid adoption of web services, cell phones, GPS systems and social media today, the ever-watching eye of Big Brother has never been more easily and closely trained on our every move and preference. Less and less remains within the strictly private realm, particularly for those using the web and social media today.
Several artists and musicians, most notably in Britain, the most surveilled country in the world today, are using surveillance camera footage in innovative ways to reclaim public spaces and cameras for private use. (see my earlier post for more details).
Also see surveillance-footage-gets-a-starring-role.
While our piece does not use public surveillance techniques, we hope that it will be an entertaining and necessarily participatory, embodied experience which will raise questions about who is watching who, and to what end. While voyeurism may entice us by carrying the allure of pleasure and the forbidden, how do we feel when we become the unwitting subjects of a hidden camera? And, once captured and recorded, who has ownership and access to these images, and for what purposes?
In addition to the generally widespread use and acceptance of surveillance-as-security, personal information and content is also being collected, mined and usurped for profit in surprising ways. A striking example of this use of your personal information can be found in this video about what you are agreeing to when you sign up for a facebook account today:
For me, this represents a bigger issue than just who is watching who, and gathering what information. The far-reaching extent of the uses for these documents and data may not really be understood for years to come.
Our piece uses video clips from the original performance, played back in random sequence through a MaxMSP patch. Amongst the random clips is one longer, edited, narrative clip. The clips will be screened on a wall via a media projector.
An extreme angle of the projection creates deliberate keystoning of the projection, which adds to the disorienting feeling already created in the performance and the playback themselves.
On a table next to the projection is a 20″ x 20″ black box with a small, crude hole on the front panel. A sensor, controlled by an Arduino in conjunction with a breadboard and MAXMSP, turns on 2 tiny lights inside the peep-hole box and triggers a live-feed from a small video camera, also hidden inside the box, when the light in front of the peep-hole is blocked. One light inside the box displays the magazine used in the performance. A second light and a small, hidden video camera inside the box are activated by the sensor when someone blocks the light by putting their eye to the peephole. The second light illuminates the viewer’s peeping eye while the camera provides a live feed onto the wall behind the person peeping via a second AV projector. The camera shows the viewer’s own eye peering at themselves from behind. The viewer can never catch their own eye watching themselves. When the sensor is not activated, a still image is displayed.
The idea is to play with variations on notions of watching. As the viewer watches the performance playback they will be enticed to peep into the box that sets off the sensor and records them looking. The projection behind the person peeping into the box creates the situation where the eye is now watching the watcher. In fact, it is their own eye, watching themselves unaware of being watched.
Here is the sketch of our project proposal:
To me this represents how delightedly we look at our own and other people’s posted information and creative content online, largely unaware of the larger mechanics that are tracking us, while snatching the rights to any content we create and upload, in perpetuity, even after we may have removed it from the web.
In the process of developing our ideas for this project we thought that it would be nice to use the emails we generated about this project as the source for creating audio files, as music or tones (not voice) to accompany the visuals. We also recorded ambient crowd and skateboarding sounds, since it is a skateboarding magazine used in the clips.
Converting text to non-voice audio proved to be a much bigger challenge, one that I was unable to solve in the short time available. However, in trying to research how to do this, I was directed to Soundhack software, which after much reading, testing and fiddling, allowed me to create sound files directly from the visual signals of video files. The resulting sounds, after some tweaking, are quite surreal and strange, and even border on sounding like running water, birds and insects at times. Also airplanes, vacuum cleaners and UFOs. I love the fact that the audio is derived and mutated from the video clips being projected, and that they add another disturbing, abstract and disorienting layer to the entire piece.
My technological goals for this project were to learn the necessary programming skills to apply the arduino and sensor technologies to turn a live feed camera projection and a light on and off, by applying these to a fairly simple project, which could then be further developed for my thesis installation.
