Posts Tagged ‘London’

Love of Surveillance: The Illusion of Safety

Thursday, December 24th, 2009

A recent Pew poll has been released concerning opinions of technological and social changes and how positively people view the different changes. Surprisingly high on the list was the increase in surveillance and security, with 58% of those polled viewing it as a positive change. That was a higher positive than for iPhones and Blackberrys, genetic testing, social networking sites, blogs and reality TV, which of course are other technological creations that are wildly popular among many segments of the population.

A Photograph of a Surveillance Room at a State...

Image via Wikipedia

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CCTV Sci-Fi Fairytale

Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009

Austrian artist Manu Luksch recently completed and is now showing the movie Faceless, comprised entirely of CCTV footage from London. The UK Data Protection Act gives individuals the right to access personal data held in computer filing systems, including CCTV footage. At 50 minutes in length, it is the first film that has been made entirely out of CCTV footage. According to the synopsis:

In a society under the reformed ‘Real-Time’ Calendar, without history nor future, everybody is faceless. A woman panics when she wakes up one day with a face. With the help of the Spectral Children she slowly finds out more about the lost power and history of the human face and begins the search for its future.”

CCTV sign in the window of Abrakebra Restauran...

Image via Wikipedia

This is a fascinating example of how one may sidestep the usual privacy/control/security debate and look at the inherent opportunities of surveillance, particularly huge systems like the one found in London. My architectural thesis project similarly sought to take advantage of surveillance technologies and cultural obsessions of the media image for new explorations in new media art. It will be interesting to see how Faceless is received and what future projects it may inspire.

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