Surveillance

Ideation | Development

Initial Idea

Control Room

This project started off with Andra wanting to make a case about "over-surveillance" in the U.K. and how this could be an issue with personal space and privacy, questioning the need for an extensive installation of CCTVs around the country. 

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The plan was to have cubes mapped and projected with CCTV footages. 

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When we were researching up on projection mapping and artists who uses it to make a statement, Robin Bell came up. He made a projection on the Trump International Hotel in 2017 with words: 

“The President of the United States is a Known Racist and Nazi Sympathizer”

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This was among many other projections that he did which sent political messages that resonated the voices of the general public.

Projections to us, would symbolise the juxtaposition of an intended message on something already in existence and would be a great tool to raise awareness of CCTV surveillance in the U.K. Over the past few decades, there were several artists who used projections to make bold statements and it is a possible outlet we would like to explore for our installation.

Development

As we went deeper in our research, we realised that there was a need to build on how we want our message to be heard and acknowledged. We needed to create an environment that allows for the anchorage of the context, an experience that draws the audience into a pseudo-environment where they feel that their personal privacy is being threatened and walk away from the exhibition questioning the issue of surveillance and the extent of which personal privacy being taken for granted.

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Two other installations were conceived to enhance the experiential narrative. 

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The Eye.

Inspired by George Orwell's novel 1984, and Amazon Video's The Man in the High Castle, The Eye is a a visual representation of CCTV surveillance which monitors the actions of people in a space. This emulates a situation where the audiences' privacy are in a vulnerable position for as long as they are within the exhibition space. This takes on a very similar experience to a situation when someone is in a panopticon, giving one the idea that they are being watched by people of higher authority. 

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Mirror Mirror.

Very much inspired by Banksy and how he presents his political messages in a queer and "clownish" approach with texts, graffiti-stencil art or both. We conceptualise Mirror Mirror to portray, in a playful and dark way, the possibilities of personal phone cameras as part of an extension of CCTVs and the concept of consented media being easily manipulated, placing the user in a vulnerable position as they have no immediate way of rectifying the exploit of personal privacy. The concept of "Black Mirror" also helped inspire this blatant act of digital vandalism on our audience where provocative art and text filters are projected onto audience faces without them knowing what they are until they look at themselves in the mirror as part of an adaptation of the usage of snapchat and insta-stories we see today. This is also to raise awareness of the lack of responsibilities of personal data privacy on the devices we use today, especially, some 73,000 CCTV around the world where users did not change their default passwords and thus are accessible on a site - Insecams.org where people's homes can be viewed on the internet.