Surveillance, a watchword for our times - Los Angeles Times

Description

MEET the friendly new face of surveillance culture.

It's
called FaceFinder, and since launching this summer, the smart sculpture
resembling a gargantuan alarm clock has functioned like a high-tech
photo booth in a courtyard off Sunset and Vine. Sheathed in aluminum
and fronted by a glass-shelled video monitor screen, FaceFinder scans
its target area outside Borders Bookstore, fixes upon a subject,
captures his or her image with a camera concealed in its blob-like
"ear," then magnifies every facial twitch at about six times normal
size on a 5-foot video screen.

Meanwhile, a robotic projector
culls images from the FaceTime database and sends 14-foot head shots of
previous visitors to a nearby "wall of fame."

"People
go up to the FaceFinder, play with it, or mock it, see if they can
trick it," says creator Steve Appleton. "This whole dialogue occurs and
the payoff is, there's this possibility that your face will join up
with others projected on the wall."

Appleton is among a new
breed of tech-savvy artists using motion sensors, 3-D cameras, robots
and pattern-recognition software to put their own spin on a central
fact of contemporary life: More and more, we are being watched.
Security cameras capture the action at traffic intersections and border
crossings -- and in malls, dressing rooms, airports, parking garages,
hotel lobbies, museums. Cellphone cameras, Google Earth satellites and
camcorders empower citizens to zoom in on celebrities and neighbors
alike. Drones fly over Houston searching for "suspicious behavior."

Ingenious
and pervasive, the monitoring of personal behavior in public spaces has
given rise to an "art of surveillance" forged from tangled impulses
encompassing interests in privacy, safety, exhibitionism, paranoia and
good clean fun.

"I view these surveillance technologies as
something I can use for aesthetic and dance-able purposes," says
Appleton, a self-taught software wizard who wrote the code for his
overall Face- Time system with Cal Arts-based programmer Steven
Schkolne. "The kind of face detection we use was not possible at any
level -- academically, NASA, anybody -- seven years ago. As artists we
are now able to leverage this kind of technology. Since there ain't no
getting away from it, let's take control."

While tourists mug
for FaceFinder, commuters whizzing down Lankershim Boulevard in the
Valley may or may not notice the blur of numerals flashing across the
facade of NoHo Commons. Across the street from North Hollywood's
Chandler Street subway station, "Drive By," completed in June by Los
Angles duo Electroland, tracks each passing car with a violet-colored
numeral that increases in value as the vehicle moves past the building.
Electroland partner Cameron McNall says, "Our intention is really
about, 'How can this building acknowledge that you're going by? And how
can you know that the building is acknowledging you?' "



In the spotlight

TWENTY-FIVE
miles south in downtown San Pedro, residents can't miss Christian
Moeller's "Mojo" robot. Perched on a cheerful red-striped pole in front
of Centre Street Lofts, the sculpture, which went "live" in November,
swivels, rotates and bends, shining a spotlight on random pedestrians
who catch the attention of video cameras mounted on roofs. The cameras
transmit data to a computer program that instructs Mojo to follow each
selected subject down the street.

Reactions vary, Moeller
says. "It produces what I call 'the friendly surprise,' but also,
people are scratching their heads going, 'What is that?' The movement of the thing is so precise . . . Mojo has a predator kind of quality that creates a certain insecurity."

Moeller,
a German-born ex-architect who moved west in 2001 to teach at UCLA's
Department of Design/Media Arts, also created Daisy, a propeller-topped
motion-sensor at Singapore Changi International Airport that pivots
"like a mime" to interact with travelers. In Tokyo, his "Nosy" cameras
blow up black-and-white video of passersby onto a 43-foot-tall
bit-mapped wall of the Art Village Osaki office building.

"I
came to these works in an innocent way simply because I wanted to use
the sensor technology," says Moeller. "But in these political times,
the acceptance of what you might call the transparent citizen has
become stunningly high." Ultimately, however, Moeller aims to delight,
not instruct. "I'm most excited by that moment when somebody responds
to my work and says, 'Oh, look at how smart, how nasty, how tricky this
is.' "

Like Mojo, ACCESS Spotlight System follows people with
a robotically operated beam of light. Created by Los Angeles-based
artist Marie Sester to explore "the edges between scary and playful,"
the people-tracking museum installation, touring internationally since
2001, intrigues San Francisco MoMA curator Rudolf Frieling.

"A
straightforward critique of institutional surveillance practices is not
enough anymore," says Frieling, who plans a 2008 exhibition including
surveillance-themed work, tentatively titled "Toward Participation in
Art." Compared to the closed-circuit video experiments popular in the
1970s, media artists today operate in a more complicated societal
context, he says.

"The historical framework, from Orwell's
1984 to YouTube 2007, represents a major shift in our culture. Artists
like Marie Sester cleverly address this ambiguous ground, where the
public response has changed from 'Big Brother is taking over' to the
sense now that 'It's OK, it's part of my security.' "

Some
artists question the cost of that security. After Hasan Elah mistakenly
wound up on the FBI's terrorist watch list in 2002, the
Bangladeshi-born Rutgers professor created Tracking Transience.net, an
impudent exercise in self-surveillance in which he documents his own
whereabouts via 20,000 time-stamped digital photos. Canadian artist
Steve Mann and his cohorts dress themselves in camcorder-embedded
T-shirts, bustiers and backpacks, then parade through stores to
challenge the assumption that security cameras need only point in one
direction -- at the customers.

By contrast, performance artist
Jill Miller chose to play the heavy for her recent "Collectors" show at
San Francisco's 2nd Floor Projects gallery. After training with a
private investigator, she spent six months secretly photographing five
Bay Area art collectors as they went about their daily business. The
exhibition includes FBI-style flow charts diagraming each collector's
"Residence," "Family and Friends" and "Activities." Miller also
published "Them" a tabloid parody crammed with photographs of her
unwitting subjects. "I started this project just wanting to observe the
anthropological side of things," she says, "but when I looked over all
these shots I realized, I'm really just making another OK! magazine.
There's this sense of privacy we want to protect, yet at the same time,
how many of those celebrity magazines are out there? To me that's an
interesting contradiction."

Miller adds that "Collectors" was
"meant to provoke," but as it turned out, none of her subjects
complained. In fact, one collector purchased a flip book featuring
pictures Miller had taken of his home.

While
surveillance-themed artistic activity has surged in the United States
since 9/11, European creative types have been crafting works in this
vein since the '80s. Current practitioners include architect/designer
Jason Bruges. Early in 2007 he rigged London Bridge with motion sensors
that transmitted signals from pedestrians' mobile phones to generate a
continuously mutating matrix of colored lights on the nearby Tower
Bridge.

Speaking from London, the world's most heavily
surveilled city, Bruges says, "Real-time tracking and information
gathering will only get more sophisticated. I think it's very important
to subvert these technologies and use them in a playful way so people
become less scared and more comfortable with this technology that
already surrounds them."

But how comfortable should citizens
feel in the face of increasingly punctilious tracking systems? Thomas
Y. Levin, author of "CTRL [Space]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from
Bentham to Big Brother" (MIT Press) and curator of Princeton
University's 2001 exhibition "Anxious Omniscience: Surveillance and
Contemporary Cultural Practice," notes, "You have to ask yourself when
you're looking at this art: What kind of intervention is it making? Is
it teaching people something they don't know? Is this stuff making
people sensitive to a dimension of the surveillance economy that they
might not have been aware of? Does the work empower us to take up
different positions or ask new questions?"

At a minimum, the new
surveillance art alerts citizens to the dense electronic soup that
permeates 21st century urban environments. Electroland's McNall muses,
"We're all so affected by this pervasive invisible electronic network.
If you think seriously about all these technologies you could begin to
get a little paranoid, but if you sort of cloak these things in
friendly clothes, people aren't offended. We're interested in exploring
fun ways to make these technologies visible and look at how this
pervasiveness can change people's relationships to buildings and
spaces, or to each other."

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