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61 Camera-Locations mapped --- 15 Groups created --- Last Upload/Download: 2003-08-28-02:08:28 --- 536 Uploads / Downloads |
| Project Manual |
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Contents:
Psychic Climate Zones in a City Functionality Sound Design Concept Technological Concept TRACK-THE-TRACKERS--- as "Network Installation” To Invest into the Public Camera surveillance is propagated by its advocates as an effective instrument in the fight against crime. The deterrent properties of visible cameras are thought to bring security, peace, quiet and order. Invisible cameras considered as a tool in hunting down criminals. Critics of camera surveillance believe that surveillance camera systems constantly besiege the individual’s autonomy.
But: surveillance cameras are already plentiful in this neighborhood: most
people have surveillance equipment in operation. Residents are securing the
entrance area of their houses with access controls that include cameras. Bigger
companies put the area around office buildings under surveillance. Small business
owners are filming the entryways to their shops. Owners of bars are overtly
filming their "territory” around the bar where brawls and small-scale
gunfights erupt frequently.
any style of camera from the high-tech to the low tech.
A culture of security has spread widely of which cameras are only a part. To defend the private space against possible intruders, it is secured with fences, lattices, and even with barbed wire, so that veritable "fortresses” ensue. Still, cameras can be considered a particular outgrowth of this security culture because they are directed at public space causing very subtle lines to emerge dividing public space into observed and unobserved areas. Mike Davis, the US-American sociologist who coined the term "scanscape” deals in his books "The Ecology of Fear” and "The City of Quartz” among other things with the implications that surveillance cameras have on the city of Los Angeles. In "The Ecology of Fear” he is describing urban districts that have been architectonically optimized towards security, redesigned and outfitted with cameras. "[...] video monitoring of Downtown's redeveloped zones has been extended to parking structures, private sidewalks, plazas, and so on. This comprehensive surveillance constitutes a virtual scanscape - a space of protective visibility that increasingly defines where white-collar office workers and middle-class tourists feel safe Downtown”. Already in 1990 Davis describes in "The City of Quartz” the impact of such chic pseudo-public spaces. He criticizes that they are full of invisible signs asking members of the underclass to leave. He says that critics of architecture are often evaded by how the environment adds to or plays a role in segregation, but that the pariahs, poor latino families, young black males, or homeless old women understand their significance instantly. Davis describes how these social groups are isolated in their neighborhoods. He then states that democratic space in the truest sense has mostly vanished. Democratic space depends for him on an intermixture of all social ranks which he says does not happen anymore. Davis’ horror scenario is therefore not anymore the "Big Brother”-government structure that is threatening privacy advocates who are bent on defending the autonomy of the individual against surveillance cameras. For Davis the horror scenario is the abolition of public space and hence segregation. So the point here is not to explore the repercussions that cameras have on
the individual, but to see surveillance cameras as symptoms of the privatization
of public space with the surveillance motives being multiple. It is the aim
of the project to recreate a public sphere by encouraging investment in the
public sphere in the form of mappings. The idea behind TRACK-THE-TRACKERS---
is to collectively research different surveillance landscapes, to use the net
and its unique qualities as medium of discourse and to use the laptop as a mobile
unit to take the data out into urban space. The project also aims at creating
a consciousness for the manner and multitude of camera surveillance in urban
public space and to encourage resistance in the form of the collaborative acquisition
of a vocabulary against such surveillance projects.
Psychic Climate Zones in a City Guy Debord, co-founder of the Situationist International, already investigated
the effect that geography has on the psyche in the 1950ies. The Situationists
conquered, mapped and marked the urban territory. In "Introduction to a
Critique of Urban Geography" Debord remarks "the evident division
of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres". According to his
opinion, neighborhoods and urban districts do not differ in their architectural
style but in these psychic climate zones. He states that this fact is apparently
not noticed, at least there seems to be no investigation into and analysis of
the reasons that lie behind these zones. In his opinion, the discovery of such
could be of great use. The mapping, sonifying and "tapping into" of
these psychic climate zones which is contained in "TRACK-THE-TRACKERS---"
can therefore be seen as a psychogeographic field of experimentation, because
it deals with preserving and making accessible the invisible lines that surveillance
cameras draw through public space.
Participants move through the urban environment with a bag that contains a laptop computer. Connected to this computer are a regular computer mouse, earphones and a GPS-Receiver. The GPS-Receiver delivers the current position of the participant to the computer. Before leaving, the participant has downloaded the current version of the database that contains the GPS-coordinates of the previously mapped surveillance cameras. The database is downloadable from www.t-t-trackers.net. The software on the computer compares the current position of the participant with the data contained in the database and makes the result audible. The sound gets denser when the participant moves into an area with a higher camera density. When he/she moves into the vicinity of a camera, the sound gets very aggressive. Participants can map surveillance camera locations themselves by clicking the mouse that is attached to the outside of the bag. The bag is therefore not opened to record camera locations. The markings are put into a queue. Once the participant is located in a place with an Internet connection he/she can then complete the markings with some additional information such as place, city and pictures of the camera. This information is then uploaded to the database on www.t-t-trackers.net and therefore again made available for use by others. Camera locations in the database also have to be assigned to a "camera group” so as to put them in a context with the findings of others to create a new context.
As a basic principle, the mapping tool is designed to incorporate many different
perspectives on the subject of camera surveillance, which can be more or less
differentiated. The idea is not to build a data-acquisition tool for highest
efficiency, but to find the highest possible multitude of perspectives on what
is happening to the public sphere, how it is perceived and how surveillance
influences the public sphere.
The collaboratively gathered knowledge is taken on the journey through the urban environment. The data is not visualized but made audible (sonification). Visual maps are cumbersome because they have to be read actively, therefore occupy the full attention of the reader and do not leave the field of vision free for navigation in urban space. So new surveillance cameras cannot be discovered while reading a map. The sound directs the gaze on zones of video surveillance and animates the participant to have a closer look. The permanently heard sounds are generated by the data that is sent to the
computer by the GPS-receiver. It is the data that is generated when the participant
moves. Sine-wave tones of low frequency are generated from this data. The soundscape temporarily intensifies when the participant moves close to
a surveillance camera that has been previously mapped and is therefore included
in the database.
Markings in the public sphere are mostly made with the colors yellow and white
on dark asphalt.
TRACK-THE-TRACKERS--- uses these "street” aesthetics. Different (asphalt-)grey
tones are used as background, text is held in yellow and white. The logo is
written in a stencil font and is designed to have the irregularly worn look
of street lettering.
Hardware: During my research into wearable applications I found out that in the field of mobile mini computers research and technology are very advanced but conceptually not innovative. Researchers at the Zürich’s Federal Institute of Technology’s Institute for Wearables are developing highly complicated, high-capacity minuscule computers, which can be integrated for instance into textiles. Concerning the function of this technology, there seems to be little advance beyond the idea of the ever-helpful digital assistant. It is the defined goal of this institute, to technologically perfect such a digital assistant, a device that is totally focussed on the individual user. All their research efforts seem to go into that direction. TRACK-THE-TRACKERS--- is a mobile computer application that ideally is not aimed at the individual but at a collective system. So the aim is not to build an individual tourist guide but a collaborative environment.
TRACK-THE-TRACKERS--- as "Network Installation” TRACK-THE-TRACKERS--- manifests, when one moves in public space. The mobile
units (bags containing laptop, gps-receiver and mouse) can be self-built or
borrowed. In the exhibition "Code
Campus” at Ars Electronica
2003 the bags were dispensed to exhibition visitors at a central place. The
presence of the project was staged as a control
space with mobile security fences and floodlights.
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