Nov 01
This project requires you to set a problem and provide a unique, innovative, creative, informed and culturally aware solution. Projects are to be negotiated with your tutor through an initial proposal included the web.
I am planning to map the surveilance cameras around a certain part of plymouth, say the city center and produce an interactive guide to plymouth and possibly routes through the city where you cannot be seen by cameras. I am planning to do an initial map this week to get the ball rolling
March 16th, 2006 at 4:04 pm
First meeting with Dan Livigstone today for a while. Came up with ideas to play games with the cameras, get footage of me from the cctv owners and generally mess about with them in order to come up with a some ideas and processes for the project. Material wise, i am still mapping the cameras and now will try and get in contact with the CCTV controlers
March 20th, 2006 at 10:22 am
After drawing a blank with contacting CCTV controlers, I decided to go it alone! Ive nearly mapped all the CCTV (well all the ones i can see!) in and around plymouth city center. Dicovered quite a lot about plymouth while doing it! I now have a set of scruffy maps with CCTV camers scrawled on them so I can enter them all on to a big map for the project.
Ive also been thinking of what to do with this. Ive found some interesting information on the misuse of CCTV. Did you know that 40% of people targeted by CCTV operators/police are targeted for no reason at all other than the way they look or their race? Shocking isn’t it! And it appears that people a dicriminated against and monitred because of the way they look! In my eyes this is wrong and a blatent abuse of power. If only there was someway of knowing where the cameras were so to avoid them and avoid being picked out of the crowd!
March 20th, 2006 at 10:25 am
If you could not tell from my sarcasm previously, my project will be a tool to help people avoid the CCTV around plymouth, to avoid discrimination and being part of a widely misused technology. Idealy the project would be able to run on portable devices so you can avoid the cameras in “real time” but I dont know how possible this will be. I think it will be on the web whether there is a portable version or not.
March 21st, 2006 at 2:27 pm
I like this project called ‘iSee’. It was created by the institute of applied autonomy and it is a mapping program that gives you routes through manhattan which avoid CCTV cameras and any surveillence. take a look here
March 27th, 2006 at 10:43 am
Ive been thinking about how my project will work and how it will look. I think I will use an interface to scroll around a large map, instead of just having a map by itself, this could probably be built in flash so to make it universal to most internet users. Ive also been looking into making this project mobile. It seems devices that run on Windows PocketPC OS will run normal HTML pages in pocketIE (mini internet explorer). This does limit the number of people able to use my app. on a mobile device but short of rebuilding the app in flash lite, this is the only option. Unfortunatly I have no means of testing it…but i have every faith it will work 
April 2nd, 2006 at 10:48 am
I have finished the map! ITS HUGE! I purposly made it massive so you can scroll around the map in more detail and you can recognise the camera positions easier. Im well into making the viewer in flash (found a few tutorials to help me because im not that good with flash!) Once all that is finished I can crack on with making the website and launching it!
April 10th, 2006 at 10:49 am
Heres a screenshot of what it looks like so far…im quite proud!
April 15th, 2006 at 11:01 am
I have been trying to come up with a name for the project for a while and I think i might go with CC:plymouth (closed circuit plymouth)…i quite like it!
April 19th, 2006 at 10:58 am
Here is a description a what the project is about which i will put in the ‘about’ section of the site:
Research shows that Police use CCTV to target in on certain people to monitor, discriminating mostly minorities, youths, and women. While the effectiveness of surveilance devices for tackling crime is still unquestionable, the possibilities of misuse and mischief are rife.
A recent study into uses of CCTV shows that black people are 1.5-2.5 times more likely to be picked out and monitored. People in the UK are targeted for no reason other than racial or appearence. Women are also targeted for sexual reasons and stills can be taken for later use.
Many of the cameras monitoring public space in Plymouth are privately owned. Banks, nightclubs/bars, and department stores all routinely engage in continuous video monitoring of their facilities and of any adjacent public space. The recordings they make are privately owned, and may be stored, broadcast, or sold to other companies without permission, disclosure, or payment to the people involved.
Similarly, video footage that is captured by public police departments may be considered part of the “public record,” and as such are available for the asking to individuals, companies, and government agencies. At present, there is precious little to prevent television programs from broadcasting surveillance video without ever securing permission from their subjects.
Already in the UK the country that so far has made the most extensive use of CCTV systems, there has been one such case. In 1995, Barrie Goulding released “Caught in the Act” a video compilation of “juicy bits” from street video surveillance systems. Featuring intimate contacts, including one scene of a couple having sex in an elevator. This video sensationalized footage of ordinary people engaged in (mostly) legal but nonetheless private acts.
Another case of misuse of surveilence is the story of CCTV being used to take close up stills of naked people during Spencer Tunick’s art peice when 1000’s of naked people lined the streets of newcastle in july 2005. These photographs were reported to have been sold in local Tyneside pubs.
The easiest way to ensure you are not featured in any of these misuses of surveilence is to avoid being caught at all. This is the point behind CC:plymouth, to avoid being captured on any of the CCTV systems in Plymouth whether private or public.
April 24th, 2006 at 11:03 am
The website is finished and it all works! All i have to do now is register a domain for it and upload for all to marvel at!!
April 25th, 2006 at 11:04 am
Ok…I think I might have finished it! Ive registered a subdomain and its uploaded. Take a look at http://www.ccplymouth.danlake.com
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November 2nd, 2005 at 8:17 pm
I think a good start point for this project will be to look into areas of the MLA course that I enjoyed doing as this will keep me interested in the project and get the creative juices flowing! I really enjoyed the database film project I did last year so maybe thats a good starting point, but i could maybe expand on the film idea and look into other uses of motion picture like surveilence or something to do with mobile tecnologies.
November 4th, 2005 at 4:40 pm
After disscussion with Dan Livingstone (tutor on this module) I started researching VJ intallations and possibilities surrounding VJing. I found a couple of interesting websites:
VJcentral.com
This site seems to be a main ‘hub’for everything that is VJing. It has some interesting articles on installations but seems to be geared at the professional VJ and hasnt proved to point me in any direction.
videolive.be
This site looked interesting but seems to be all in french so proved no use to me. However had some good visuals and got me thinking a little bit!
01zu.com
As with the previous site its foriegn…however it has some interesting visuals and clips of VJ loops ect.
November 5th, 2005 at 4:54 pm
Ive looked long and hard at VJing and and I am still none the wiser. Ultimately I dont think this would be a good route to take if i want to produce a decent project.
November 7th, 2005 at 4:56 pm
Following on from another idea i got from my discussion with Dan, Ive decided to look into Video performances. This is an area in which Im not particulary familiar with but it may give me other ideas.
November 18th, 2005 at 5:17 pm
I have done some research into Live video performances and come up with some interesting websites:
lividdesign.com
Livid Design is a company that produces live video performances for performance artists and concerts. Although this doesnt really help me…its shown me the type of thing that i could be looking at doing if i followed this route. However this all seems to be very technical using specialist equipment and i dont know how feasable this would be as a project.
irishoppe.com
Iris Hoppe is an artist whos work “encompasses video and film installations, photographs, interdisciplinary projects, performances and interventions in public space.” Her video instalations and projects explore a whole range of contexts and social boundries and this is the sort of work i would love to do. I particulary liked ‘Meeting Point’ (2002) which was a video piece which showed 60 acts of greeting between people from various cultures and generations in public spaces, displayed on big information screens in 26 rail stations accross germany in between the regularly scheduled information and entertainment programs. Travelers in the train station are confronted, in a vivid way, with personal gestures of others who are also in public situations.
post-videoart.com
This site is a large database of different video art pieces that artists have posted for viewing. There are many different pieces but nothing that strikes me as a good basis for my project.
BenHanbury.com-recycled TV
After another discussion with Dan Livingstone, I decided to take a look at a diferent video performance by Ben Hanbury. Ben is and ex MLA student whos inevitably gone on to do better things and his work ‘recycled TV’ uses an old TV and old content to produce new creations. I really like this piece but obviously can only use this for ideas.
November 20th, 2005 at 8:41 pm
After a suggestion from Dan Livingstone, I read “The Vision Machine” By Paul Virilio. I was very interested in the fourth chapter of this text called “Candid Camera”. This concerntrates on mainly surveillance issues and it raises some interesting points. “reality will outdo any mere director every time” “With cinema, observation does not mean Balzac taking notes; it is not beforehand, it is here and now” Eric Rohmer, “daily life was now no more than a film mix, a reality with endless superimpositions”, “the cinematic is no longer content to give the viewers the illusion that some kind of movement is being performed infront of them”
This got me thinking abut voyeurism and surveillance as a ‘here and now’ cinematic and ways in which I could use this in m project.
Below is an article I read about surveilence and Its got me quite interested in the issues surrounding it. I think this may be the direction i will take for my project.
“Michael Alstad has a thing about public space. Through strategic appropriations of storefronts and commercial billboards, Canada’s favourite exhibitionist creates street-level installations that offer society a lens-mediated look at itself. Alstad is now back in our faces as co-curator of Transmedia: 29:59, a year-long exhibition on the pedestrian level video billboard at Toronto’s Yonge-Dundas Square. Developed with artist Michelle Kasprzak, the project features one-minute videos that run every half hour, on the 29th and 59th minute. November’s works explore the webcam–that ubiquitous little icon of public surveillance and private voyeurism. On the 29th minute, Toronto can watch Cheryl Sourkes’s ‘Live from the Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas,’ a series of videos showing various Elvis impersonators marrying a variety of heterosexual couples, which Sourkes made by animating stills captured from a remote webcam. Minute 59 features BlueScreen’s ‘StreamScape,’ a perpetually c! hanging video work made up of hybridized images from 13 webcams scattered throughout the world, all gathered on a server and incorporated into an on-line ‘inhabited landscape.’”
transmedia2959
Transmedia 2959 is the website where the transmedia project is documented.
Michael Alstad
Alstad is the canadian artist that curates the Transmeadia project along with others…and some of his own work is quite interesting too.
November 21st, 2005 at 9:25 pm
I also read an article on Rhizome.org about another surveilance artwork by Stanza. This looks like something i would be very interested in doing. Below is a bit about the piece:
“Stanza is a London-based artist who specializes in net art, multimedia, and electronic sounds. Stanza is also spying on you. Abuse of Public Domain, his first solo show of networked media art, presents two large-scale projections employing live data from closed-circuit security cameras placed in major urban centres. In ‘You Are My Subjects,’ a lone camera records images of people passing below on a busy street in New York City. The high vantage point and solitary perspective create a feeling of detached voyeurism–an ivory-towered state of removal from the distant other. ‘Authenticity,’ on the other hand, fragments the viewer into a state of multiplicity–a street-level crowd, in effect–by drawing images from cameras planted throughout London and merging them into a mesh of gazes. Each work explores notions of selfhood, as mediated through the lens of surveillance culture. At the same time, by making both works available on the internet, the artist turns society’s reflection back on itself, creating a kind of narcissistic Utopia in which ‘we are all unwitting bit part actors, in the filming of our own lives.”
There is more info on this project on the website Abuse of the Public Domain
November 25th, 2005 at 11:15 pm
As pointed out in many issues behind surveillance and voyeurism, it is an invasion of personal space and public domain. So I want to create a project that will invade the viewers private space and public domain aswell as the subject. I want to incorporate 3D imaging into some kind of surveillance system in order to do this, so the voyeurs personal space between him/her and the screen in which they watch appears to be invaded by the 3D image. I have just got to find a way in which to produce the 3D effect.
November 27th, 2005 at 11:32 pm
After doing some research in 3D techniques and what is achievable, I came up with a couple of solutions. 3D vision can be achieved in one of two main ways, using anaglyph (the old school red and green glasses shown below)
or using a technique called polorisation. This means of creating 3D images can be complicated and expensive but after much research I found an article by Keigo lizuka of The University of Toronto, Canada that describes a technique of converting a liquid crystal display screen into a three dimensional display.
I think The anaglyph method is a bit to old and possibly a bit too easy to acieve so I would like to look more into the polorisation method.
November 28th, 2005 at 11:18 am
Lookin further into polarisation I have found an easy (if not a little bit basic) method of doing this, by adapting a LCD display into a 3D dispaly. “Polarized light is used not only because our eyes are insensitive to the polarization of the light wave, but also because its path can be selectively blocked or transmitted by using a polarizer. If the polarizer’s transmission axis is parallel to the polarization direction of the incident light, the light passes through the polarizer with minimum attenuation. On the other hand, if they are perpendicular to each other, the light is absorbed by the polarizer and does not transmit through. Now, we can take advantage of the fact that the light emanating from the liquid crystal screen of a laptop computer or a camera phone is linearly polarized2. The light from the liquid crystal display is linearly polarized simply because the top surface of the liquid crystal screen is covered by a polarizer sheet as one of the necessary parts of the liquid crystal display.” (Keigo Lizuka, University of Toronto)
The Idea is to use cellophane as a half-wavepalte which would in effect block certain light waves emmited from the LCD display. By displaying two images of the same thing and covering one half of the screen with cellophane (this changes the direction of the polarisation a the screen) I can produce a 3D image that can be seen through polorisation filters. So to eliminate the need for the viewer to wear polarisation filters (polarisation glasses) I aim to adapt a LCD monitor so the 3D image can be viewed by the naked eye. The process can be found on the website 3D imaging
By setting up suveillence cameras in twos with a small distance between them, I can recreate the distance between the human eyes and display these images accordingly on the adapted screen giving an accurate 3D image of the surveillence. The 3D image will invade the voyeurs personal space just as the surveillence cameras and the voyeur invade the subjects personal space and privacy
November 29th, 2005 at 11:41 am
Below is a section from the article on 3D polarisation on how the cellophane works with the polarisation filters to produce the 3D image:
“Polarizer glasses are glasses in which the coverings for the eyes are constructed from polarizer sheets that have been cut down to a size suitable to fit into the cardboard frames of the glasses. With a laptop computer, the direction of polarization of the light from the screen is at 45° from the horizontal direction. An observer looking at this screen through polarizer glasses whose transmission axes are at 45° will be able to see the whole screen. If, however, the right half of the laptop computer screen is covered by a cellophane sheet, the direction of polarization of the covered section is redirected to 135° (= 45° + 90° ). Let us first consider what the observer sees through his or her right eye while wearing the polarizer glasses. The transmission axis of the polarizer covering the observer’s right eye is at 45° , which means the right eye can no longer see the covered section of the screen. The right eye can see only the uncovered left half of the screen. In short, with this configuration, the right eye sees only the ball displayed in the left half of the laptop computer screen.” (Keigo Lizuka, University of Toronto)
December 1st, 2005 at 2:00 pm
Note for dan:
http://ctrlspace.zkm.de/e/ - surveillance issues
January 19th, 2006 at 2:12 pm
http://optics.org/articles/news/10/12/10/1
January 24th, 2006 at 6:05 pm
Heath Bunting-Border Xing
Kate Rich- Feral Trade (irational.org)
BIT Kate rich and natalie jeremenko surveilance over silacone valley
February 2nd, 2006 at 2:26 pm
After many chats and negotiations with dan and joasia I have decided that the project i had originally come up with would not provide the depth of concept or any rationale to why I did it. I seemed to have focussed on the technology and have got stuck in a stubborn rut with the one idea. I have decided to move away from the 3D idea and concerntrate on surveillence issuse. I like the idea of surveillence black spots and issues surrounding that.
February 2nd, 2006 at 2:43 pm
http://www.irational.org
February 15th, 2006 at 2:03 pm
I want to do something with the surveillance cameras in plymouth city center. I have found some information on the CCTV scheme in plymouth on the city council website:
Total of 51 CCTV cameras: 43 colour pan, tilt and zoom cameras, 5 static colour cameras and 3 static black and white cameras within the BID area. The CCTV control centre provides up to 3 CCTV operators to proactively monitor and record, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 364 days per year.
The footage is recorded and stored from all cameras for a period of 31 days with a facility to display and review. They provide quality evidence sufficient to assist the police or other enforcing bodies in the investigation of a possible criminal offence including on-going surveillance where the criteria are met as authorised by a nominated officer following discussions with the police or other enforcing bodies, under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. To obtain quality video evidence, which enables police or the Council to take civil criminal action in court where necessary.
The City Council maintains all CCTV equipment ensuring that the system remains in an operational state as required under the Data Protection Act 1998. In the event that a camera or component of the system fails the Council will repair or replace within a 48-hour period. In the event that a repair cannot be affected within the 48 hour time period then the particular camera or component/s are removed from service and replaced once repairs have been completed.
the webpage is here
February 15th, 2006 at 7:44 pm
I quite like the idea of using the surveillance cameras in plymouth and using the black spots (the areas not under surveillance to map the city. I am looking furthur into this idea.
February 22nd, 2006 at 4:41 pm