EV Graduate Seminar - AD508 F08

Complicit Warnings
AD 508
Benjamin Thorp

Complicit Warnings involves computer vision and also is grappling with issues of surveillance, complicity (of those being surveilled) and the potential for liberatory action. The work engages how people experience spatial forms when they are filled in with dynamic and rich multimedia information and how we’ve adapted and reacted to the knowledge that we’re constantly being watched, and how this knowing has effected our behavior in private and public spaces.

There has been much debate recently about spaces such as shopping or entertainment areas or other spaces where various information can be accessed wirelessly and wether this is a techno-aesthetics that promotes freedom or yet another encroachment of the consumer/capitalistic/panopticon.

In “The Poetics of Augmented Space” Lev Manovich ends the section entitled “Learning from Prada” with this idea: “In other words, architects along with artist can take the next logical step to consider the ‘invisible’ space of electronic data flows as substance rather than just as void - something that needs a structure, a politics, and a poetics.”

The ideas that this text has generated are ones that I want to engage in a multimedia, sight specific installation that will appear as a skin of light/information on parts of a public space/structure.

As people enter through the gallery doors the computer vision (jitter) recognizes a differences (from the image of an empty doorway) greater than 50% of the area being monitored. [jitter divides the doorway into 37 rows, each row is equal to the height of the individual entering the space] When the difference is recognized a 5 second video clip is recorded, tagged with the height and stored on the computers hard-drive.

Inside the gallery being projected is a collection of UIC crime alert text, the text occupies 3/4ths of the screen, the remaining quadrant is a cycling of 5 second video clips of people who have entered the gallery and whose height matches the offender description. Each text is projected for 25 seconds in that time 4 video clips are played with a 1 1/2 second projection of black space in between clips.

imagesPDF