The CCTV revolution in the UK bagan in Liverpool. An artwork by Stanza using live CCTV from inside a building and broadcasting it all outside.

Title. Public Domain Series III.

God is Watching Over Us Outside In the Panoptican

Exhibition.

An artwork by Stanza using live CCTV from inside a building and broadcasting it all outside. " Public Domain III. Outside In the Panoptican", continues the series of investigations into the uses of CCTV to extend space and invoke impressions of transparency with architectural space. This artworks extends the architecture of the building into the city. The artwork includes the performative aspect of those being watched as they are /can be displayed inside the artwork.

The public are embedded into the information of the artwork so that they become the artwork. The experience becomes a real time artefact, the work is always changing, never the same again always different forever. The focus is the live dynamic interpretation of the space and the people both inside and outside. CCTV systems are everywhere in the public domain. We are all actors, bit part actors, in a giant movie called life. Except we cannot watch, it is not on public display and the results are monitored, filtered and distributed without our permission.

This artwork puts the public on public display. The surveyed public as everyday actors are displayed using giants screens in public space, ie within the public city. To use the building the networks are part of and re-represent the building. All the imagery from the inside of the building is used to make the artwork on the outside of the building. The display device for the networked data infrastructure is the building itself. This work opens out the networks of CCTV and manipulates these images creating new and hidden narratives in the process.

Aesthetic functions: Transparency of space ownerships of data and problems of representation.

How. Use of Live embedded real time CCTV.

Performers. Any Building and its interior space.

Audience. The Public.

Video.

Public Domain III. God Is Watching Over Us. from stanza on Vimeo.

This artwork performance focuses on local environmental concerns using ad hoc wireless networked devices for environmental monitoring. In this case the dozen sheep collect and send data about the environment, and respond to the space as a collective as they move about. The sheep monitor the environment in real time, generate sound, and send data to a server (online or offline) where this data is interpreted visualized and sonified in situ using custom made software.Stanza artwork. We have nothing to hide only to lose. Stanza artwork 2010. An artwork by Stanza using live CCTV from inside a building and broadcasting it all outside.

 

Live CCTV images as artwork, by Stanza 2010 Live CCTV images as artwork, by Stanza 2010

Concepts and Contexts

Public Domain III is an artwork about the surveillance of public domain space utilzing the CCTV systems in place and manipulating the CCTV feeds. Using the CCTV of the building to create a new relationship with public domain space and the architecture of the building.

This artwork, "God is Watching Over Us Outside In the Panoptican "questions who owns the data space and who is watching us in these spaces. Most buildings have CCTV and they use it to observe the people inside the space, ie the public. By appropriating the real time analogue and digital CCTV feeds my aim is to reclaim the data space from private to public domain. All the resulting CCTV network is projected over the the city creating new narratives from what is happening inside.

The city becomes a huge display system. The city space and the physical body is represented as a huge display. By doing this one also makes the building transparent and opens up the architecture and the networked space.

In this artwork I used the CCTV technology in the building to broadcast all the information outside into the public domain. This makes the building a giant broadcast TV station.

The information no longer becomes private, it is opened out, and is not longer privileged, it is transparent. The data although observable by everyone ie, everybody in the whole world is watching you, is also available to be owned by yourself ie, the public. The public are the owners of the data they make. In fact the public are the data inside this space. The body reclaims the data space.

The series of artworks "publicity" and "public domain" are socio-politcal cultural artefacts, that create real time images with the systems that are used in everyday surveillance, that are in deployed inside the 'public' building. The work fuses the inside space, and the outside of the space, and the real time data of the body and the data of the surrounding environment. This system allows the public to be in and engaged within a 'parallel reality'. This is an observation of the self within the context of the continuous stream of data that surrounds us in this case accessing the buildings own surveillance.

The impressions are not literal interpretations, or snap shots, but fused metaphors, a narrative, creating a unique experience of the place, the space, and the environment. The images are sensory illusions of a data space with the body firmly placed in the centre. They are rendered real time films, ie real time unfolding environments. This is a syncronous unfolding of reality from multiple perspectives. These images unfold as real time impressions of the internalised space.

The work can be adapted to be a memory space a bank of memories by fusing the recorded data with the real time footage. A real time memory space, a psychometry or the architecture. This new 'Psychometric architecture' becomes a techno space or surveillance embedded in the space capturing the total environmental experience. The walking, talking, moving is merged and reconfigured and replayed as seems fit. The reconstructed space thus becomes a gallery a global panopticon an all buildings could be linkwed together this way.----Stanza

Public Domain. Version one "publicity" was made Watershed 2004 http://www.stanza.co.uk/publicity/index.html

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Artwork by Stanza: www.stanza.co.uk