Authenticity: In The Age Of Infobesity. 2004.

Authenticity: In The Age Of Infobesity is a networked, generative artwork that transforms the everyday visual environment of London into a continuously evolving form of digital painting. Accessible online since 2004, the work draws on live imagery from a network of approximately 300 London surveillance cameras, bringing fragments of the city into a constantly changing visual composition. Using customised software, images from cameras designed to monitor people, traffic and urban activity are selected and recombined in real time.

The resulting compositions are never repeated in exactly the same way. The city becomes both the source and subject of the artwork, while the software transforms the continuous flow of surveillance imagery into an evolving aesthetic experience. Situated within net art, digital aesthetics and contemporary debates around surveillance, the work questions who owns the images generated by networked systems, how they circulate, and how their meaning changes when they are removed from their original purpose. Data produced to monitor public space becomes material for artistic expression. Through this process of appropriation and recontextualisation, Stanza challenges the boundaries between public information, private ownership and artistic authorship.

The title refers to a condition of information excess in which the sheer volume of images and data makes it increasingly difficult to distinguish meaningful information, establish context and determine authenticity. The work presents London as a fragmented field of observation: familiar locations appear alongside unknown places, while multiple perspectives accumulate into an incomplete and continually shifting portrait of the city.

In gallery installations, the online work can be presented as a triptych of large projected screens, extending the networked experience into physical space. Each screen displays a changing configuration of live images, creating a distributed visual environment in which the city is never represented as a single, stable picture. By transforming surveillance into generative painting, Authenticity: In The Age Of Infobesity brings together net art, real-time data and critical approaches to the politics of looking. The work proposes a form of artistic reclamation in which images produced by systems of monitoring are reimagined as a continually changing public visual resource. Every composition is temporary, and the artwork remains in flux for as long as its networked image sources remain available.

Exhibition:

It now available as a piece of software for exhibition purposes and can be shown on a series of screen like above.

THIS STILL WORKS IF YOU USE THE PALE MOON BROWSER OR GET IN TOUCH

Availability. Custom made computer code and computer files

Keywords: networked, installation, CCTV, map, city, urban, net art, painting, net art