UCLA (Fall 2003)

Graduate Seminar (Prof. Jennifer Steinkamp)

This proposal is an interactive video installation for the courtyard at UCLA Hammer Museum in Westwood Los Angeles.
Taking advantage of the hallway in the inner courtyard the piece revisits issues of privacy, surveillance, control in a public space.

Networked databases are creating the identities of individuals which affects behaviors, possibilities and interest. This project challenges this condition by creating new identities and data bodies of pedestrians passing by the installation.

A surveillance picture of the visitors passing or standing is projected in the windows at the museum. With a slight change. All faces are displayed pixelated as individuals who don't want to be recognized in a television broadcast.

In the meantime a computer processes uses the head shots and creates personal home pages of the visitors, assigning a name, email-address, interests, hobbies, friends etc. by the software tracenoizer (disinformation on demand, www.tracenoizer.org). The data body's hompage is automatically submitted to search enginges. A webbot starts to go 'shopping', creates cookies, subscribes newsletters, catalogues.

By mixing virtual and real identities data considered as valuable becomes useless. The piece hopes to raise question about the way we are listed, tracked and evaluated in our daily life (e.g. groceries, credit history etc.)

other proposals - brainstorming