This exhibition features two large video projections, which use live real-time data from CCTV cameras sited in two cities, London and New York. Security tracking data is Stanza’s chosen medium for these process-led artworks. Stanza is a London-based artist, who specialises in net art, multimedia,
and electronic sounds
You are my subject uses data from a single fixed camera in New York, focusing on subjects as they pass below it. Authenticity [Trying to imagine the world from everyone elses’ perspective, all at once] draws its imagery from cameras all over London. Other works can be viewed in a web browser via the Internet and turn us all into voyeurs of eerie ‘parallel realities’.
“CCTV systems are everywhere in the public domain. Millions of hours worth of data are recorded every day by these cameras. We are all unwitting bit part actors, in the filming of our own lives. Usually we cannot watch. The results are not collected for broadcast back to the public. Rather they are monitored, filtered, distributed and archived without our knowledge or permission. The city has millions of CCTV cameras. One can take the sounds and images off live web streams to offer them back to the public for new interpretations of the city. In essence the city of London can be imagined as the biggest TV station in existence.”
HTTP [House of Technologically Termed Praxis] is one of London’s foremost galleries dedicated to showing net art, new media and sound art. HTTP works with a wide range of artists and audiences to explore the potential of current network technology and to promote distributed creativity.