Sarah Zimmer

"Sousveillance (soo-VAY-lənss) is the recording of an activity by a participant in the activity, typically by way of small wearable or portable personal technologies.The term "sousveillance", coined by Steve Mann, stems from the contrasting French words sur, meaning "above", and sous, meaning "below", i.e. "surveillance" denotes the "eye-in-the-sky" watching from above, whereas "sousveillance" denotes bringing the camera or other means of observation down to human level, either physically (mounting cameras on people rather than on buildings), or hierarchically (ordinary people doing the watching, rather than higher authorities or architectures doing the watching)." - Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance

Proceed is an interactive installation that uses the selfie to explore the differences between surveillance and sousveillance.  As individuals increasingly choose to participate in sousveillance activity by posting selfies across a variety of social media questions arise as to how their viewers and followers will interpret and potentially use or repurpose the selfies.

For the installation, four surveillance cameras and a flat screen television are installed in a street-facing window to facilitate public interaction. The cameras are clustered around the television, clearly visible to the public. The multiple video streams are composited to create a video collage for the viewer to interact with in real time. While the participant interacts with the live video collage, individual video frames stills are saved to a hard drive. The longer the viewer chooses to interact with the installation, the greater the number of portraits they create. The covertly harvested selfies were then shared online and saved for use in future work.

Materials: Surveillance cameras, DVR, 30" Flat screen TV, Signage

Size: Varies based on installation spa