Kirthi Balakrishnan | Michelle Chen | Carlos Miranda Pereyra | Mia Winther-Tamaki
As you may have noticed, there are security cameras everywhere all the time, from speed cameras on light poles to clusters of bullet cameras on the outside wall of important buildings. They monitor your behavior as you enter your university campus, exit your bank, or take a stroll outside of a gated apartment building. Sometimes they are hidden from view, and sometimes they carry large, loud signs, yelling silently at us to notice their presence. In either case, the cameras are always there.
CD6/Midtown ≈ 300 cams
CD9/CU
≈ 90 cams
CD1/FiDi ≈ 450 cams
See Also
Reactions may vary: our lack of awareness or selective attention may lead us to live our lives as we normally do, perception indiscriminate of the pedestrian eyes or a security guard behind a cctv screen. For many of us, surveillance awareness may may bring about comfort, feeling as if the surveillance itself is helping make our communities safer — “nothing to hide/nothing to worry about” echoing in mind. For many others, it does the opposite, however, feeling as if our privacy is being violated, shamed into good behavior by an unseen watcher skulking around every corner — Foucault’s notions of consistent observation as punishment ringing too true for comfort.
Our Project
Our Urban Sensing team acknowledges the existence of all of these relationships between people and security systems. These experiences may not be mutually exclusive: we may oscillate between acknowledgement of surveillance to ignorance of it and vice versa. Given the diverse reactions by the observed, we seek to explore how the behavior or people may change when when they know they are under surveillance and when the thought is not in their mind. To achieve this, we are monitoring passersby on a busy walkway, and only sometimes will they be made aware that they are being watched.
Surveillance and Analysis Process:
Through our research process, we are observing behavior. We have three basic questions:
- How do passersby behave when they are not being made aware of surveillance systems?
- How do they behave when they are made aware of surveillance?
- How does their behavior differ in these two circumstances and why?
Our goal, ultimately, is not to be an advocate for more surveillance or less. The crux of our project to remind others about the ubiquity of surveillance in the city.
Surveillance Project Summary