Objectives

I bought ten CCTV cameras, set them up, and distributed the cameras to the public so that the public controlled what they are pointing at. The public becomes the actors and filmmakers in this piece and the narrative is created by the online users and what they choose to watch.

The artwork engages the public within a new media/ digital artwork as part of the creative process.

The artwork incorporates the public into the work as 'actors' with the gathering of assets and images.

The artwork has an online area, a web site that allows these gathered assets to be viewed online as an artwork.

This artwork explores the creative uses of CCTV and networked information.

Public Domain III is an artwork about the surveillance of public domain space utilzing the CCTV systems in place and manipulating the CCTV feeds. Using the CCTV of the building to create a new relationship with public domain space and the architecture of the building.

This artwork, "God is Watching Over Us Outside In the Panoptican "questions who owns the data space and who is watching us in these spaces. Most buildings have CCTV and they use it to observe the people inside the space, ie the public. By appropriating the real time analogue and digital CCTV feeds my aim is to reclaim the data space from private to public domain. All the resulting CCTV network is projected over the the city creating new narratives from what is happening inside.

The city becomes a huge display system. The city space and the physical body is represented as a huge display. By doing this one also makes the building transparent and opens up the architecture and the networked space.

In this artwork I used the CCTV technology in the building to broadcast all the information outside into the public domain. This makes the building a giant broadcast TV station.

The information no longer becomes private, it is opened out, and is not longer privileged, it is transparent. The data although observable by everyone ie, everybody in the whole world is watching you, is also available to be owned by yourself ie, the public. The public are the owners of the data they make. In fact the public are the data inside this space. The body reclaims the data space.

The series of artworks "publicity" and "public domain" are socio-politcal cultural artefacts, that create real time images with the systems that are used in everyday surveillance, that are in deployed inside the 'public' building. The work fuses the inside space, and the outside of the space, and the real time data of the body and the data of the surrounding environment. This system allows the public to be in and engaged within a 'parallel reality'. This is an observation of the self within the context of the continuous stream of data that surrounds us in this case accessing the buildings own surveillance.

The impressions are not literal interpretations, or snap shots, but fused metaphors, a narrative, creating a unique experience of the place, the space, and the environment. The images are sensory illusions of a data space with the body firmly placed in the centre. They are rendered real time films, ie real time unfolding environments. This is a syncronous unfolding of reality from multiple perspectives. These images unfold as real time impressions of the internalised space.

The work can be adapted to be a memory space a bank of memories by fusing the recorded data with the real time footage. A real time memory space, a psychometry or the architecture. This new 'Psychometric architecture' becomes a techno space or surveillance embedded in the space capturing the total environmental experience. The walking, talking, moving is merged and reconfigured and replayed as seems fit. The reconstructed space thus becomes a gallery a global panopticon an all buildings could be linkwed together this way.----Stanza