Signs of Surveillance

This chapter discusses the challenges of working with complex digital information, visual images, meta-data, and temporal and geo-spatial information, as raw materials for artistic expression. In the chapter the reader will have an insight into the thought process and working practice, artistic and technical, of forming information into a recognizable body of work and processing both the content and the form of the work into an emotional, reflective experience. It not only discusses the challenges of working with external, commercial software frameworks and web services and the challenge of dealing with the brittleness of digital things but also the ‘semantic affordance’ offered by computer systems in working at a conceptual level with art materials. The ‘Signs of Surveillance’ project originated as a photographic observation and collation activity in early 2015 and has grown to a complex digital web and installation live visualization project. Since that time thousands of photographs of signs of surveillance and the warning signs, indicating an area or activity is being monitored by video-camera, have been captured in more than 15 countries, including Belgium, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Korea, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the UK. This chapter discusses the development of one aspect of this multi-part work, dealing directly with managing and manipulating a large body of digital data and working with complex visualization systems and online and offline digital distribution technology.