Brilliant ideas involving CCTV Cameras

1. Coca Cola security cameras was , the best viral videos of all time. The images come from the circuits of security cameras from around the world and show scenes of everyday life of normal people . We discover the pleasure of sharing and small great heroes that are in everyone .

2.Inside Out Edinburgh: Playing with CCTVs

Photo: Circe f. Ervina

Announced onstage today at TED: JR, the street artist and the TED2011 TED Prize winner, has been working this week in Edinburgh on an Inside Out Project action in the home of TEDGlobal. Writer Celyn Bricker tells the story:

That the UK uses the most CCTV surveillance in Europe is widely known, though perhaps less well known is that Edinburgh is the UK’s most closely surveilled city. When we were provided with the opportunity to work with ‘Inside-Out’ we decided to highlight this little known feature of the city. We did this simply by photographing people on both sides of the CCTV camera -– those that are surveilled and those that work as surveillants. The former, of course, includes pretty much everyone, though we initially narrowed our range of subjects by photographing the group that are the most closely surveilled, namely males aged 16-24.

The process of interviewing and photographing people on both sides of the CCTV had some surprising results. There were some, working closely with CCTV, that found the current situation in the UK regarding surveillance to be highly problematic; likewise, at times we encountered the reverse with the people we spoke to in the streets who had no problem at all with high levels of surveillance and were in support of it. Nevertheless we chose to visually separate the two groups that we photographed by taking the photographs from contrasting angles: the images of the surveilled subjects are taken from above, as though captured on a CCTV camera, and the images of the surveillants from below, as though looking into a CCTV screen. The process of photographing the former led us to climbing onto street utility boxes, buildings, perimeter walls, street statues and monuments in an attempt to capture that moment when the surveilled subject comes into contact with the camera.

By pasting the image of ‘surveilled’ subject and ‘surveillant’ in the same physical space we were able to simulate a kind of encounter that is made impossible by the CCTV system. The strange process of CCTV –- which is essentially people watching other people -– is somehow normalized by having a machine system separating watched and watcher. We wanted to make clear the artificiality of this separation, and at the same time make some equivalence between the two groups: the ‘surveillants’ are of course themselves subject to surveillence, and we mimicked that process by taking their photographs. By pasting in the historic centre of Edinburgh, we wanted to highlight the tension between the city’s at times antique appearance and this surprising feature of its modernity –- that it is the most closely surveilled space in Europe.

3.

Artists are uniquely capable of drawing attention to an issue, by creating a discourse within a community and breaking down ideas for closer examination. Now let’s look at some recent art pieces and performances relating to mass surveillance. Several of Jill Magid’s projects are relevant here, but her 2003 project “System Azure” is of particular interest. She reached out to Dutch police to bedazzle their CCTV cameras. At first they rejected her proposal, which she submitted as an artist. Later, she approached them as a contractor, a “security ornamentation professional,” and soon enough she was climbing up a ladder with a glue-gun in hand to affix rhinestones to the cameras around the precinct. She had a full scheme in mind — with colors and patterns purported to carry meaning and symbolism (green for ‘justice’, red for ‘full of love’, blue for ‘strictness’, and white for ‘integrity.’) When the police cut funding for the project, she responded with a campaign of posters to “Bring Back the Glam Cams.” An unrealized commission that came from that campaign would have resulted in CCTV cameras by another precinct that would have worked to “transform the meaning of red in the red light district.”

4.Turning CCTV Footage into Art

William Betts uses CCTV stills, traffic cams, and photographs as the sources for his unsettling, blurry paintings which look like low-res, pixelated digital images. The paintings even include details like the time and date stamp you get on CCTV footage in a nod to a world in which we're constantly being captured by watchful, mechanical eyes. With smartphones in every pocket and CCTVs on every street corner, it's something that's so ubiquitous we've become oblivious to it—and Betts' work addresses this ever-present technological gaze and our complacency to it.

5.150 CCTV cameras installed on a Madrid wall and all focused on absolutely nothing... relax, it's art

An artist has made a wry comment on the inordinate ubiquity of surveillance in cities by installing 150 CCTV cameras on a single wall, all pointing at nothing in particular.

Street artist SpY, known to some as the 'Spanish Banksy', has arranged the cameras in a regular pattern on a plain building overlooking a quiet road in Madrid.

He says the installation is meant to provoke passers-by into reflecting on their daily interactions with surveillance technology, and the people behind it.

Ubiquitous surveillance: Spanish street artist SpY arranged these 150 CCTV cameras on the side of a building

The installation went up on the side of a building in the centre of Madrid last month, with SpY and his assistants hiring a cherry picker to put them all in place.

Public response as been mixed, says SpY, with some valuing it just for its appearance and others taking time to reflect on the phenomenon of surveillance that it represents.

Of his latest work, SpY told MailOnline in a statement: 'The piece invites reflection about our present and daily interaction with technology and who is behind. The cameras are a symbol that represents it, however it is clear that we are surrounded by devices that act as tools of surveillance.

'There are mixed reactions from people: some just value it’s asthetics and others reflected on its representation, most people wondered if the cameras are on, and some even interacted with the piece thinking they are being recorded.

'I like to generate some type of reaction with my work, I try to awake and create a more lucid conscience with my interventions. Irony and humour is a way to make the receiver an accomplice, create a dialogue and make one think that the work communicates something with which one identifies. They are small bits of intention that make the person who receives them see their routine as an urbanite hatching.

'If the passer-by who sees the piece likes it, they see the work as a romantic act and will take part of the intervention with them.'

6.Urban Rhythms by Stanza Live CCTV art

Urban Rhythms Of Utopian Dreams, Spain. The artwork was running 2005 - 2012 (Offline)

Urban Rhythms Of Utopian Dreams And Surveillance, New York: (Online)

The artwork collects cctv feeds from around a city in real time. These real time images are fed into a custom made software system where a series of specialized channels rework these images. The channels are always on, and always changing, a constant view of world cities changing and evolving around the clock. The system uses specially created software and technology to randomly travel the city and integrate the images from the cameras. The images are taken randomly in real time and will evolve forever (or until the cameras break as they did with the spanish version on 2012).

Touring . This work is available for touring to museums and galleries. It needs either a series of projectors or as below on smaller screens or large plasma screens.

Resources

http://blog.ted.com

www.youtube.com

http://www.joannemcneil.com/art-activism-and-cctv/

http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/cctv-footage-as-art-the-work-of-william-betts

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2535494/150-CCTV-cameras-installed-Madrid-wall-focused-absolutely-relax-art.html

http://www.stanza.co.uk/spain_cctv/index.html