An Obscure Camera

Evoking aspects of contemporary surveillance culture, An Obscure Camera is an interactive and immersive installation. The work gives audiences the power to explore, seek, and inspect the content of live video feeds featuring local by-passers, traffic, and landmarks. In doing so participants navigate the fine line between observer and voyeur, physically enacting the choices made by the countless algorithms that analyse our daily lives.

The piece represents an exploration into the underlying sociopolitical implications of contemporary interactive technologies including motion tracking, AI image recognition, and LiDAR scanning, as employed in earlier works by Sandiland (Remote Dancing(2004-9), Trip Hazard(2013), Border Control(2022)). The installation develops Sandiland's ideas of public agency through physical action and embodiment, the central tenet of his PhD, Accenting Agency, Duets in Interactive Installation (2022).

Description:

The fascination with Camera Obscura has captured public imagination drawing people worldwide from Victorian times to the present day. The spectacle of entering a dark room through which to witness and actively peer out to the surrounding landscape is both theatrically enticing and technically mysterious. An Obscure Camera develops these ideas for a 21st-century context.

Audiences enter a large dark space containing a multitude of ornate Rococo frames projected onto the surrounding walls and ceiling. Each of these frames contains a close-up view of the live outdoor environment outside of the building. As the visitors walk around the space, the frames move with them, traveling in accordance with their speed and direction. New subjects enter and pass through the frames as their viewpoint changes. The audience now finds that they can begin to scan, track, and follow different features in the outdoor spaces, including its inhabitants, through their motion within the installation. The installation is an interactive work in which viewers intervene with and control the focus of CCTV cameras trained on a venue’s outdoor surrounding areas. It is presented in a large, darkened auditorium with space for each viewer to move freely around.

An Obscure Camera was created during an artist's residence at the Brighton Dome Arts Centre, Brighton.

Artistic Concept and Realisation, copyright Nic Sandiland.
Music copyright Karni Postell / Nic Sandiland.