An Obscure Camera

An Obscure Camera (interactive installation)

An investigation that references and develops the Victorian camera obscura, revisiting the form for a contemporary 21st-century context of AI and surveillance culture.

The research seeks to highlight the implications of choices made by AI when analysing movement and person-recognition in live video feeds. It is focused on the AI algorithms created by companies such as Ultralytics (Ultralytics 2024), employed by a vast range of bodies, from commercial through to governmental, to recognise, track and follow the human figure in public places. Although these tracking systems are in part understood on an objective level – where images are analysed and indexed against pre-existing visual data sets to make decisions – there is little or no understanding of their actions as an immediate and physical act in the same way that we, on a subjective human level, intuitively understand such interactions as ‘approaching’, ‘meeting’, ‘embracing’, ‘following’, ‘running after’ or ‘away from’ others.

An Obscure Camera address these subjective interactions on a phenomenological level, by focusing on a participant’s physical action, placing an emphasis on their tactile-kinesthetic awarenesses (Sheets-Johnstone 2011). Through custom scripted spatial sensing and interactive technology, the research aims to accents the agency of the participant (Sandiland 2022). In this situation, viewers can choose to embody the following and tracking of an AI algorithm through their physical movement in and around an installation space, bringing home the profundity of their movements through physically immediate action. In contrast to the minimal actions of clicking a mouse or pressing a key, the participant in Obscure Camera embodies the act of surveillance. In this way they are confronted first-hand with the ethical and social implications of the way we are tracked and followed by corporations and organisations of power.

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).

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