Red Paper Heart made a swimming pool a viable projection surface by dumping over 65,000 ping pong balls into it. Swimmers are able to glide through animated light. Read More

Romain Tardy and Thomas Vaquié created this permanent installation in a new museum of architecture in Wroclaw, Poland, as a way to highlight the 100-year old building’s rich architectural past with the present. Read More

The Graffiti Research Lab took their infamous L.A.S.E.R. Tag light graffiti system to Hong Kong to stage an intervention to support the Students for a Free Tibet. Read More

Fast and dirty, Kyle McDonald teaches you how to disrupt information by creating ad-hoc projections with cardstock and a flashlight in order to respond, augment and provocate the world around you. Read More

I chose to focus on acts of surveillance within the Carnegie Mellon community. Individuals within the community will eavesdrop or secretly photograph their peers for social gain, and the institution itself has several cameras in various points around campus and even employs people to observe certain areas. These acts are typically subtle, so as not to alert the surveilled of the observer’s actions.

I dressed in formal attire and walked around the University Center during lunchtime (a peak traffic time for the building) and would stop a few feet away from tables of people and stare at them while taking notes on a clipboard. I did not interact with any of the individuals I observed besides eye contact, and kept a completely straight face the entire time I was watching them. After a few minutes I would walk away and find another table to observe.

The responses elicited by those I observed ranged from curious to concern. No one directly confronted me, but people in groups tended to express looks of unease to each other, and the tension between me and the individuals was fraught with tension. It was an uncomfortable experience for me as well–being covert seems to be a natural inclination when we attempt to watch others.

This was a solid start to a project, I was pleased with the reactions elicited by the individuals I encountered. Were I to repeat this, I would  like to actually create legitimate forms for surveillance to fill out while observing people–I was using a random form I pulled from Google Images and simple writing jargon. Although the performance’s impact was the actual act of observation, I think the creation of artifacts from the observations would add an interesting dimension to the documentation of the piece.

2: Schenley Park is located along Forbes Ave across from the Cathedral of Learning. It contains many small restaurants, greenspace, and a performance tent with seating areas.

3: It’s close to both University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon; along several bus routes; near the Main Carnegie Library, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and the Phipps Conservatory; and near a popular strip of Forbes Ave, creating a confluence of a variety of people. The area surrounding the Plaza are points of interest or necessity for many people, and nearly half the people observed were using the area as a through-way to get to another place. This creates a passive audience, some of which may be willing to pause if they see something out of the ordinary.

4: Seating alongside Forbes Avenue provide small, intimate spaces potentially for storytelling or small-scale performance.

5: These areas were also filled with semi-enclosed outlet plugs. Some of the observed plugs had been affected by outside elements to the point where they were no longer useable, but the still-working ones could provide a valuable power-source for interventions that require use of computers, projectors, and/or other electronic equipment

6: Those who were actively at the park were observed to be using the walkway along the edge of Schenley Drive. The large tent at the end of this pathway not only provides performance space for medium scale acts, but also provides a white, matte surface that could potentially be used for projection.

CV Dazzle is a series of looks that prevents current facial recognition software from identifying the wearer’s face. In an age where Facebook uses your family album as machine learning data sets, this provides a sense of privacy and security against automated eyes. Read More

A knit sculpture that prevents others from viewing your work on your computer, this piece provides “privacy, warmth and concentration in public spaces”.  Read More

“L.A.S.E.R. Tag” combines a beefy projector and a high-powered laser to create gigantic and ephemeral tags. Used to aid Tibetan protesters in 2008, L.A.S.E.R. tag provides a large-scale platform for people to voice their opinions. Read More

“Anonymity” is a wearable that allows those who don it to preemptively disagree to the disclosure of their identity. Mimicking censor bars traditionally found in film and television, this piece acts as a real version by thwarting CCTV and other forms of surveillance. Read More