Gallery: Turning Live Surveillance Feeds Into Unsettling Works of Art
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Belgian artist Dries Depoorter's "Jaywalking" installation automatically catches jaywalkers in webcam footage and gives users the choice to report them to the police.
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His algorithm, a few dozen lines of code using the OpenCV computer vision software tool, runs on a tiny Raspberry Pi computer and matches a human figure in an intersection with a red light.
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Then it leaves the decision to the person looking at the screen: press a red button to email a screenshot of the jaywalker to the local police or leave him or her to harmlessly break the law, unaware of being watched.
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An example screenshot and email sent to the police. "Most" gallery visitors will choose to report the jaywalker, Depoorter says.
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In his latest exhibition he takes a softer approach, selling framed prints of jaywalkers his software has detected. The price of each print is the fine for jaywalking in the place where the photo was taken.
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In a more masochistic, earlier privacy experiment, Depoorter wrote a piece of software that randomly posted a screenshot from his computer once a day, unpredictably revealing his most private affairs. Here it caught him looking up directions.
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Another work he titled "Tinder In" juxtaposed random people's Tinder portraits with their LinkedIn profile photos, to show the different faces they publicly presented.
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In a project called "Here," he broadcast his location continuously from his iPhone to a web page for a month, showing the Google Street view image for his location at all times.
