Alison Chung-Yan
Lecturer
Faculty of Music (Sonic Design)
Carleton University
School for Studies in Art & Culture
20 Haslemere Avenue
Ottawa, ON
Canada K2W 1E3
Tel: +(613) 599-8731
http://artengine.ca/chungyan/surv/index.htm

Keywords
Surveillance, Webcam, Internet, Net Art, Public Space, Private Space, Conjoined Spaces, Rhythms

Surveillance (2004) is a net art installation which explores the phenomenon of webcam surveillance on the Internet and its capacity to conjoin spaces near and far – physical and virtual – public and private. Housed within a single webpage, 15 smaller windows are gradually assembled security-camera style into a 5x3 matrix offering a near real-time glimpse of webcams situated around the world.

As a woman in the Netherlands searches her fridge, an elephant drinks from a watering hole in Africa. Students mill about a campus in southern California while traffic hums along in Toronto. The night sky is lit up in Shanghai as an office worker in Houston toils away in a cubicle. In Japan, a Zen garden is a picture of complete stillness while the Internet Traffic monitor registers a spike in activity.

Satellite cloud patterns over Costa Rica allude to the possibility of a storm, as people wait in line at a cafeteria in Alaska and a guinea pig somewhere in Pennsylvania stirs in its cage. As a solar flare is picked up by satellite, someone crosses a bridge in Bali and a BBC radio broadcaster reaches for his cup of coffee.

Unlike the fast-paced abbreviated snapshot of the world as often depicted and superimposed by television news media, Surveillance
attempts to show the world unfolding and moving to its own rhythm. It offers the chance to observe with the attendant possibility for things to happen – or simply be.

The exhibit uses Flash and Javascript and is optimized for 800 x 600 screen size resolution, Internet Explorer 5+ browser on PC, and dial-up Internet access speeds.