.. Thx for
New York Surveillance Camera Players
Debut Performance
At around 11 pm on Tuesday 10 December 1996, six members of the Surveillance Camera Players (Michael, Katie, Bill, Susan, Lisa, and Orrin) performed most of Art Toad’s special adaption of Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi in front of a surveillance camera in Manhattan’s Union Square subway station. At the same time, three other SCPers (Grrrt, Michelle and John), as well as several on-lookers, watched the play on one of the station’s closed-circuit television monitors.
It is interesting to note that An International Day of Action Against Video Surveillance was organized on September 7th, 2001… just two days before the incident that changed the public opinion about government surveillance in general.
Here in Vienna they have a surveillance camera at the top of every escalator on the U-bahn stations. In contrast, the density of cameras at the Tube stations in London was phenomenal. Each staff member monitors up to 60 cameras. The New Scientist has an interesting article about new software that can spot dubious behaviour, suicide attempts, abandonded packages etc.
Face recognition technology is slowly crossing over from security products sector to consumer electronics. Canon’s new Powershot TX1 has a rather advanced face recognition system that can even recognize multiple faces in a scene while shooting video at HD resolution!
It just occurred to me that it wouldn’t be all that difficult to implement an “identity search” on Google Images. All it would take is to automatically index every face in each image and link it to the profile picture of your Gmail account for example. It won’t probably happen in a year or two, but who knows about the future? The technology is already here.
EDIT: I just learned that Royal Caribbean has a ship-wide surveillance systems utilizing facial recognition technology. This enables security personnel to locate any passenger on the ship, except in private areas (such as staterooms and restrooms).
Posted by api in Ambient environment, Audiovisual instinct, Wonders of technology