Surveillance

The catcam is part of an experiment for my thesis. For my thesis I established a schedule of weekly experiments, each week was to deal with a different design theme. For the theme of surfaces I decided to do a surveillance project after seeing the web site of Mr. Lee catcam. Fortunately, Mr. Lee sells a timer chip you can solder into a keychain camera to make your own catcam, or in my case, surveillance camera. And after learning how to solder electronics, I had a surveillance camera to conduct an experiment on surfaces.

But I didn't just want to document surfaces such as objects and planes and so by abstracting what initially I thought of as physical surfaces I could, with the notion of surveillance, observe interfaces that I wasn't thinking about. Now surface can mean a point, or plane of interaction. One of the major questions I'm working with in my thesis is how can I design for a place and time I can never exist in (this is getting at planning for the unpredictable future), folding this idea in with the notion of surveillance I wanted to observe interactions without being present.

What I discovered is that a lot of action takes place in two minutes. In the first set of images from the sophomore computer lab I only got 10 images with people in them. I had placed the camera in the computer lab knowing a class would be meeting there for three hours and I was hoping for a lot of human movement, but ended up without many people and a series of images that documents the light moving through the room. One of the sophomore moved the plant the camera was in onto his desk in the sophomore studio and from this move I got a series of images that showed a stack of papers moving. I can't explain why they're moving, but so far the surveillance camera is showing that things I assume to be static move quite a lot. I'm calling this experiment a success because it's countered one of my assumptions, and the images are supercool when you string them all together like a stop-motion animation.