Subverting surveillance technology, VVTC puts the public in control of playful security cameras across the city.
The machines interact with people in interesting and unpredictable ways. Using IR sensitive cameras and simple image recognition techniques they could move, flash lights or play sound to attract attention to themselves and act entirely unlike CCTV cameras.
The cameras personalities and environments are created in collaboration with street artists. As if existing cameras have been transformed by a splodge of exuberant, interactive, urban art. Working with the VVTC team they will help define how the cameras behave, how they are skinned and the ways they react to people. Some may act like antipodean birds, others may have laser pointers and disco balls to wave.
The streets around them are more important than the technology itself. The machines create a playful space through their antics, projecting their personality into the physical world. The locations they inhabit will also be primed, using IR reflective tapes and paints; creating fuzzy-edged zones of action and play, that the cameras can easily react to under a variety of lighting conditions.
Importantly the cameras watch and react, but never transmit. Eating their own video feeds.