Final Project Sketch: Panopticon
Here are some links that gave me the idea for this thing:
An article about the history of privacy and surveillance and the NSA
Art about being watched by bots and algorithms
The Panopticon is an installation that simulates a digital creature with a hundred-sided polygon of faces as a body. It steals the faces of those who view it (using the depth and color data from a kinect) and uses them as tools of surveillance, acting as the center of a giant spherical panopticon. The database of faces is never purged, and you cannot remove yourself from the sphere once you are a part of it.
With this project, I want to try to take the unseen and secret processes of modern surveillance and have them manifested as a mythical digital object/creature.
I also want to explore the idea of “surveillance by identity” with this project. Today, surveillance is not just conducted by physical cameras/microphones, but also by the mass collection of data and the use of algorithms to parse the identity of people in the database and analyze them for threats.