Surveil, The Over-watching Eye

For the assignment this week in my Play to Make course that I am taking at Virginia Tech, we were asked to look at Virginia Tech's Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology's website, and pick out our favorite thing that we saw and write about it here. So here we go.

Yes, the title does not deceive you, the piece that I found the most fascinating was an installation about an eye that is projected onto the sculpture and it follows the people watching it with motion tracking. Not only that, it also has real time recording that picks up noise and plays it back to the audience.

Now I won't lie, this is very, very creepy, but that's what I love about it. A little fun fact about me is that I love art that is creepy or really off putting. I don't exactly know why, but I really like the idea of something being able to do that to me.

But yes, this is Surveil. Now although the installation is still in the works, the people working on it were able to give a quick demo show of what it may look like. To do this they used a looped recording of the eye seemingly tracking the audience while at the same time using looping audio to simulate the feeling that it's repeating stuff back to you.

Now I know what you're thinking, why does this actually represent? And that is what I love most about it. It represents Big Data and how companies and governments are always collecting data on you. No matter what you're doing. This is something that I really like since I took at course last semester on the topic of Big Data and security.

The only thing that I can say is that I was a bit disappointed that there wasn't a video of the piece in action, but I think as time goes on, and they work on it more since it is technically still in beta, they will release it.

Now this piece is hopefully going to be finished by the end of summer and I can not wait to see it in person because I think it would be so incredibly cool.

If you want to look at it yourself or read up more about it, go to this link: https://icat.vt.edu/projects/2017-2018/mini/eye-in-the-sky.html

Thank you again for reading, I hope you have a wonderful day. See you next time.