PROJECT THREE: MUSICAL SURVEILLANCE

 

Video footage of my actual performance. While I, and later a classmate of mine, were playing on the keyboard, certain images—not displayed in this video, appeared in synchrony with the music.

 

With this project, I hoped to achieve a few things:

1) To show that even in a time when we are aware that we are being surveilled, there is still something eerie and unsettling when we are reminded of the fact at an unexpected time.

2) To show that the boundary between play and seriousness is never that thick.

3) To explore, through new media art, a cool way to arrange image, sound, and physical movement in relation to one another.

The colorful innards of the machinery. The keyboard was constructed such that each key had a corresponding wire—rather than having multiple trigger points operating through a single wire—that connected to the circuit board. Sandy managed to create a circuit (pardon my shoddy terminology; this was all very new to me) that would output a certain voltage. We then planned to connect the wires to a parallel port and feed data into a computer program that would trigger an image even each time a key was pressed (Thanks, Sandy!).

 

The Targus multimedia presenter—my savior.

 

The final set of images consisted of other pictures and information about my colleagues I had gathered from the internet.

 

Photograph by Chris Hubbert.

 

 

Panopticism Today

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault describes an architectural plan for a prison developed by Bentham called the panopticon. Supposedly the ideal structure for imprisonment, the panopticon afforded those in charge the power to surveil any of the inmates at any time from vantage point of a tall tower. The inmates—separated from each other and not able to see their neighboring inmates—could never be certain if the guards were in fact watching.

 

 


A version of the panoptic prison. Contemporary panopticism is a bit more technologically savvy: cell phone monitoring, library records, Homeland Security.


London SW7 58D


Thursday 21 September 09:30

The Original Plan

With the aid of Sandy Stone's hardware hacking knowhow, I initially wanted to take apart and wire a lifesize keyboard to a computer, where data from the oversized piano could trigger a series of images on the computer each time a key was depressed. In other words, every time a person would step on a key, an image would appear.

We met some success, but eventually discovered (two days before presentation day!) that the plan couldn't be realized in the short amount of time we had.

 

 

 

Plan B Flat

On the day of presentations, I had to play the role of a magician. I faked having the images synchronized with the piano playing by holding onto a wireless multimedia presenter in my pocket as I stepped on the keys. I would then manually trigger the images in the most basic program: the Windows Image Viewer.

In synchrony with the first set of images, I played two songs, Row, Row, Row Your Boat and La Cucuracha. I then invited a fellow ActLabby who knows how to play the piano to sightread and play another children's song. He was so engrossed in getting the notes right, that he did not notice that pictures of him and information about him—his phone number, address, hometown, etc.—were being projected onto the screen in front of him.

 

 

Operating an extra large piano is not as easy as it looks!