Misha's Blog

—John Naisbitt (Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming Our Lives)

I recently started collaborating with a small group of people. We are creating applications based on computer vision algorithms being developed by my friend Yogesh Girdhar.

I used some of this software to scan through my Estonian vacation footage from 2007. The result was a set of images-extracted from the video-that summarized the vacation. I turned hours of footage into a mere 12 stills. Its a more objective summary than I would have made. The software takes into account the entire composition (colors, textures, etc) of the frame, and faces get no special treatment. Matthew Williamson suggested that I use a film everybody knows. I decided to concatenate all three original Star Wars films into one 7 hour movie. The resulting summary of 16 images is here as well as embedded below.

Friends enjoyed me taking them through the summary image by image. It was great to hear them speculate on why the software picked certain frames. Some frames were picked because they were compositionally representative, but others because they were most rare.

Several art projects have questioned/challenge/subvert the supremacy of the surveillance gaze (In the event of Amnesia the city will recall…, Eyes of Laura, Sorting Daemon). Some projects explore the impact of surveillance on our society (Evidence Locker, The Dead Weight of Quarrel Hangs, Wafaa Bilal Domestic Tension). Other projects explore the idea of non-video surveillance (Makrolab, Broken Arrow). It was relevant to question who controls the cameras, but now everyone has access to cameras. Parallel, participatory surveillance creates a participatory panopticon. Despite the initial issues of access to the sensory data, computational constraints quickly become primary. As David Lyon, head of The New Transparency says in Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life “Today, the most important means of surveillance resides in computer power, which allows connected data to be stored, matched, retried, processed, marketed, and circulated.”

I’m excited about off-loading the difficult decisions about what is deviant to the robots.