Statement of Intent:
Urban public space today is carved up by unseen boundaries of security. This veil of monitored and unmonitored spaces is indicative of oppositional tendencies in contemporary society towards both a libertarian desire for individual freedom and a collective desire for personal safety and respect for rule of law. Throughout the past thirty years, a complex web of government- and privately-developed systems have proliferated in Western cities, largely outside of real public knowledge and scrutiny.
For the past year or so I have been involved in various projects related to the mapping of urban security systems and visualizing the spatial characteristics of these systems. The work is separating into two distinct types. The first involves documenting existing public spaces, through various forms of sousveillence, crowd-sourcing, and digital mapping techniques, with the goal being to promote awareness of the extent of urban surveilance. The second form of analysis is largely gallery-based and empirical, with the aim being to illustrate spatial prototypes of situations taking pace in real urban environments, and enabling viewers to recognise spatially the limits and characteristics of digital surveillance.
It is the second of these forms which is proposed for the Perspectives on Spectacle exhibition.
Given my background in architecture, I am interested mostly in highlighting space activated by surveillance, and the complex layers of psychological, technical, and legal meaning which the space becomes imbued with. The installation seeks to make physical the trace of what is observed by surveillance, and thereby make physical the space being observed.
Artist Bio:
I am an architect based in Dublin, Ireland, with a particular interest in electronically surveilled space.