Walls Have Eyes
Published on 01 October 2014
At a time when our society is exploring what our technology can do and the social power that data has, it is incredibly important that we are creatively making data tangible and readable by humans —Jon Rogers
About the installation
These technologies are used by companies to track people for commercial purposes. We created the installation as part of wider work within BBC R&D investigating the costs and benefits of personalisation of media, but for Mozfest the main aim was to understand the possibilities of the technology and demonstrate their use in a way that provokes discussion.
Designs of the Year
Subsequently, this project was nominated for the Design Museum's Design of the Year award in the Digital category. This meant revisiting the installation to make it work unattended in a gallery context within a smaller area.
I re-architected the code to ensure that each function was separated and ran in it's own process. These processes were monitored so that they were started automatically on power-up and restarted if they crashed. I ensured that the installation could be manually triggered via a web interface and that additional camera nodes could be added to the network just be booting them up.
I was also responsible for laser cutting the cases and helping to assemble and install the installation at the museum.
Libby has written a nice round-up of the project on her blog. The code is available on Github.