URME

URME is dedicated to protecting the public from surveillance and creating a safe space to explore our digital identities

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URME Surveillance was recently fictionalized (with permissions) as a plot point on CBS’s CSI: Cyber Staring James Van Der Beek and Patricia Arquette. The show gave a decently fair albeit limited representation of the project. It doesn’t get better than Patricia Arquette handling your work though :) to find out more about URME Surveillance visit www.URMESurveillance.com

CSI Cyber, Season 1, Episode 8, “Selfie 2.0”

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Art Souterrain is an annual festival that floods Montreal's underground tunnels and buildings with over 60 public art works. URME Surveillance was formally invited to exhibit its Facial Video Encryption software. In addition over 200 URME Paper Masks were distributed on opening night. I spent 3 hours talking with the public about my project and how it fit this years theme of security it public spaces.

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In her video "Birthday", Katy Perry plays with a series of personalities and identities. This playfulness and experimentation with identity as a fluid and editable entity is at the heart of URME Surveillance. This image, which I propose for Jon Cates exhibition, reimagines Perry's sense of play with my own identity by wearing the URME Surveillance Prosthetic. 

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Image of URME Surveillance supporter using our new Facial Video Encryptor!!!! to get your own version of this software, visit http://www.urmesurveillance.com/urmefve

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New FREE software from URME Surveillance that takes videos and replaces your face with my own. To download or find out more visit 

https://urmesurveillance.squarespace.com/urme-facial-video-encyrptor/

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CASH RULES EVERYTHING AROUND

Last Wednesday I attended the opening of this years Glitch Festival exhibition at Rua Red, Dublin. It features brand new works from Addie Wagenknecht as well as two sets from Irish artists Breda Lynch and Fergal Brennan, and curated by Nora O Murchú.

One of the main themes of the show, as the title suggests, is money … or at least the systems and relationships of the modern tech day. Works reflect a world born in an era of Jeff Bezosomics, worldwide longtail inventories, goods and services from China, and presented in a symbolic hypertextual space. The show (with no fault by anyone involved) was limited to a grant of 5000 Euros (a familiar circumstance for all art spaces and diminishing funding), yet successfully presents ideas within this limitation.

As you enter, you cannot miss the huge handwritten mantra on the wall, ‘I will not download things that will get me in trouble’, which repeats and degenerates into the opposite. This connects to a three-tier cake, iced and adorned with a unicorn, presenting the same dilemma of desire and fulfilment (you can actually eat the cake if you wish, despite its contextualisation as a piece on a plinth). A collection of Scalextric cars in stop-motion sculptural arrangement appearing to jump and crash into said plinth, yet on a distant wall is a mounted track, ordered on Ebay and sent from Austrailia; it makes the point of the looping paths of our present system. Cars again feature with handpainted scenes from Google Street View, all of which were custom ordered from a Chinese service. The internet played a huge part of how the show was put together: Cash Rules Everything Around Http …

Finally, another huge wall has thirty mounted CCTV cameras each adorned with crystals to give them a fashionable makeover. This made me think of our relationship with portable computing, that in our Snowden-era understanding of surveillance with familiar tech we use and carry everyday, our bond with it is one of customization and personalization. Surveillance is often unquestioned and marketed desireable, an image, part of a look.

This is just a brief overview of the whole show, but it has to be said that Addie is one of the best media artists working today. To me, she is capable of new media artworks with poetry and meaning, all carefully considered and blended together, when often works in this field are cold and esoteric.

You can find out more at the Rua Red website here

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User submitted image

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This workshop began with an active discussion about surveillance and its intersection with themes of identity, prejudice, and power. Participants were then invited to make paper masks of themselves or of the artist's face to be worn in a walk to Crown Fountain lead by Selvaggio. All activities were challenge-by-choice. This is the first time that URME has invited others to use their own faces for this project. 

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Some Images of URME Surveillance on Exhibition at Columbia College Chicago

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URME 3D PAPERCRAFT

NEW 3D Papercraft Mask for URME Surveillance!!! Thanks ThatsMyFace.com!!!!!

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#urmemask #manifest2014 #columbiacollegechicago

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#urmemask

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"What Solange Should have worn into that elevator" in the Washington Post. Check out the article that features URME Surveillance

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URME Surveillance

Anti Face-Rec art project by Leo Selvaggio where he offers his facial likeness as surveillant data disinformation - video embedded below:

URME represents artist-driven, anti-surveillance devices made for the public. Working as an artist in Chicago, the most widely surveilled city in the nation, and seeing how it has affect the way I behave and think about public space,  I have an overwhelming urge to protect the public from such surveillance …

… I have researched several of the strategies out there and there are two major themes. You can either wear a ski mask and hide your face, which looks very suspicious or you can destroy private or public property vis-a-vis security cameras. URME offers a different way. With facial recognition technology being widely used now a days, rather try to hide or obscure one’s face from the camera, these devices allow you to present a different, alternative identity to the camera, my own. When you wear these devices the cameras will track me instead of you and your actions in public space will be attributed as mine because it will be me the cameras see. All URME devices have been tested for facial recognition and each properly identifies the wearer of me on facebook, which has some of the most sophisticated facial recognition software around. 

More at Indiegogo here

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