Trace Recordings

A learning blog by UTS ART Education and Outreach

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Trevor Paglen  They Watch the Moon  2010 digital c-type print, 91×122cm

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Shinseungback Kimyonghun  Memory  2013 digital tablet, custom software and wooden frame 30×24.5×3 cm

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Paolo Cirio Street Ghosts 2012–ongoing printed paper, site-specific dimensions vary

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Mahwish Chishty  MQ-9/1, MQ-9/2  2011 30×76 cm gouache, gold leaf and tea stain on handmade paper

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James Bridle A Quiet Disposition  2013 printed books, computer monitor, networked software dimensions vary

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Heather Dewey-Hagborg  Stranger Visions  2012 3D prints, wooden box, documents, found samples dimensions vary

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Denis Beaubois  Everybody Happy  2000

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Denis Beaubois  Here, Now, Infinitely There  2000

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Trace Recordings: surveillance, art and identity in the 21st century

€œWe know where you are. We know where you'€™ve been. We can more or less know what you'€™re thinking about.'€ These aren'€™t lines from Nineteen Eighty-Four but the words of Eric Schmidt, Google'€™s notoriously frank Executive Chair and former CEO.

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The NSA and surveillance ... made simple - video animation

Find out about the activities of GCHQ and the NSA with this animation from The Guardian.

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This image is a parody of a famous image made by poster street and silkscreen artist Shepard Fairey (of Obey fame). Here is a link to an article on Fairey's response to his iconic Obama poster being appropriated in response to the recent PRISM surveillance affair.

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Artists use surveillance technology to explore extent we are monitored

Trace Recordings, an exhibition at the UTS gallery, Sydney, suggests that much as much as we might value our individuality, we are at some fundamental level just averaged out data

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Surveillance is our new normal, so let's take a closer look

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Shinseungback Kimyonghun

Shinseungback Kimyonghun is an artist duo based in Seoul, South Korea. Shin Seung Back studied Computer Science at Yonsei University in Korea and Kim Yong Hun studied Photomedia at Sydney College of the Arts. Together, their artistic practice explores digital technologies related to image processing and computer vision. They are interested in how these shifts and changes in technology have been affecting our relationships with images.

Their work Memory consists of a digital tablet inside a picture frame. The frame includes mountboard that hides the edges of the tablet, but has a small hole at the top for the tablet’s internal camera. Inside the frame is a blurry portrait.

The tablet is loaded with software that detects viewers’ faces. Every time it registers a person looking at it, it takes a photograph of the viewer and superimposes it onto the previous portrait. The software then averages the images together. The face in the frame becomes a composite portrait of all the people who have looked at it.

  Make a version of Memory for your class group. You could do this in a number of ways. You could set up a photo booth, and photograph each member of your class in the same way and at the same scale (you might want to use markings in the camera viewfinder, and make sure the camera doesn’t move). In photoshop, make an ‘average’ of all of your photographs. There are a number of ways to do this. See if you can work out the most effective way. Once you have succeeded, try making an average photo of the students in another class. How about your whole school?

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Camoufleurs

Camoufleurs were professional camouflage specialists in the defense forces during WWI and II. It was a very special and esteemed position. Camoufleurs were often professional artists (you may have heard of Paul Klee and Franz Marc). The word originally referred to people serving in the French military camouflage unit in WWI.

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Norman Wilkinson: Dazzle Pioneer

The word 'dazzle' comes from a type of camouflage devised for navy ships in World War I. Rather than try to blend them in with their surroundings, dazzle works on the principle of disorienting the viewer so that it is harder to tell the size, speed and direction of a ship at sea. It was pioneered by British artist and marine painter Norman Wilkinson for use by the Royal Navy and the US Navy.

Wilkinson was serving in the Royal Naval Volunteer reserve in 1917 when there was a string of attacks on British ships by German submarines. Up to eight British ships were sinking every day. It was around this time he had the idea for a new type of camouflage, one that would make it harder to aim fire at a ship in the distance when looking through a periscope.

Wilkinson was put in charge of naval camouflage, and moved in to a new headquarters in the basement of the Royal Academy of Arts in London. There he worked with a team of artists, model-makers, camoufleurs, construction preparators and draughtspeople. Together they designed different types of dazzle, tested them out on models and sent plans out to the docks where another set of artists would apply their designs to the ships.