Title: Visitors To A Gallery - Referential Self, Embedded. 2004 +

This digital artwork is a surveillance art system that incorporates the visitors to the gallery inside the artwork. As visitors come into the gallery, they are then monitored and captured by the camera system in the gallery. A series of codes and custom electronics manipulates the camera feeds and the resulting video feeds. Proximity sensors on the floor allow the system to zoom in, or divide the screen into grids, depending on where people are standing in the gallery. The results are displayed on the gallery walls.

Concepts: The visitors to the gallery, are in fact assets, and I refer to the audience as data. The visitors, that is the audience are units of data, moving around the giant database, which is the gallery. The patterns, movement, and exchanges of data in the real space, can be measured and interpreted as an emergent social space or flow space.

• The public are embedded into the "information stream" of the artwork so that they become the artwork.
• The private body in the space is made public and shared.
• The resulting experience becomes a real time artifact, the artwork is always changing, never the same again always different forever.
• The focus is the live dynamic interpretation of the space and the people both inside and outside.
• This artwork puts the audience, the public on display and everyone is incorporated into the spectacle in the gallery.
• This work opens out the networks of surveillance and creates new narratives in the process.
• The idea of using the information inside the space is also to make the space transparent and extend the gallery space outwards.
• Artwork functions: Transparency of space; ownership of data; and problems of representation, identity, and privacy.

Funding and Development. I first developed the artwork as part of a Clarks Bursary at the Watershed Media Centre in 2004, where it was first presented. Further development started again as part my AHRC fellowship at Goldsmiths College in 2006. It was re-commissioned by Helen Sloan in 2008 where it was shown at Plymouth Arts Centre UK 2008 curated by Paula Orrell (which was supported by The Arts Council Of England) . The installation was exhibited again in 2013 at De Markten Belgium as part of the exhibition "A Look Inside" which was a themed show in surveillance based artworks. Which was at the event to launch the book Liquid Surveillance. (Lyon Bauman)

Exhibitions and Provenance. This installation has been exhibited in these galleries and venues.

• The Watershed Media Centre UK. Thanks to Dick Penny and Clarks Bursary. 2004.
• Plymouth Arts Centre Feb. UK. Solo show. Thanks to Paula Orrell and Helen Sloan. 2008.
• "A Look Inside". Surveillance Art expo De Markten. Brussels Belgium. 2013.

The artwork at "A Look Inside". Surveillance Art expo De Markten: Brussels Belgium 2013

Images show the projections on the walls of the artwork Visitors To A Gallery at "A Look Inside". Surveillance Art expo De Markten: Brussels Belgium 2013

Contexts: Visitors in any of the galleries and all spaces in the building can appear inside the artwork at any time. In this way I create a parallel universe what I call a parallel reality. The gallery becomes a panopticon, a surveillance space of the live breathing data with "The Visitors To A Gallery". Though I have indicated that visitors can be thought of units of data, it is also possible to “re-mediate” the body in the data space in order that a new, emergent, social space is created. New technologies will monitor the space to track public interactions and provide “interpretative” and the cluster of visitors within the gallery.

"Visitors to a Gallery", uses custom made electronics and ultrasound sensors which are placed on the gallery floor to create the installation in the space. Visitors to the main gallery control the CCTV feeds by their own movement in the space. The artwork becomes a performative and interactive controlled system. The proximity to the main ultrasound sensors affects the aesthetic of the image. The visitors act as an intervention in the the gallery space and become embedded in the artwork.

Technology: Live surveillance from the Gallery. Projectors, custom electronics system , software.

Touring: This work is available for touring and for any public space wishing to expand on my concept of privacy in public spaces as artwork.

There is also a larger research text here which was developed in 2008 and sent to Tate Modern to form an AHRC bid for follow on funding under the title Public Doman.

Thanks to Plymouth Arts Centre, Paula Orrell. Supported by Helen Sloan of Scan. Part of distributed South, which is a project funded by The Arts Council England. Thanks to an AHRC creative fellowship and Goldsmiths digital studios.

KEYWORDS: network art, CCTV, generative, sensor, installation, real time audio, visualization, environment, surveillance art, responsive.

Concept, images, design, visualisation, installation, (c) copyright Stanza. 2004

Stanza taking a photo inside the artwork being projected at "A Look Inside". Surveillance Art expo De Markten: Brussels Belgium 2013

FURTHER CONTEXT:

Everything is or will be tracked. CCTV, car sensors, tracking inside our phones and id card movement tracking in the guise of anti- terror activity. The patterns we make, the forces we weave, are all being networked into retrievable data structures that can be re-imagined and sourced for information. These patterns all disclose new ways of seeing the world. The value of information will be a new currency as power change. The central issue that will develop will be the privilege and access to these data sources. By at least taking some of this data and making something with it one is at least reclaiming ownership of the data and putting it back in the public domain. Surveillance systems are everywhere in the public domain. We are all actors, bit part actors, in a giant movie called life. Except we cannot watch, it is not on public display and the results are monitored, filtered and distributed without our permission. This research is an opportunity to redress that balance. Underpinning these artworks and research, are a whole series of potential problems about observation, surveillance, and the ethics of the control space. Imagine walking out the door, and knowing every single action, movement, sound, micro movement, pulse, and thread of information is being tracked, monitored, stored, analyzed, interpreted and logged. Stanza often works with small unit blocks that are simplified then re built , re-cored re-formed into an understanding that can re-communicate the complexity of the larger system. Stanza is working towards creating a new social space that exists in between these independent online networks where future cities will be merged into real time connected up data cities. The landscape will become an observable connection of monitored networks of real time information flows. Stanza 2004

In Visitors to a Gallery, Referential Self, Embedded, the artist is therefore fully aware of the tendency for ubiquitous technologies to be those of surveillance and control. The audiences here are making their own damn art and have the freedom to make the content of the work itself, but because the CCTV cameras are capturing their image when they might not have been aware of it, they of course are not fully in control. The artwork Gallery, Invisible Agency and Cultural Behaviours from 2008 marks a more conceptual approach to a similar theme, and Stanza asks what happens during the process of visiting the gallery as a dataspace - what does the visitor actually do? Professor Beryl Graham

"The London-based artist Stanza has been exhibiting for over three decades, and has been drawn consistently to themes of surveillance technologies, as in the “panopticon” addressed by Michel Foucault but later treated more skeptically by Bruno Latour and Emilie Hermant. The theme of surveillance has been a central concern in the social sciences in recent decades. Much of the credit for this obviously must go to Foucault, due to his well- known passages in Discipline and Punish on Jeremy Bentham’s “Panopticon,” an institution whose inhabitants (prisoners, students, patients, or otherwise) might be watched at any moment from a central observation point. As Foucault puts it: “The Panopticon is a marvelous machine which, whatever use one may wish to put it to, produces homogeneous effects of power.” Another of Stanza’s themes is multi-point perspectives, though rather than give this topic the expected relativist spin, he stresses the notion that the varying perspectives amount to parallel realities thereby suggesting that these realities are partly cut off from one another for the same reason that Euclidean parallel lines never make contact." Professor Graham Harman

Visitors to the Gallery presented back inside the artwork projected on the walls.

The custom system shows the split screens which is activated when people stand right next to one of the sensors, A photo inside the artwork being projected at "A Look Inside". Surveillance Art expo De Markten: Brussels Belgium 2013

Image from 2013 exhibition in Belgium. Shows sensors and split screens.     Image from 2013 exhibition in Belgium. Shows sensors and split screens from four of the gallery spaces all on the same wall.           Visitors looking at the other visitors.     Cameras Zooming in on one person.     Visitors coming down the stairs in another part of the venue.     Split screens from the 16 cameras at Plymouth Arts Centre 2008 . Everyone in the building is seen inside the artwork.     Split screens from 16 cameras 2008. Plymouth Arts Centre     Detail of zoomed in cameras in the gallery. You can see people in the foyer and other gallerries inside the artwork . Theyare co opted inside the artwork as performers. This photo of the installation at Plymouth Arts Centre from 2008.     Detail of zoomed in cameras in the gallery 2008 Plymouth Arts Centre     Detail of zoomed in cameras in the gallery 2008. Plymouth Arts Centre     Set up on Plymouth Arts Centre Walls 2008 of Visitors To A Gallery       Visitors To A Gallery - Referential Self, Embedded. 2008. From around the gallery on the walls in the other spaces. From an essay by Beryl Graham. “Data. People. Art.”   These relationships between physical space and virtual space are a recurring theme in Stanza’s work. His work Visitors to a Gallery, Referential Self, Embedded from 2008 uses the CCTV Closed Circuit Television Cameras to embed visitors to a gallery inside the artwork. Grids of images from CCTV in other parts the building are projected into the gallery rooms showing visitors their own bodies from other spaces and other times. The projectors and cables sprawled across the gallery floor reveal the self-referential nature of the work and the means of production. The installation makes visible those things not usually shown in galleries and reveals the nature of gallery-visiting Itself. Artists have of course used CCTV and surveillance cameras for art for some time, including the Surveillance Camera Players who performed with props and subtitles, specially for CCTV cameras around New York since 1996. What Stanza’s work does is to highlight a critical view of the current rhetoric about visitor participation in galleries, for here the visitor is not necessarily participating in work voluntarily. But what does this buzzword 'participation' really mean after all? Is it a euphemism that sells the obligation to cooperate, to play along? Is it a moral imperative, a condition of the social? Is it just a way of emphasising the necessarily plural nature of activity in general?   Artists working with new media have become very familiar with the ways in which it necessarily works with interaction and participation, and disrupts fundamental artworld systems of authorship and Intellectual Property. In Visitors to a Gallery, Referential Self, Embedded, the artist is therefore fully aware of the tendency for ubiquitous technologies to be those of surveillance and control. The audiences here are making their own damn art and have the freedom to make the content of the work itself, but because the CCTV cameras are capturing their image when they might not have been aware of it, they of course are not fully in control.     Self portrait inside the artwork Visitors to a Gallery. 2013               Trouble shoot tech notes 1 sensors 1 sensors wiring Download sensor layout Download sensor notes (C) Copyright images and concepts. Stanza 2004