This are the first images from the new performance Crash by Marguerite Dolon and Helena Waldmann. The world premiere will take place as an open air performance on the 5th of May 2006 at CTD/ Budapest.

Olaf Arndt will be participating in crash test dummy. He will make a presentation and hold a debate on new tendencies in crowd CTRL.

This is an image of his ArmPod concerts - tracking, streaming, interacting.

This article is highlighting some interesting aspects of the hungarian game of video surveillance.
Lazlo Molnar is part of the Urban Eye project. As Budapest is a city with a very high number of cctv camera these are not only used to hunt down criminals.

Mayor György Farkas hopes that these ominous pictures can produce evidence against dog-owners leaving the dog shit on the streets, too.

Read the rest of this entry »

Multitude will start the blog-based project “Dictonary of War” in June:

DICTIONARY OF WAR is a collaborative platform for creating 100 concepts on the subject of war, to be formed and presented by scientists, artists, theorists and practitioners at four public, two-day events in Frankfurt, Munich, Graz and Berlin.

von Konrad Becker

Das Wort Sicherheit fand seinen modernen Gebrauch im 14ten Jhdt. als die Sicherung der Wege, insbesondere für Handelsreisende und Pilger zunehmend ein Anliegen wurde. Der Kaiser, und noch entscheidender die entsprechenden Fürsten, erklärten den Schutz der Überlandstrassen und unterzeichneten dementsprechende Verträge. 1375 erklärten sich die Herzöge von Österreich und Bayern bereit “die Wege überall zu schützen und zu sichern”. Read the rest of this entry »

check out this beautiful film!

netlag done by pleix.net

Just after wirting the first post I saw this interview with Marcus Kirsch about his project urban eyes, which is also about CCTV but from a very different perspective:

Urban eyes is a service combining CCTV networks and pigeons to provide an alternative view on the city. Users have to feed the pigeon with Urban Eyes bird seed. The special seed can be bought in a camera shop and contains RFID tags. When the bird flies about, the seed triggers the CCTV / webcam network (cameras would have been previously fitted with RFID readers) in a city based on its proximity to the camera. The images are then sent to the user’s PDA, creating a story about the bird and the city.

The Urbaneye Research project has a good documentation on CCTV-surveilance all around Europe and the resistance of the citizens:

“It is a comparative research project analysing the employment of CCTV in public accessible space in Europe which shall assess its social effects and political impacts in order to finally outline strategies for its regulation.”