A Scanner Darkly

A Scanner Darkly

As the scale and scope of public and corporate surveillance grows, and more people living in urban areas are tracked, analyzed, and profiled, enormous power imbalances are starting to appear. A Scanner Darkly sheds light on these imbalances by highlighting the infrastructure that allows systems of surveillance to exist.

A Scanner Darkly’s physical infrastructure of surveillance appears as a constellation of 15 security cameras on a wall. Each camera is equipped with a WiFi controller for remote triggering, and a spotlight that toggles on and off, seemingly at random, as the light projects on the opposite wall.

The intangible infrastructure of surveillance is the described light from the spotlights; when combined into a 3x5 grid, they operate as a dot-matrix character display. Once per second A Scanner Darkly shows a new character, slowly displaying the text of US surveillance laws and regulations pertaining to surveillance, the same laws that allow the physical infrastructure to exist and operate. 

2021 - 3D printed enclosures, custom electronics, Wi-Fi controller – dimensions variable

You can read more about the explanation and how it was built here - [Blog]
High resolution images of the project can be found here - [Gallery]