NSA – 2012

This is an installation I made at my space in Artisan’s Asylum in 2012. I had set up a mannequin wearing a fake pair of Google Glass, and an NSA sign made out of cell phones. When you walked into the space you were presented with a screen that showed conceptually what the mannequin was seeing – A heads up display program that said it was tracking people in the area around you. A Kinect sensor was set up that tracked your movement in the space and represented audience members on a map inside the space, as one of the four Google colors. At the same time, an LED strip would light up corresponding to that color, leading to the NSA sign. The idea was that using facial recognition in heads up display could be subverted by government organizations to know the locations of people without their knowledge. This predates when Snowden revealed that the NSA had been spying on people’s cellphones, but it was something people had been talking about in the hacker community I was part of for a while.

nsa_phones