Stationed 01
Interactive Installation 2026
Stationed is a continuous interactive installation that implicates the spectator as surveyor. This interactive piece problematizes the lines between being surveilled and being the surveillor by forcing the audience to view publicly available surveillance footage with their own faces livestreamed and combined with facial recognition software.
A continuous projection across from the "station" displays live mixed video feeds from three different cameras. Facial recognition software using Google Media Pipe is overlaid on these camera feeds. The camera feeds display point cloud data live from the gallery space, a webcam feed placed in front of the main station, and pre-recorded surveillance footage from various US cities.
In this iteration of Stationed, audience members saw themselves fade in and out of view with recorded surveillance footage from livecam in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Nashville, New Orleans, and Myrtle Beach.
The audience interacts with the surveillance station by pressing buttons and changing sliders on an Akai APC 40 midi board. Functional buttons and sliders were delineated from non-functional buttons via color. These sets of effects also corresponded to particular screens on the LCD panel. The midi sends values over serial to Arduino to update information on the LCD screen panels. This feature, combined with recurring prompts and directions programmed for the screens, allow the audience to discover different image effects, points of views, and compositing combinations.
Midi input and LCD response interactivity in this version of Stationed allowed the audience to change the following features:
— Primary viewpoint of the surveilled city
— Viewpoint of live streamed point cloud data of the space
— Color grading effects
— Cross hairs and text over the Google Media Pipe facial recognition stream
— The opacity and blending of all of the above settings
— Primary viewpoint of the surveilled city
— Viewpoint of live streamed point cloud data of the space
— Color grading effects
— Cross hairs and text over the Google Media Pipe facial recognition stream
— The opacity and blending of all of the above settings
In future iterations of this project, more cities will be added to the possible viewpoints. Rather than using prerecorded video from EarthCam, Stationed will feature livestreamed public surveillance footage. Further refinement on optimizing user experience with LCD responsiveness and ergonomics of the station's construction will also be developed.
Exhibition
ARTSLab, 2026
ARTSLab, 2026
Software
TouchDesigner
OBS Studio
Arduino IDE
TouchDesigner
OBS Studio
Arduino IDE
Credits
EarthCam: publicly available surveillance footage
Google Media Pipe: free facial recognition software
guillermoalmo: AKAI APC midi mapping for TouchDesigner
Documentation music by Yurii Semchyshyn from Pixabay
EarthCam: publicly available surveillance footage
Google Media Pipe: free facial recognition software
guillermoalmo: AKAI APC midi mapping for TouchDesigner
Documentation music by Yurii Semchyshyn from Pixabay