Live-Video Installation
Camera, Projector, maxMSP
2022
Exhibited at Floating Projects in Hong Kong in December 2022
https://www.floatingprojectscollective.net/art-notes/tool-being-1
OCTV, or Open-Circuit Television is a play on the term CCTV commonly used for video surveillance. CCTV, or closed-circuit television, is meant to operate in a closed system only transmitting to a single or a small set of monitors within this system.
Drawing from my continuous examination of my own relation to the city and the public realm and the way I as an individual appear within this realm, the video installation aims to address issues of appearance and individualization. Living in a city the individual naturally becomes anonymized by its vastness and masses of people. The CCTV camera’s purpose is to revoke this natural anonymizing notion of the city, making people appear, re-individualizing and identifying them.
The artwork breaks this closed circuit open, manipulating the live video signal coming from the camera to remove any features that could identify persons as who they are. Instead, the features are replaced with procedurally generated static noise, an anonymous image. The noise generation is triggered by motion within the frame to visualize the physicality of the process, highlighting the working of the technology and how it is not acting independently of us but is very much in constant conversation with us. This effect is amplified by not only generating noise from movement in the frame but also turning this motion into sound. Every time something within the frame moves, random notes are played on a virtual keyboard. We can experience how visual and oral information are not two separate streams of information but very closely connected in the medium of video.
To fully break open the closed-circuit nature of surveillance and CCTV the live feed of this installation was streamed live to Twitch (twitch.tv), making the intended for closed circuit video available to virtually everyone on the internet, creating the name giving open circuit.
The artwork uses the software Max MSP to take the live video input and create a difference map for motion detection and an alpha matte to replace the non-white parts of the image with the procedural generated noise. The noise and sound generation are triggered by taking the mean value calculated by the difference map. Whenever a set threshold is crossed, the noise and sound would generate new iterations until the value falls below the threshold again. The more motion within the frame, the more difference between two frames, the higher the calculated mean value. This information is used to control the attack and velocity of the generated sound, meaning that more motion creates louder sounds and vice versa.
OBS (Open Broadcaster Studio) is used to live stream and capture the processed video.