browser art, JavaScript, socket.io, GPS art
There are an estimated one billion surveillance cameras worldwide, over 700 million of them in China. Shanghai alone hosts around 15 million cameras. Yet as we move through the city, this dense infrastructure of watching remains strangely invisible; we rarely register how constantly we are being seen.
This project renders that invisible gaze. As participants walk through Qiantan, their path is visualized in real time according to the number of cameras surrounding them, revealing when and where they are most intensely watched and allowing them to see their own trace alongside those of others. The camera data for roughly 6,400 ㎡ of Qiantan was painstakingly mapped by us through on-site observation, due to the lack of open surveillance datasets.
Each monitored trace can be downloaded and shared, turning these individual routes into a participatory gallery of lived experiences under surveillance—an evolving archive that invites us to reconsider how we appear to one another in a surveilled city.