MONDAY ARTIST BLOG // the institute for applied autonomy

I recently picked up a book/map collection titled
An-Atlas of Radical Cartography

included in the book is a map by designers Site-R based on the work of The Institute for Applied Autonomy's isee project
a video on the project follows

iSee - The Institute for Applied Autonomy from Rich Pell on Vimeo.

from the radical cartography website a short bio of the Institute

"Institute for Applied Autonomy was founded in 1998 as an anonymous collective of engineers, designers, artists and activists who are united by the cause of individual and collective self-determination. The IAA has produced several projects under its flagship initiative, "Contestational Robotics." Their work has been seen at MassMoCA; Ars Electronica Festival (where it has won awards in 2000 and 2006); ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany; and the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati. TXTMob, a recent project, was a cellphone text message broadcast service widely used by demonstrators during the 2004 DNC and RNC protests and at election protests in the Ukraine and Washington D.C. www.appliedautonomy.com"

An essay on the project is presented in the companion book to the set of maps
from the essay

"As Cities like Boston, Chicago, and Washington DC implement city-wide video surveillance programs, grassroots efforts to map CCTV networks take on the crucial role if creating public proofs that both document and challenge emerging infrastructures of control. CCTV maps have rhetorical value in raising awareness and provoking public debate. They also have analytic value, enabling citizen-science of surveillance in which surveillance systems are monitored and evaluated by the communities they purport to serve."

for me lately the there have been two main questions related to the content and process of my work. I feel like this mapping project has found answers to both. the first being how to identify the subject matter and record its presence. in this case it was CCTV cameras and the participation of the public in researching their location. The second is how the information functions and what can be done with it. The information provides a open ended collection of data that can be used by anyone for whatever aims related to the location and number of CCTV cameras. the end product presented in this work is a poster that documents several paths of least surveillance available to the public for whatever aims they choose to use them for.