Transience Fields

Chances are, you’ve interacted with a consumer camera. Maybe it was a Super 8 or a camcorder when you were younger, and maybe it’s the phone in your pocket right now. Consumer cameras offer us autonomy in the preservation of memory; all we have to do is point it at what we want to remember. But our relationship with cameras is dependent on the context in which we are interacting with them.

When the camera isn’t in our hands, how comfortable are we with it being pointed at us? While cameras have developed into a consumer technology, they’ve also found a way into our society for the sake of surveillance. Cameras in our public spaces are placed with the intention of security and safety, but at the cost of our autonomy. Technology like this often seems to point outwards and downwards, further enforcing social stratification through their proliferation in urban, high population areas, and acting as a barrier in gated communities and higher income areas, only being escapable if you can afford to avoid it. And yet, surveillance technology is an impersonal form of preservation, grounded to the environment in which it is placed. A stationary camera’s memory is limited to the information passing through its field of view. And while the thought of a camera preserving memories inaccessible to us might be uncomfortable, they also have the potential to create a spatial memory of our collective activity within that field.

This project is meant to be interacted with. See how it responds to you. Spend some time watching what passes through this environment. This installation is ephemeral in nature, and it will only exist in this form, in this space, for a moment. It is surveillance, but nothing is being recorded. The choice is yours to preserve it for yourself. You can take pictures, record videos, or you can just be here in the moment and play.