Stranger TV and the World of Cinemapolis
[Image: Banksy (Marble Arch, London, 2004); via Enjoy Surveillance].
"Residents of a trendy London neighbourhood are to become the first in Britain to receive 'Asbo TV' – television beamed live to their homes from CCTV cameras on the surrounding streets. As part of the £12m scheme funded by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister," the Times reports, "residents of Shoreditch in the East End will also be able to compare characters they see behaving suspiciously with an on-screen 'rogues’ gallery' of local recipients of anti-social behaviour orders (Asbos)."
This is part of a "New Deal for Communities to regenerate poor districts" – by watching those districts on TV. It's the future of televised entertainment.
So will advertisers buy every wall in view of a camera...?
(For more, see BLDGBLOG's earlier piece on CCTV and urban psychovideography; as well as a quick post on wmmna).
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Why buy a wall when you can do virtual inserts? My question is: how long until a star is born? Who doesn't like to ham it up for a camera?
Great, further psychic collisions, or maybe just overlap. finishing an Asbo-post for Subtopia, but you beat me to it.
Post it anyway! Would love to hear your take on this.
And Jose, the surveillant star of the future... is OJ Simpson.
Or a new novel: a man is captured simultaneously on surveillance cameras all over the world, committing identical crimes. A policeman is called in to investigate. Thing is, he looks exactly like the man in the surveillance images... Homage to Philip K. Dick.
it seems you can get something similar on your mobile too:
http://www.textually.org/textually/archives/2006/01/011149.htm
in this case "just for watching traffic" ;-)
this is the perfect scenario, in future virtually everybody will watch everyone else. this is much more effective than a centralized state run and funded surveillance model. a myriad of small brothers and sisters will merge in one all encompassing big brother.
hrm - this is facinating and reminds me of a house in SF with a camera designed (ostensibly) to watch people on the sidewalk pausing to look at the view revealed by the house's architecture.
while the obvious possibilities are quite disturbing, there is also a potential artistic component. cf. Gibson's Pattern Recognition"
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