This animation is part of a larger project, ‘Static’, which tackles the theme of digital and physical surveillance. I was interested to find out more about physical surveillance; in particular the use of CCTV cameras in the UK. In London you are caught on CCTV up to 300 times a day. In order to communicate this, I created an animation using carbon paper printing. The drawings were made using live Transport for London CCTV camera feeds available online as source material. Using the camera feeds, I followed and traced myself making a journey down one of the roads in London with the densest population of cameras, Marylebone. Every five minutes the camera feed refreshed, a drawing was made, and a new frame of the animation was created. Each frame is printed on top of the previous using carbon paper, a medium that visually represents the trace left behind. By visually documenting myself being surveilled, I hope to question the relationship between the recorder and the recorded, the watcher and the watched.
Each frame of the animation is an individual illustration made by overlapping layers of carbon paper. Every time the camera feed refreshed, a new layer of carbon paper was blindly drawn on top; creating a new frame of the animation.