Tout Le Monde Peut Vous Voir!
Everyone Can See You!
Tout Le Monde Peut Vous Voir! is a site-specific installation created for the 2015 edition of Art Souterrain in Montreal. While originally accepted for the show, it was never completed due to the loss of the space it was slated for at Place Des Arts. Following a change in administration, Place Des Arts chose not to participate in the 2015 edition of Art Souterrain.
The theme of the 2015 exhibit was "Security in our Society: What Remains of Our Personal Freedom". My proposal was to construct a photo booth which delivered no photos to the participants, instead, they would get a slip of paper with a QR code to see the photos on a social media site (flickr). While I never got to construct the actual project, I did write all of the software to run the photo booth and built a maquette of the booth. I even wrote all of the proposal in French! Anyway, below is an excerpt from my statement about the project:
There is a dark side to social media – an ominous subtext in this age of surveillance. National security agencies have recently revealed that they are pouring over social media web sites with facial recognition software to ostensibly make us “safer”. Tout Le Monde Peut Vous Voir! explores this concept. It appears to be a traditional photo booth, but it prints no pictures. It immediately posts pictures of consenting participants to a social media photo stream where they may be viewed by anyone anywhere in the world (including government agencies). In consenting to have their pictures taken, participants also incur a loss of privacy. Posting parts of our lives on line has become so ubiquitous that we don’t think about how exposed we have become.
The statement seems a little dated now. I wrote that ten years ago. Now most people seem to have little hesitation in posting images and snippets of their lives on multiple social media sites - and flickr has been largely replaced by other sites. Although I never got to build the actual full-scale photo booth (at least not yet), it was very satisfying building the model and creating the software to run it.
