Location Insecure

12:00, Color, Stereo, US, 2006
Natalie Bookchin: Location Insecure

N. Bookchin: Location Insecure

Location Insecure is a bitter-sweet global city symphony seen through the lens of security webcam, which although probably unintended for public viewing, were not secured by passwords and found on the Internet. The video offers a contemporary reinterpretation of the city symphony, the early twentieth century documentary genre that celebrated the modern city and industrial development through a depiction of a day-in-the-life of a city and its inhabitants. The human recorder of the city is multiplied to infinity with the proliferation of webcams, everywhere and always on, and monitored by an unlimited number of remote observers. The video depicts the experience of asynchronous and non-linear space and time of the Internet, where one jumps from continent to continent and from day to night with a single click of the mouse. Locations are both specific and undetermined, potentially traceable only by geographically or architecturally-specific details or by a domain name or domain registration address. The star of Location Insecure is the recorder itself, appearing through traces and technological artifacts: wires connecting the camera to the Internet, the camera's reflection in window pane, the obstruction of a landscape by window bars and blinds behind which a camera is hidden. The camera relentlessly records, indifferent to darkness or bursts of light that wash out all but the reflective glare of the lens, without a human operator to attend to the dirt and rain that mark the lens or to straighten a skewed camera. The audio mixes fragments from secret White House telephone recordings with voices from call-in radio programs revealing personal details about their callers' lives over the public airwaves, a precursor to reality television and symptom of a society accustomed to, and increasingly comfortable with, the camera's constant gaze.

at videomedeja in: 2006screening