Manon Boulens and Vivien von Burg, Wave at First Sight, 2024

There are countless livestreams on YouTube showing public places around the world. Even though most people aren’t aware that they are being filmed and streamed on the internet, in certain places public surveillance cameras have become famous. Some tourists and passersby interact with these cameras by waving or taking pictures. This inspired a reflection around questions of privacy and awareness of surveillance in public spaces. It also revealed various strategies of communication between those being filmed and those watching, as well as the reappropriation of these live images freely spread on the internet.

Wave at First Sight is an interactive installation that employs a surveillance or livestream camera using PoseNet and object detection in p5.js to automatically blur the people it recognizes. The camera invites one person at a time to interact, with the simple phrase, “wave to be seen,” displayed on a screen positioned under the camera. Only through waving does the person become visible for 3 seconds. During this interaction between the willing participant and the apparatus, the camera creates a mark (a dot) on the screen at the participant‘s location and confirms the interaction by displaying the phrase “the camera sees you.”

In an interval period of 10 minutes, the computer registers and marks each consensual interaction, connecting the dots in the order they were drawn on the canvas to form a constellation. This constellation serves as both a collective artwork and a collection of data points. After the 10-minute interval, the camera‘s memory is wiped clean, leaving only the exported collective constellation artwork as a printed artifact that transcends the digital space into the physical one.

Rather than infringing on the privacy of individuals and distributing it on the internet, this project aims to foster an interaction or dialogue between the observer (the camera) and the observed (the person) based on consent. The resulting collective artwork is an expression of this consent, originating in the physical sphere, translated into the digital, and finally manifesting as an artistic output in the physical world, ensuring that the original data cannot be misused.