Surrounding Systems
Emily Bergerson
This project began as a film made from various CCTV cameras. My content was sourced from live feeds I found online, featuring scenes of grey cityscapes, windswept grasslands, crowded elevators and bucolic farmsteads. Typically this surveillance is used to generate predictive shopping data, to monitor traffic, or to identify terrorist threats. I wanted to see the world from above, and then to counterpoint moments of everyday life with texts of transcendentalism, subversion and warped perception.
These video recordings were originally intended as a means of state or corporate control, yet I often found a beautiful, poetic quality in the material. My thesis book collates screenshots from this research, and asks a question: whether seen through the lens of a security camera or through a divine eye, are we are all small pieces of something larger?