Life: a user’s manual

I was just reminded by a student of this powerful performance by Michelle Teran:

Moving through the city streets with a video scanner reveals a hidden layer of personal fragments and stories which are broadcast by the private owners of surveillance cameras. The accumulation of these autonomous yet synchronous acts contributes to an invisible ad-hoc network of media permeating the socially codified spaces of our urban environments: the café, the apartment building, the store, the parking lot, and the street. Life: a user’s manual is a shared experience in visualizing the invisible. Together with the participants, Michelle Teran walks through the streets with a wireless surveillance camera scanner and broadcasts the images on a TV monitor.

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We Live in Public


I just stumbled upon the story of Josh Harris. How did I miss this until now???

“Josh Harris is the founder of Jupiter Communications and Pseudo.com. The dot-com pioneer dreamed up legendary art project Quiet: We Live in Public, a late ’90s spycam experiment that placed more than 100 artists in a “human terrarium” under New York City, with webcams capturing their every move. It ended badly, and Harris’ personal life later took a dive when he tried a similarly intimate stunt in his own loft. ”

Here’s a documentary.