Artistic Concept

TV Eye is an interactive installation that playfully engages with the fact that we are part of a society under constant surveillance. Via media monitoring, corporations and organisations capture our behaviours and actions as data that they then use to try to influence and control our decisions. Drawing on the aesthetics of sci-fi B-movies, hypnotherapy, using a soon-to-become obsolete media as it is television and following the DIY ethic of the hacking culture, the project offers an ironic commentary of the effects of publicity, propaganda and targeted marketing in people’s minds.

Technical Implementation

TV Eye consists in 4 old CRT televisions stacked on top of each other and connected in series via coaxial cables. These are connected to a RF modulator that allows setting the TVs to right frequency to receive an AV input. Using another adaptor we transform the analog phono signal to digital VGA, which gives the facility of using the TVs as monitors of a computer. On the laptop I run a openFrameworks sketch that draws a series of animations on the screen depending of the data read by an ultrasonic proximity sensor. The sensor data is processed by Arduino running the standard firmata example and programmed directly on OpenFrameworks. In openFrameworks we set a proximity threshold so if there’s noone around an eye in “passive” state is drawn onto the screen. Once proximity to the televisions is detected the eye switches to “active” state trying to hypnotize the people around it.