Real-life stars of CCTV
[guardian.co.uk] We
are in the back streets of Cambridge on a warm April afternoon, armed
with a handheld video receiver, a small portable screen and a short
antenna. There are eight of us: film-makers, activists and a couple of
curious hangers-on, all about to engage in in film-making’s latest form
of subversion. We are spending the afternoon "video sniffing".
Video
sniffing encourages people low on resources, but high on imagination,
to create their own media. Our mission is to capture the live feed from
the network of CCTV cameras that stand sentry over so many shops and
street corners in Britain. The handheld receiver allows us to scan, or
"sniff ", wireless transmissions and view them on the screen without
the owner’s knowledge or consent.
A French women in our group
scans the airwaves using the radio receiver, which we bought off the
shelf from Maplins for less than £30. Hunting for CCTV signals looks no
more complicated than tuning analogue television. "It’s a bit like
playing hot or cold," explains Dave Valentine, the group’s leader.
"I’ve
got something," the woman with the scanner soon exclaims, and we huddle
around the screen. It’s difficult to see anything in the brilliant
sunlight; there’s a pulse of static that causes a ripple of excitement,
and then emerges the unmistakable image of the white lines of a car
park. It works – we’ve successfully "sniffed" our first video.
On
a sunny Saturday afternoon, this feels exciting, but there is more to
it than having fun. The first thing you realise is just how many CCTV
cameras are out there. Even in this grotty bit of Cambridge, there are
dozens. The second thing is that once you’ve scanned the video, you can
just as easily record it, and then use those recorded images to make
your own movies.
A group of homeless teenagers in Southend-on-Sea
did just that. With the help of the art collective Mongrel, they made a
short film using images they had taken from the very cameras that had
been installed to spy on them. After a day on their bikes mapping the
network of nearby cameras, they acted out a short script right there in
the street, and then "borrowed" the images from CCTV.
"The law surrounding video sniffing is a grey area in the UK," says Valentine, whose film The Duellists (futuresonic.com/08/theduellists.html)
was shot entirely on surveillance cameras in a Manchester shopping
centre. Even so, you are about to see more of this clandestine form of
film-making in the coming months. Channel 4 has just screened four in
its Three Minute Wonder slot, and there is a whole festival of films
shot on CCTV in Aberdeen next week.
The strangest of these is the featurelength Faceless (ambienttv.net/content/faceless),
produced and directed by Manu Luksch and Mukul Patel, with a voiceover
by Tilda Swinton. It’s a science-fiction movie set in a dystopian
future in which time itself has been annulled, leading the world to
exist in a state of permanent present.
Although Luksch makes
movies with CCTV, her methods are different from the sniffers‘. For a
decade, it has been anybody’s right to demand footage of themselves
taken from CCTV cameras. Over a four-year period, Luksch has spent
hours performing on the London streets beneath the glare of CCTV
cameras and then going through the protracted process of making formal
requests to retrieve the images from the cameras‘ owners. Most sent her
CDs or videotapes in return for a fee of £10. When the tapes arrive,
the faces of other passers-by are blanked out in order to protect their
identities – although, in one instance, a high street bank printed out
a copy of every image, leaving Luksch with a thick sheaf of paper. The
faces of everyone else had been cut out with nail scissors.
·
The Duellists and Faceless will be screened at the Recoded: Landscapes
and Politics of New Media festival, which runs until May 31 at the
University of Aberdeen.
