Spanish Urban Artist SpY Turns 150 Surveillance Cameras Into Large-Scale Artwork

Who watches whom?

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Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

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The Spanish-born street artist going under the pseudonym SpY recently went after the absurdity of the surveillance state, in a new installation simply titled Cameras. In the piece up in Madrid, the artist created an “Installation of 150 fake security cameras on a building facade with the intention of not watching over anything,” according to his artist's statement. 

As these devices often seem obtrusive or out of place on many building facades, SpY’s appropriation and organization of the 150 cameras turns them into an ordinal grid, a large-scale artwork, that renders each meaningless in the collection of the whole. Like with some of his other projects, such as Pyramid, SpY turned a generally feared or mistrusted object of public consternation into something shrewd and visually stimulating. The gaze of the spectator put on the insistent gaze of the surveillance cameras brings up questions of authority, privacy, and the old interrogation, “who is watching the watcher?”

Check out more of SpY’s work here

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[via Designboom]

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