Home Land

Home Land

Home Land

Home Land

Home Land

Home Land proposes a video-landscape sculpture for installation at the Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, New York. Home Land interrogates the role of electronic information technologies at a time where our civil liberties are being threatened. Home Land Security has given rise to a greater scrutiny of information, ideology and movement as it pertains to individuals and groups. Advances in electronic information technologies have provided new means of both information gathering and processing. The creation of databases outlining everything from purchasing patterns to telephone conversations has enabled the creation of a maps of individuals. With the proliferation of visual scanning apparatus, our physical movements are increasingly captured. Surveillance cameras capture visual information in the form of a time coded sequence of consecutive still images. When these still images are projected in succession, a video results recreating the captured events in real time. Each still image is organized as a two dimensional matrix. Each matrix location or pixel contains a colour value. The matrix location denoted by its coordinate position and the colour as a value of red, green and blue are stored as binary code. The reassembly of this code into the field of an image with successive images over time creates a video, reconstructing the captured events. This work proposes to aestheticise this phenomenon of visual surveillance. A field of 80 feet by 45 feet is subject to a 4 inch excavation. The excavated landfill debris is sorted into eight groupings by tone. The sorted debris is placed back on the field into 5 foot by 5 foot compartments corresponding to the pattern of a pixilated eyeball image. A 45 foot tall mast fixed to the ground with a pin pivot and supported in place by tension cables has a surveillance camera at its upper tip. The camera is focused on the field and captures its image in a live video. The captured image is broadcast on a 7 inch monitor protected within a stainless steel cowl enclosure at the base of the mast. Viewers walk across the pixilated field and are drawn to the glow and flicker of the monitor. Upon reaching the monitor, they realize that the image displayed is of the field itself and it becomes evident that the field is in fact an image of a human eye.