Who do we need to check-up on?

Who do we need to hold accountable? And, meanwhile, what critical infrastructures are important to us – our communication networks, mutual aid, playgrounds, energy systems, childcare – that we need to build and sustain?

A map to regulate all the cameras out there already concealed in doorbells that are constantly streaming and archiving background film of children going to school. How can body-worn and smart-architecture networked cameras be kept out of children’s lives?

A system of vigils at the gates of the factories that make authoritarian state apparatuses. Who makes these things?

Contestational design – come together to witness, “from Latin contestari ‘call upon to witness, initiate (by calling witnesses)’, from con- ‘together’ + testare ‘to witness’”.

“By contestational design, I refer to design activities that engage in advocacy work in collaboration with and/or on behalf particular players in adversarial political processes. Contestational design is distinct from design activities that merely seek to raise awareness of or provide opportunities for discussion about political issues; it is an openly partisan activity that advances a particular set of interests, often at the expense of another.” – Contestational Design, Tad Hirsch

Are ‘open’ or ‘commons’ networked camera systems hand-held rather than wall-mounted?

“Jill Gibbon visits arms fairs in Europe and the Middle East by dressing up as an arms trader with a suit, plastic pearls, and a fake company. Her pretence is a metaphor for the façade of respectability in the industry. Once inside she draws, and collects complementary gifts from the stalls – stress balls in the shape of bombs and grenades, toy tanks, sweets and condoms with marketing slogans.” – https://www.jillgibbon.co.uk/cover

A hello world how to play an rtsp or mjpg in a simple java Processing sketch:

import processing.video.*;

Movie movie;

void setup() {
  size(1024, 512);
  Movie.supportedProtocols[0] = "rtsp";
  movie = new Movie(this, "rtsp://demo:demo@ipvmdemo.dyndns.org:5541/onvif-media/media.amp?profile=profile_1_h264&sessiontimeout=60&streamtype=unicast");

  //Movie.supportedProtocols[0] = "http";
  //movie = new Movie(this, "http://xxx.xx.x.xxx/mjpg/video.mjpg");
  
  movie.play();
}

void movieEvent(Movie m) {
  m.read();
}

void draw() {
  background(0);
  image(movie, 0, 0, width, height);
}

“In 2013, I went on twenty dates with people I met on an online dating site called OkCupid. I used my phone to stream these dates to the Internet. I paid remote workers on a site called Amazon Mechanical Turk to watch, interpret what was happening, and direct me what to do or say next.” – Lauren Lee McCarthy https://lauren-mccarthy.com/social-turkers

“IP cameras: farm … The world biggest directory of online surveillance security cameras.”

“They are blocked from the transformative power of production, because they are stuck by their own access to power” – https://www.thewhitepube.co.uk/canwhitepeopleberadical

“[I am] blocked from the transformative power of production, because [I am] stuck by [my] own access to power”

— Ben Dalton