In James Coupe’s “Swarm,” Surveillance Equipment and Profiling Algorithms Highlight Demographic Identity and Social Paranoia…

Swarm is an installation that identifies people in the museum according to their demographic and segments them into ‘clans’ in competing versions of the gallery space.

A public art work installed on the facade of the Henry Art Gallery until November 2015. As people approach they are tracked, profiled and recorded by surveillance cameras, while ultrasonic speakers beam stories at them derived from Facebook status posts.

Sanctum opens May 4 – sign up to the project’s Facebook app.

This installation merges surveillance video with a self-help style voice-over, a psychology experiment, and a religious sermon.

A ring of five cameras is configured to continuously monitor a 360-degree field of view. The resulting panorama is then displayed on five screens on a wall. Software filters the video captured by the cameras to show only one person on each screen. The footage of each person loops, only being replaced once a new person stands in front of one of the cameras.

Five People in a Room included in The Public Private at Parsons, New York City Feb 7 – April 17.

A new installation is currently being installed at the Phillips Museum of Art, Franklin & Marshall College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Five cameras are located in the center of the gallery, panoptically configured to continuously monitor a 360-degree field of view. Computers process the video captured by the cameras and filter out any footage that contains movement. Five screens on the wall of the gallery construct a panoramic representation of the gallery via the camera feeds. Regardless of the number of people in the gallery, it always appears empty in the video footage. Although the panorama seems unified, each screen is temporally inconsistent and discontinuous with the others.

Camera units track men and women of specific ages as they walk through the museum. They record vignettes of each subject and use these to generate video sequences, which are stored in a database.

>> click image for pdf

A new version of Today, too, I experienced something I hope to understand in a few days has been commissioned for the Abandon Normal Devices festival in Manchester, UK. In advance of the festival, forty new portraits were recorded of people from Manchester, and these will be used in combination with Facebook status posts by […]

A site-specific artwork that auto-generates narrative films based upon data collected from Facebook users.

The Technology Law Society at the University of Washington School of Law will host a panel discussion focused on surveillance art (the use of technology to record human behavior that provides commentary on the process of surveillance) and rights of the artist and public on Thursday, January 28 from 12:30 – 1:20 p.m. in William H. Gates Hall Room 127.

… turning traditional methods of filmmaking upside down, Coupe takes an algorithmic approach to cinema and, in doing so, transforms reality into narrative.

A series of video works-in-progress as part of a residency at Lanternhouse, Ulverston from September 9 – 19, 2009.