Surveillance Suite with James Coupe

I’m trying to get my head around a new project I’ll be working on, ‘Surveillance Suite’.  I first worked with James Coupe in 2004 on a piece called ‘Call Centre’ (if you go to the link, make sure to listen to the sample call) for the Lancaster Literature Festival and the Storey Institute. Since then James has left the UK and gone to live in Seattle where he works at the University of Washington.  ‘Surveillance Suite’ is a massive new project with three phrases, building on James’s interest in CCTV footage, video, and story-telling.  We are just beginning work on Phase One of ‘Surveillance Suite’ which will be created during James’s artist’s residency at Lanternhouse in Ulverston, in the Lake District; here’s how James describes the piece on his website:

Over the course of the residency, he will produce a series of algorithmically generated films, shot on location around Ulverston. The films will be based upon Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, a self-referential novel consisting of ten chapters from ten different novels, all of varying style, genre and subject matter. All overlap slightly, suggesting a single meta-narrative, and all are interrupted at strategic points. What is absent or missing becomes a sub-plot all of its own: narrative is composed as much by what is not there as by what is.

Recorded footage will be run through a face recognition algorithm that identifies people’s age, gender, race, facial expression and movement patterns. Using a series of script rules derived from the novel and produced in collaboration with a number of scriptwriters, the everyday activities of the town will be transformed into narrative films. The auto-generated results will be compiled as video montages and exhibited in the Lanternhouse gallery.