in(security)

Our online celebrity lives have begun, and if you are an active participant on the Web, your life and your past is available for public consumption.
In response to this, I would like to encourage a world where instead of being only in the eyes of survillance, we also become the eyes ourselves in order to have a possible new perspective on why it may or may not be important for some sort of universal on-line surveillance.

The losses of our rights to personal privacy have encouraged me to think in many directions about how to approach the fact that we are forced to lose our individuality and our ability for expression due to the implied fact that we must start to hide our identities on-line in order to remain out of the eye sight of that Big Brother-esq terror that seeks to keep a hold of our thoughts and monitor our cyber-activity.

I would like to integrate free, live, on-line surveillance cameras into a text-based chat room structure. This union will add an immediate visual layer to heighten the intensity and reality of the mood and will aid in creating the architecture of a theatrical piece. I propose a live theater space that exists inside of a chat room, that watches back at the world that we have escaped from through our online activities.
I maintain that there is an infinite world of possibilities, free from the constraints of the physical theater, in cyberspace. This is a theater of perception...the real and the world that exists live online, streamed through the cloud of ones and zeros.

I am interested in the online energy of synchronous communication centered around the notion of the word ‘live’ and how it relates to the personal experience of interacting in chat rooms.
A few years ago there was the case of the “Ripper” wherein a young man was encouraged to take multiple drugs to the point of overdose while chatting on line in a chat room. Other members of the chat taunted and coerced the ‘ripper’ to take more drugs. The result was a live suicide that was brought about, devastatingly, by the medium of the chat room.
There is an element of human nature that salivates at the notion of ‘live’ and I want to tap into that drive to keep real time synchronous communication happening to the point of the ripper’s demise, but keep it safe, no one dies, but that energy that drive to destruction still lives.
This is an environment that is still being explored and still evolving through games and faster Internet connections are allowing the synchronous interactions to happen more often.
What type of footprints are we leaving in this digital society? I am fascinated by the legitimacy of the written word on the Web. Do we really trust what we see and read online?
Is my online identity just a character in a large play that I am creating and manipulating to be someone other than myself, or just an extension of who I really am?
Is there drama in a chat room; how can I harness that energy and immediacy and make it into an enjoyable dramatic event?

Context Examples
The Chat Room as a theater space has been used in two successful and noteworthy cases.
Surveillance cameras have been utilized in many performance and art works.
“How do you cede some measure of control or authority to the audience, reader, listener, ‘user’ -- yet still deliver a work that's expressive, moving, memorable, satisfying?”
A quote from Scott Rosenberg’s Hypertext Wasteland referring to Desktop Theater’s "Clicking for Godot."
I will illustrate three examples in these fields that are related to In (security)…

Laughing Out Loud
Created by N3krozoft MORD
Presented in 2003 Les Voûtes - PARIS LOL was shown as part of the group exhibition called Global Resistance.
Last presented Dec, 2005.
The project was themed around the memorable Ripper case.
A chat room theater piece was employed.
The actors involved re-enacted the actual transcript of the Ripper Chat session.
http://www.stepzero.org/temp/ripper.html for a transcript of the case
http://www.n3krozoft.com/ for the art group’s website

ASV [v.f.] 1.0
://rhizome.org/object.rhiz?3371
Created by Vincent Makowski / AmsterdamEditions*
Used 5 actors in a chat room theater performance
They had no rehearsal and had no interest in linear narrative and used absurdist dialogue and communicated between actors as characters; the public was able to act along in the chat room
ASV [v.f.] 1.0 was performed on Sat March 23rd 2002 at 5 pm CET in the chatroom installed on www.amsterdameditions.com for the occasion during the Internet Fiesta and the Irish Museum of Modern Art's first open Net.art exhibition in which the website was involved.
The technology used was simple and easy to operate.
The Chatroom Plays require any kind of chat oriented basic technologies such as ICQ or IRC.

The Institute for Applied Autonomy
iSee is a web-based application charting the locations of closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance cameras in urban environments. With iSee, users can find routes that avoid these cameras ("paths of least surveillance") allowing them to walk around their cities without fear of being "caught on tape" by unregulated security monitors.
The Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA) was founded in 1998 as a technological research and development organization dedicated to the cause of individual and collective self-determination. Our mission is to study the forces and structures which affect self-determination and to provide technologies which extend the autonomy of human activists.

Inverse Surveillance.
Inverse Surveillance intervenes in the process of surveillance and attempts to undermine or reverse the authoritative power associated with the technology.
Their use of security cameras and the need to avoid them is especially intriguing and a perfect fit for the in(security) project.

Other resources:

NY Security Camera Players
http://www.notbored.org/the-scp.html

Desktop Theater
Uses Palace avitar chat for theatrical performances.
http://www.thepalace.com/
They performed a production of Waiting For Godot.

Web Camera Theater
An Italian perfromance group that uses web cameras to enhance performances.
http://www.webcamtheatre.org/lab-roma.htm
MPG:Mobile Performance GroupMPG: Mobile Performance Group is a collective of new media artists interested in finding new ways to present art outside of traditional venues. MPG disseminates their work by using automobiles, video projection, cell phones, FM transmission, wireless hotspots, and any other technologies that allow artist to engage the public. The Group was founded by Matt Roberts and is part of his classes taught at Stetson University’s Digital Art program.

Web users, voyeurs, anyone who has an online identity.

Surveillance Drama offers a unique experience for a small online group made up of users throughout the world.

To participate in Online Surveillance Drama follow these steps:

At the appropriate performance time illustrated on the in(security) HOME page you will log into the chatroom. You will then be part of the drama and you can follow along and click on links provided in order to follow the story, you may also enter text to be part of the story.

A simple chatroom using open source code. One actress live on the streets with a cellphone as a monitor. The director, myself, running the show, five actors in the chat room, 5 audience members (these numbers may vary).

I am using free chat source code from LACE.
http://socket7.net/lace/.

For live audio I am using Quicktime Broadcaster.