CCTV drawings

CCTV DRAWINGS

"We live in a world, we have not yet learned to look at.
We need to re-learn to think about space."
(Marc Auge, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity)

It is said that at any moment across the world, between 60 000 and 1 million people are flying in the air at the same time – a multitude more is constantly found on the way to or from the airport. Each day, more than 3.5 million people use an airplane. This is the same number as there are residents of Berlin. The terminal comprises the central gateway to a globally networked architecture complex and transportation system. Can the terminal function as a prototypical spyhole into our future social structures?

Train stations, airports, rest stops, and shopping malls are the spatial structures that everyone knows and uses, but hardly anyone understands. Since 2008 Nikolaus Gansterer is mapping these high-tech passages with their duty-free shops, waiting areas, and precise security architecture forming nodal points in the global information network. His fleeting pencil sketches of surveillance camera systems are depicting the technical eyes of the omnipresent security architecture on airports. By drawing in front of the cameras the act of drawing is automatically recorded and becomes part of the closed circuit television.

Technique: pencil drawings in sketchbooks
Year: ongoing series since 2008

Exhibited in the framework of:

– 2010, Mapping the Terminal - Radical Cartography. A research project with Philippe Rekacewicz and students of the Institue for Transmedia Arts, University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria