For my project, I want to do a piece that deals with surveillance. In response to hostile neighbours, my family set up a security system around my house that has impacted the way in which I lived at home. After hearing of the new show, Ring Nation, that Amazon is making where they show footage from people’s Ring cameras, I was inspired to make a piece that explores the implications of consumer surveillance. I would usually never do a project like this. I feel like this topic is talked about enough in news media and in academia where we all sort of know how little control we have over our data, but after realising that Amazon has a right to use all of the footage and data made on their devices and make strong use of it, I thought it was worth exploring this topic. I have recently learned that in addition to the use of Ring footage in Ring Nation, Amazon is heavily compliant with law enforcement when they make requests for their footage. This is alarming as it further widens the security disparity between homeowners and non-homeowners, allowing communities to make a de facto surveillance network with just a few houses monitoring a community, without their consent or even knowledge. For a while I have been thinking about how a project like this would play out. My original idea for this piece was to have a film narrative follow one individual living in a house trying to escape the surveillance they experience at home. As they would run away from the consumer appliances around them, they would find that surveillance is inescapable where they live. They go on the run and as they shed various apps from their phone and start living more and more off the grid, they would find themself at a deadlock when they have to decide to leave their phone altogether, due to dependency on social interaction and the general usefulness of smartphones. The issue here would be finding the rights to film in various locations because I would want the scenes in the film to show the interconnectivity of these devices, particularly the Ring camera network. This would require a neighbourhood where I can have access to multiple homes, and I am not networked enough in Cheltenham to do this. I do have this networking at home in the Poconos, but we aren’t really suburban there. Houses are spread apart enough and hard enough to navigate by foot that it would not be suitable for a project like this.
Marceline Smith Blog #1
