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How about Video Sniffing?

p2pnet did a post on this four years ago, quoting Kevin Poulsen, and it’s now an art form picked up by the mainstream.

“Video sniffing encourages people low on resources, but high on imagination, to create their own media,” says Sean Dodson in the Guardian, describing a day this month when he and eight others were in Cambridge, England, “armed with a handheld video receiver, a small portable screen and a short antenna”.

The group comprised film-makers, activists, “and a couple of curious hangers-on, all about to engage in in film-making’s latest form of subversion”.

Their mission (and they did decide to accept it)?

To capture live feeds from the network of CCTV cameras, “that stand sentry over so many shops and street corners in Britain”.

The handheld allowed them to grab wireless transmissions, “and view them on the screen without the owner’s knowledge or consent”.

The story goes on >>>

The first thing you realise is just how many CCTV cameras are out there. Even in this grotty bit of Cambridge, there are dozens. The second thing is that once you’ve scanned the video, you can just as easily record it, and then use those recorded images to make your own movies.

A group of homeless teenagers in Southend-on-Sea did just that. With the help of the art collective Mongrel, they made a short film using images they had taken from the very cameras that had been installed to spy on them.

After a day on their bikes mapping the network of nearby cameras, they acted out a short script right there in the street, and then “borrowed” the images from CCTV.

The Guardian cites Dave Valentine, the group’s leader, “whose film The Duellists (futuresonic.com/08/theduellists.html) was shot entirely on surveillance cameras in a Manchester shopping centre.”

The Guardian link is a re-direct, but there’s a short version of the video on YouTube (also see the end of this)

The concept is really clever. It’s exactly as Dodson describes it —- a subversive filming technique for people low on resources, but high on imagination.

“MediaShed were invited to the Manchester Arndale Shopping Centre by Futuresonic to make a film combining free-media with free-running,” says newbrainframes.org, going on >>>

Parkour, or freerunning, involves fluid, uninterrupted movement, adapting motion to obstacles in the environment. MediaShed created the film overnight in the Arndale shopping centre, filmed using only the in-house CCTV system, and it was then shown on the screens inside the shopping centre from 10-20 May 2007.

But you’ll see more of this, “clandestine form of film-making in the coming months,” promises the Guardian, adding:

“Channel 4 has just screened four in its Three Minute Wonder slot, and there is a whole festival of films shot on CCTV in Aberdeen next week”

The strangest of them is the feature length Faceless (right, ambienttv.net/content/faceless).

“In a society under the reformed ‘Real-Time’ Calendar, without history nor future, everybody is faceless,” says the synopsis.

“A woman panics when she wakes up one day with a face. With the help of the Spectral Children she slowly finds out more about the lost power and history of the human face and begins the search for its future.”

. .Stumble It!

quoting Kevin Poulsen - January 30, 2004
Guardian - The secret art of video sniffing, April 25, 2008

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Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details. Download here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 at 1:25 pm and is filed under Cool Stuff, Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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