Sousveillance - Aarhus, 8-9 February 2009

Sousveillance, original French, as well as inverse surveillance are terms coined by Steve Mann (Toronto, Canada) to describe the recording of an activity from the perspective of a participant. "Surveillance" denotes the act of watching from above, whereas "sousveillance" denotes bringing the practice of observation down to human level (ordinary people doing the watching, rather than higher authorities or architectures doing the watching).

If you are in Aarhus Denmark around or on Feb 8-9 and do not know what to do, Sousveillance, the art of inverse surveillance conference is an event not to be missed. From the web site:

Moving away from cameras and directional microphones, face and voice recognition, the pervasive technologies offer not only the ability to gather and organize huge amounts of dissimilar data, but as well on grounds of these to predict probable patterns of behavior. Commercial mobile variants of Google Maps, YouTube or Facebook are by far the only ones to make use of these possibilities. Urban games, locative art, flashmob art, pervasive games etc. all represent new forms of observational and aesthetic experiments with how we through technology perceive and make use of the urban space itself.

The conference will be held in conjunction with two digital art exhibitions in the city of Aarhus (one at ARoS and another at Skive Art Museum) and aims to create a platform for sharing and discussing the topic of surveillance, privacy and control of information, analyzing different creative, artistic and political strategies to produce fluid zones of interventions, both in the urban space and on the net.

Learn to create your own minority report as Philip K. Dick would say.