ABOUT

Summary:
"WATCHING THE WORLD – The Encyclopedia Of The Now" is an art and photography project, an online exhibition, an AI and big data experiment, an OSINT and an online project - and relies exclusively on open data sources. It records the world in real time around the clock and across the entire globe using publicly accessible network cameras. The captured images are presented simultaneously on a website and can be experienced in different modes. With the help of artificial intelligence, a new form of seeing is created - a new kind of photography.

Watching The World can be understood as a gigantic digital camera that allows the viewer to curate and individually use the simultaneous views of the world. The incessant stream of images can be structured and organized in real time according to various content-related or formal criteria - a dynamic, visual experience. The network cameras look at both the public and the private. The fact that different cultures attach different importance to the value of privacy is just one aspect of this. What can be seen in the images determines the world and is simultaneously in the eye of the beholder. This can be provocative.


The world is being photographed now, this very moment.
Network cameras - whether web, surveillance, security, IP cams or others - are constantly capturing what is happening and feeding their images live into the network. The web itself is becoming a camera, a gigantic camera through which the world is constantly being photographed - perhaps entirely in line with the established practices of self-observation for the purposes of self-optimization.

But network cameras are more than just the eyes of the internet - they are an extension of our own perception, body extensions. Through them, we not only look into the web, but through the web - back at the real world and ultimately at ourselves.

And this camera can - on the one hand - be used to take photographs if we make it our own. Because if you understand the web as a separate and personal camera system, the net cameras take over the actual task of the lenses. The screen becomes the viewfinder and the mouse becomes the shutter release.

On the other hand, this gigantic image machine photographs live and simultaneously around the globe. The images appear somewhere on the web - automatically photographed, without the scrutinizing eye of an author.

If the technology is allowed to work independently, an algorithm presses the button. But does it replace the photographer, the creative author? Does it claim image rights? Does it bear responsibility for the content? Or does this lie with the operators of the cameras - or even with the technicians who installed them and thus determined the image section? This creates a new and piquant mode of authorship.

Today, the world is photographically available at any time. The theorem of the “decisive moment”, which is central to classical photographic history and is always tied to a specific location, is thus expanded and reduced to absurdity: When a gigantic camera incessantly captures everything, this one moment loses its uniqueness. Instead, it expands across the entire globe - a moment that takes place everywhere and at the same time. If you photograph thousands of these moments simultaneously and make them immediately visible online, you create an encyclopaedia of the now. Or in other words: you can see everything - and from here it's not far to a metaphor for God.

Watching The World also pursues the goal of not only making this spatially expanded global moment visible, but also consciously manifesting it - as a living, constantly changing and renewing map of the world, so to speak. Although the issue of surveillance plays a role in this and is undoubtedly an important aspect, at its core it is about much more: it is about observing the world in its complexity, grasping its structures and movements and gaining new insights from these incessant streams of impressions and information. Ultimately, this type of observation opens up the possibility of not only seeing, but also understanding and formulating new knowledge.

Kurt Caviezel and the ZHAW, Zurich University of Applied Science, have jointly developed and programmed a “Big Cam” that makes exactly this possible. This camera is publicly accessible and can be used in its own unique way.


BIG CAM
Our system captures thousands of network cameras - and new ones are added every day. More than one million images are downloaded from the network every day by algorithms, analyzed and evaluated by artificial intelligence (AI). They remain in our memories for 48 hours before they are overwritten by subsequent recordings.

TEXT SEARCH
As a user, you can explore the world in real time - either using predefined categories or an individual text search. Clicking on the “AIRPORT” category, for example, shows the latest live images from airports around the world. If you enter “RED CAR” in the text search field, Watching The World filters all current images for red cars. Clicking on an image opens the archive of the respective camera, which includes all images captured and saved in the last 48 hours - a visual journey through the recent past.

PATTERN
The cam archives appear as dense, seamless image clusters in the browser. With no gaps between the individual images, they develop a fascinating dynamic of their own: strange patterns, clouds of images, orgies of color, ornamental architecture, etc. emerge. Before our eyes, the individual images begin to flow into one another, they change their structure, alter their semantics, unfold a life of their own - a matrix of the present. With each new call, the cluster appears in a different form, while the current live images are inserted and constantly transform the overall picture.

BIG DATA
From the individual image to the overall picture: Watching The World opens up the possibility of gaining new knowledge about the world. On the one hand, by examining and analyzing individual images. On the other hand, by focusing not only on the individual image, but also on the larger, comprehensive overall picture. This change of perspective is achieved by systematically analyzing and interpreting the data streams and camera metadata. The underlying infrastructure and the practical applications of these cameras are also examined. Pattern recognition techniques are also used to identify and decipher hidden correlations and trends.


For example, the analysis serves to examine the following questions:

• In which locations cameras are placed - and in which they are not.

• Which camera types are used in certain areas and the reasons behind them.

• Which content is shown in which locations - and which is deliberately not shown.

• In which locations and regions new cameras are integrated into the network - and in which they are deactivated.

• Which patterns and connections are recognizable in large image conglomerates.

Watching The World can therefore also serve as a precise trend barometer that shows changes and developments in the world, and at the same time acts as a seismograph for the current state and mood of the world.

BIG PICTURE
If you select the “BIG DATA” section on the Watching The World landing page, an eminent overview of all the images that our system downloaded from the Internet the previous day opens up. Over one million images are summarized in a “Big Picture”. This in turn can be arranged and displayed in different color modes, by time or even randomly. And above all: you can zoom into this big picture and embark on a journey through the world of the previous day.

From this daily changing pool of images, a further option for use has been developed: Visitors can upload their own images to our servers and have them converted into photo mosaics. The uploaded image is reproduced and displayed by placing thousands of net camera images in mosaic form to create the corresponding whole. These mosaic images can then be downloaded and saved by users.

PRESENTATION
How are all these images and data presented, apart from on the website?

In exhibitions and installations, there are various presentation options - from prints and wallpapers to videos and the presentation of comprehensive visual data on screens, video walls, as projections or through the use of VR headsets. The variety of presentation forms makes it possible to show the images and data in a wide range of contexts and experience levels. These continuously generated image streams can thus be made visible in an exciting way. Our servers are used to combine and arrange the live images in different modes and transmit them in real time via the web. This brings them directly into the exhibition spaces - as a Netflix of the real, so to speak. Hundreds of thousands of images can be presented simultaneously in various forms. One possible scenario: the seamless display of an entire room - from the walls to the floor and ceiling. An immersive all-over concept, a hyperspace experience.

In live online mode, each new image that is added changes the overall structure, creating a new composition in a constant flow.

MAGIC
From a technical point of view, live images are nothing more than data. And data - and not only computer science teaches us this - always refers to further data. At the same time, we know - and not only from philosophy - that nothing exists in technology that was not previously created in the field of magic (Magical literature, science fiction etc.). Data itself carries no meaning. It only becomes information through the intentions and perspectives of the viewer. One and the same data set - a street scene, for example - can provide very different insights: into the volume of traffic, the weather, forensic analyses, the fashion of passers-by or the effect of cameras in public spaces. Interpretation shapes reality.

WATCHING THE WORLD is…
• a constantly changing online exhibition	• a television station
• an AI experimental field	• a streaming service
• a research tool for sociological, ecological, political, philosophical, legal, artistic and all conceivable aspects of photographic practice	• a surveillance tool
• the largest camera in the world	• a cabinet of curiosities
• a pattern generator	• a floodgate of images
• a big and open data project	• a news portal
• a reportage	• a data collector
• an authenticity monster	• an OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) tool
• an encyclopedia of the now ... and much more.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)
Watching The World shows live photographs taken anywhere in the world by network cameras, completely autonomously and automatically, without the intervention of an inspecting eye, and immediately visible on the network. These cameras combined in our system have no access protection, they are publicly available. In this way, a radical and new form of documentary photography is created that shows the world as it is. It stands for an immediate, documentary quality that promises to capture a real moment - shaped by time, place and context.

When we talk about AI and photography today, we may think first and foremost of the growing list of AI image generators. These algorithms are undoubtedly fascinating, impressive and challenging at the same time. Accordingly, their implications are being discussed with great intensity in photographic discourses up and down the country. While the AI image generators create artificial worlds, Watching The World goes in exactly the opposite direction. It uses artificial intelligence in a completely different way, for example to analyze images or textsearch. In contrast to synthetic images, which are deliberately designed, the principle of authenticity is retained here. No artificial world is created here, instead it is about drastic reality. The authenticity shown is often astonishing, sometimes disturbing, sometimes oppressively monstrous.

We are confronted with scenes that we have never seen before.

Watching The World makes this principle of authenticity visible in a radical and almost apodictic way and can be interpreted and positioned as a counter-model to the artificially generated, synthetic image production processes.

ALGORITHMS
Specific algorithms have been and are being developed and trained for Watching the World. Time and again, this results in findings that are relevant from both an artistic and an engineering perspective. One example: in order to develop algorithms for image analysis, large data sets are required, which can be used conveniently via online photo communities - a conventional approach. They are trained step by step on these image archives, for example in object recognition. After several training cycles and fine adjustments, they deliver precise results. After this phase, the optimized algorithms were applied to our images from network cameras for the first time - and failed completely. Nothing worked as expected.

Why?

Here we need to ask about the nature of photography and what exactly the difference is between photography with classic authorship and authorless photography that pays homage to chance. The vast majority of photographers follow certain rules - consciously or unconsciously - in the composition of their pictures, for example. Modern cameras, packed with algorithms for “better” pictures, almost force you to take these “better” pictures. This type of photography is reflected in the images of the photo communities and then again in the algorithms that search these mountains of images for patterns. A bias.

The images from Watching the World, on the other hand, do not abide by any rules. They take pictures for all they're worth, even if the network cameras are snowed in or freeze, birds build their nests on them, the lenses shatter, weather and get dirty, or the cams end up in fridges or waste bins. Even the fittest and most powerful super algorithm can't keep up. The exuberant variance, the unthinkable image inventions, the radical unpredictability in the images from network cameras have no equivalent in classic auteur photography. Certain images can only be taken with these autonomous cameras. Algorithms for network camera images can only be trained with this very data. Or in other words - and to use an old bon mot: the real is stronger than the imagined.

Watching the World reveals this new kind of photography - and a new way of seeing.


Add your cam:
If you would like to participate, please send us the link to your netcam.


Contact:
Kurt Caviezel, info@kurtcaviezel.ch
ZHAW, Zurich University of Applied Sciences
Project-team: Fitim Abdullahu, Helmut Grabner

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