Sightseeing

Live CCTV camera + sound recording (mp3, 9’, loop), 2018-2022 (French title: Penser voir)
Watch the artwork with the live camera: www.acousticcameras.org/playlist/thierry-fournier

A CCTV camera films a beach. We hear her voice, as if she were alive. The level of perfection of her intelligence would have led her to doubt and not know what to do. She thinks out loud and shares her questions: What is it? What should she look at? How to recognize a landscape? What is suspicious behavior? But above all, what’s the use of all that? She does not understand anything. As if she were in burn-out, she compares herself to the underpaid click workers who feed the artificial intelligences, questioning the meaning of her work with an anthropomorphism that raises the political stakes of these devices.

Penser voir was created by Thierry Fournier in 2018 at the invitation of Acoustic Cameras, an online project that invites composers and sound artists to annex the real-time flow of webcams located in various places around the world.