Filmmaker Turns His Eye on Surveillance Culture

A Canadian filmmaker is combining his love of science fiction with his alarm over the ramped-up surveillance in his native Toronto by putting a specially fitted Web cam into his prosthetic eye — he lost his own in a childhood accident — and filming everything he sees.

Check out Rob Spence’s “Eyeborg Project” site here.

The Vancouver Sun:

With the help of an ocularist and an engineering professor (Steve Mann, so dedicated to pushing the edges of gadgetry he has earned the nickname “cyberman”), Mr. Spence has targeted February to have a stage-one prototype complete.

While the working model will be able to record video, it won’t be able to broadcast live and will likely be out of focus. Hopefully, this will be enough to apply for funding to proceed.

In the end, Mr. Spence’s intention is to use the footage recorded from his bionic eye to become a “media virus,” imagining himself as a mixture of George Orwell and the Bionic Man.

“There is so much surveillance going on. It is getting a little scary in Ontario. There are 11,000 new cameras going into Toronto, for example. And it’s funny because you tell people that and it’s like, ‘Yeah, uh huh, what’s for lunch today?’ It doesn’t land,” he said.

“It’s not that I even necessarily disagree with security cameras. It’s just where is the oversight? Who has control of this stuff ?”

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