How would you like to walk around with a camera implanted in the back of your head? You don’t have to, but it’s exactly what Wafaa Bilal, an assistant professor of photography at New York University, is doing. In a few weeks, Bilal will undergo surgery to install a camera in his head, which will then take pictures at one minute intervals. The images will be streamed to a computer database and then appear in different sequences, some in real time, on monitors in an exhibition space at the Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha between December and May. The work is called “The 3rd I” and the idea behind it is to “comment on the inaccessibility of time, and the inability to capture memory and experience.”
Professor Bilal
I think this is a really interesting project. Sites like Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, and Youtube make it easy to share personal information, photos, and videos instantly. An exhibit like this can really shed light on society’s obsession with constantly being connected to technology, where the boundaries of privacy are almost nonexistent.
As I first started reading this post, I was very disturbed by both the idea of having a camera installed in the back of one’s head, and also by the idea of the project. I thought to myself, “How could this overstepping the boundaries of privacy be considered OK?” However as I reached the end of the post, my eyes were unveiled. Katherine is right–people everywhere seem to have no problem sharing their entire lives with the world through internet sites. What makes this any worse?
The “Truman Show” concept is interesting, but why does the camera have to be surgically implanted? Perhaps it is just a manifestation of the “too much information” age in which we live.