1.7 million minutes
Helmut Grabner, a professor of visual intelligence, and Kurt Caviezel, a photographic artist, collect images from CCTV cameras and arrange them. Their aim is two-fold: to stimulate people’s brains and to generate new knowledge.
Every dot is a photo, every line one day: There’s a huge amount of information in these 1.7 million images. | Image: Helmut Grabner und Kurt Caviezel
No, this isn’t a work of abstract art, but the view actually recorded by a CCTV camera. For more than three years, minute by minute, it recorded the same mundane entrance to a gated housing community just outside New York, and uploaded the footage to a server. Helmut Grabner, a professor of visual intelligence at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW), and Kurt Caviezel, a photographic artist from Zurich, downloaded the footage and arranged it for an art project, reducing it to one line per 24 hours. This made the cycle of days and nights, summers and winters, immediately apparent. When the clocks change, the lines appear to jump. “I initially thought it must be a mistake”, says Grabner.
But this long-term visualisation reveals even more. When the camera or the server briefly stopped functioning, you can see a clearly defined grey line; when there was snow on the ground, the night-time images suddenly turn light blue; and when the sun casts a shadow, the day assumes a blue tinge. A single red dot can indicate a car in front of the camera. On the project website, you can zoom in, right down to individual images. Grabner used algorithms to analyse the flood of photos. Among the 1.7 million of them on view, for example, you can spot a deer that appeared in the driveway one night. And even specific people in front of the camera. “It’s weird. You can actually recognise who’s there, and when”. This is why Grabner blurred their faces.
Grabner and Caviezel also use their method to pick out the most interesting CCTV footage currently being made across the world, from a butcher’s in Bulgaria to a mountaintop in Germany to an underground car park in Vietnam. “We want to give people a wake-up call and show them what’s freely accessible on the Internet”, says Grabner. The images in question are also useful from a scientific perspective: “They depict real life in all its grubbiness. There’s nothing staged, there’s no perfect lighting, no golden section or anything”, says Grabner. This makes these photos ideal for his scientific work, which involves developing and testing algorithms for automatic image analysis.
