Interception II

Interception II as well as Interception, both are performances of pure “urban hacktivism”, held in Poland by Roch Forowicz, an artist from Warsaw focused predominantly on experimentations involving video technologies and dealing with surveillance and violation of privacy. In his latest project, Forowicz pushes his boundaries by physically removing a camera used for video surveillance and reinstalling it in an underground station in order to project the output on a wall. In this way his idea is to publicly show to the trespassers their own images tracked by movement tracking software. Surely an extreme concept – stealing a device to use it illegally and publicly, and providing unfiltered documentation of the event online. Even though it might seem sensationalist, such actions can play an important part in defining people’s imagery. By getting directly involved with “urban warfare”, the artist has the chance to modify the street furniture and change or invert its functionalities, even if just for a couple of hours, thus creating a strong communicative impact in the people who come across the event. This chance represents the very significant social part of Forowicz’s project – it is on this ground that the dichotomies within the rules of society become more evident. It is here where the “legality” of surveillance imposed by the establishment clashes with the “illegality” of creative citizens claiming back their private lives.

Interception II is just a new, different way to hack urban surveillance and distributing information on areas where all our privacy is violated illegaly but justifyed by security means.