A Day In The Life – 2024-09

Commentary Transcript

From The Artist: I apologise in advance for the choppiness of my ‘directors commentary’. I was fighting a cold which made speaking for long periods difficult without having a coughing fit.

Overall, my video is a day in the life of a student from the technology POV, and it’s a creative response aiming to explore surveillance in both the physical aspect as well as the digital footprint and the algorithm tracking you.

At the start of trimester, we looked at like[sic] the digital hacks at home, which is funny because I already bought these little curtain robots right before week one. So, you’ll see in the opening sequence of the video, you see both the curtain robots and the ad which enticed me to buy them. I want to think this sets the preface for the whole video itself, with all the apps showing the technology and then the digital ad just popping up next to it.

The Nespresso Coffee Machine sequence was really fun because I found out the other day that Nespresso bases my repeat order off how many cups are consumed per day, not by time. That’s the little thing that’s based on that little green screen part that I’ve superimposed over the machine itself. This sequence, this shot itself, I would say is the most technically challenging shot for me to get, as the reflective surface of the side of the coffee machine — you could just see the wire dish rack to the side, and I was like, “hey, this isn’t going to work.” You can’t see any of the words that I’m trying to project onto it. As I was doing the dishes one day, I realized this chopping board is really clean, and it cuts out the dish rack, so I was like, “Hey, I’m just going to smack it to the side,” and bang, here’s the shot.

The Student Central CCTV shot is the only non-advertising piece that I had come up, but I wanted to showcase the Madrid holograms in a similar light to the student Free Palestine movement on campus. I found it in a really similar way—in Madrid, in Spain, they were unable to hold protests on political grounds, so they set up all these holograms. I’m not advocating for students to set holograms up on campus, but given the fact that we’re unable to hold protests and rallies, I’m fascinated to see how creative people need to be in the circumstances, but also how similar these situations between Spain and campus are as two separate microcultures.

I think it was in week three or week four where we explored the idea of hiding from surveillance. I went with a really simplistic idea to start with: what if I just use somebody else’s access card to get into the room? Like[sic] the university is like, “Hey, we’re going to see if you have the correct access and facilities to get in,” and I’m like, “Hey, I use somebody else’s card – you’ll never even know that I’m on campus.” You can really see that this set up the idea of that door sequence. If you end up reading that computer code along the side, you actually see all my student details there, and that really brings up the technologies used to track people as they go – not just the cameras seeing where you are, but the cookies tracking you on your computer.

That brought me to finding this TED Talk, The Shift We Need to Stop Mass Surveillance by Albert Fox Cahn, an American lawyer, technologist, and anti-surveillance activist. I chose this talk as it really embodies what we’ve been researching in the unit, from digital tracking to giving out our freedoms. This then further challenges who regulates the regulators. If these big organizations are going to be scrupulously tracking us and getting all our information, who’s tracking them? Who’s keeping them in line?

The closing sequence comes back to the digital footprint and the tracking, and reiterates and repeats all the ads which have been previously shown in the video. This was a really silly inspiration, I was just doomscrolling one night on TikTok, and almost every single video that came up was by a creator I already followed and that was on my For You page.

The final piece is very different from the initial idea I envisioned. I wanted to do something a little bit more documentary, and I like to think of myself as practicing in a photojournalistic sort of way, and that’s in line with what I’ve been doing for the last few years. But Aaron suggested trying to go in a different direction, so that’s where I got the whole technology POV bit. In a little bit of a nod to that final traditional A Day in the Life documentary style, and a little silly nod to week one, I wanted to include the little cathode-ray “bzzt” closing out as a way of imagining a robot going to sleep, or like a person living in a simulation.