When Art, Apple and the Secret Service Collide: ‘People Staring at Computers’
This is a rather lengthy story, but it touches on many different topics – art, privacy, Apple, law, government, and more. And even though it is long, it is very well written and is absolutely worth the time.
Later that year I worked with interactive artist Theo Watson on an extension of “Important Things,” called “Happy Things,” which took a screenshot every time you smiled, and uploaded it to the web. We got pictures from all around the world, with people smiling at everything, from cat memes to the Wikipedia article for Nicholas Cage.
Sometimes this kind of work is associated with “human-computer interaction,” but this term makes it sound like we’re interacting with computers, when in fact, most of the time, we’re interacting with each other. I like to think of it as “computer-mediated interaction.”
In mid-May, 2011, I took a timelapse using my laptop’s webcam to get a feeling for how I looked at the computer. After a few days of recording, I watched the video.
I was completely stunned.
There was no expression on my face. Even though I spend most of my day talking to and collaborating with other people online, from my face you can see no trace of this.