The Camera at the End of the Block: What a 2002 Book Tells Us About Flock Cameras

August 23, 2026

A roadside Flock camera looks like a distinctly current controversy. But CTRL [SPACE], a 2002 book about surveillance art, shows that the systems behind it have a much longer history, from the Panopticon and JenniCam to intelligent cameras and searchable streets.

Museum Interaction Design

Thesis

What I'm Thinking About

Parsons MFAD+T Projects

Fresh Posts

DATALAND did not appear from nowhere. In 2016, Gray Area and Google presented what has been described as the first exhibition of generative AI art. That same year, Meow Wolf opened a world audiences could physically enter. Later, through Gray Area’s Experiential Space Research Lab, I explored how immersive environments could do more than entertain. They could encourage agency, critical thinking, and new relationships between people, technology, and living systems. Now Refik Anadol’s DATALAND brings those histories together through AI, environmental data, biosensing, and responsive space. The biggest shift is not simply that AI has entered the museum. The museum itself is becoming a living system. I wrote about the longer history behind this Reel, what excites me about DATALAND, and the ethical questions a responsive museum must confront. Read the full story through the link in my bio. #DATALAND #RefikAnadol #AIArt #ImmersiveArt #DigitalArt #MuseumFuture

A lot of the AI conversation right now is about what machines can create. This story is about what they might help us recover. Researchers at Santa Clara University have developed an AI Provenance Assistant to help researchers trace artworks stolen during the Nazi era—searching across fragmented historical records and surfacing connections that might otherwise take enormous amounts of time to find. The AI doesn’t decide who owns a work. Humans still have to verify the evidence. But it can help researchers find the evidence. To me, this is a much more interesting vision of AI: not replacing human expertise, but giving people new ways to navigate enormous amounts of human knowledge. And sometimes, helping recover a history someone tried to erase. Read the full NPR story at the 🔗 link in my bio. #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #ArtHistory #DigitalHumanities #CulturalHeritage