Body Tracking Artwork

A camera on a motorized gimbal, installed in a gallery. It watches you. Not like a security camera — those are passive, indifferent, forgettable. This one tracks you. It turns to follow you as you walk. It notices when you stop. It reacts when you approach.

The system uses real-time pose detection to identify and track visitors, driving a pan/tilt gimbal with servo motors. The tracking isn't just mechanical — an expression engine layers behavioral presets (curious, startled, watchful, bored) onto the motion, making the camera feel alive rather than robotic.

The result is uncanny. Gallery visitors report feeling seen, considered, followed — the exact sensation that ubiquitous surveillance produces but that we've trained ourselves to ignore.

There are an estimated 770 million surveillance cameras worldwide. In London, the average person is captured on camera 300 times per day. In New York, the NYPD operates a network of over 15,000 cameras with facial recognition capabilities.

We've normalized being watched. This piece de-normalizes it — by making the watching visible, personal, and impossible to ignore.

The project raises questions it doesn't answer: What does it mean to be surveilled? When does observation become intrusion? Can building the machinery of surveillance help us understand its emotional toll?