Bugs Scaled for Today's Era of Self-Surveillance

In old spy movies, "bugs," surreptitious listening devices, are small.

Even in that terrifically creepy television series with great production values from last year, "Rubicon," the bugs were minute. The good guys had to unscrew light fixtures and squint to try to find them. Even when they found a bug, they knew there must be others around they couldn't see. If they really needed to talk, they shut up, closed the blinds and scribbled notes with quiet pencils.

But Rubicon was an outlier of the normative contemporary condition. Today, surveillance is self-serve. We carry bugs, a/k/a smart phones, in our pockets and we're nervous when we can't place them near to hand. Cameras aren't really hidden, though they may be designed to be light and efficient. The tracking apparatus of our times are out in the open.

The sculpture pictured above is called "Space Observer" and it is by Bjoern Schuelke. It sits in the new San Jose airport terminal.

In the aperture at one end of the chassis resting atop the Calder-like legs is a monitor which displays what different cameras mounted on the sculpture are picking up around the room. According to a news article quoted on the artist's website, the sculpture "can see and track you as you walk around it."

This sculpture is right for the times, a bug at the right scale.

Mind you, I don't like the new airport terminal at all. It's the kind of architecture suitable for the information worker when she is not traveling: good for office work, for conferences, for art events. But an airport should be fantastic and the old terminal - small, cramped, inefficient, like a 1960s conception of the future - fit that purpose better.