Shopping Carts in Ravines

For me, one of the definite highlights of the trip to NYC was visiting The Village Petstore and Charcoal Grill, an animatronics-based non-graffiti exhibit by infamous street and guerilla artist Banksy, who also happens to be my favourite contemporary artist. (Although for the record, Tom Green did the hang-your-own-painting-in-a-big-gallery trick in Ottawa first!)

I found out about the exhibit (and that it was by Banksy, as it exists anonymously and is staffed by randoms) from Wooster Collective, whose RSS feed I really need to stay up on because I just missed them speaking in Toronto by a day. I’m really glad they were careful about spoilers and left out some of my favourite things, like the leopard. (The exhibit is closed now.)

Many people who lined up did so only because they were walking down the rather busy street it was on and saw a line of people waiting to get into what appeared to be a pet store with a leopard in the window. I heard a lot of “Uh, I think it’s an art thing?”
Some things you had to see online though, like the record of the view from the mother CCTV camera’s lens:

Unlike his first North American exhibit in LA where Banksy painted an elephant to match a magenta-and-gold wallpaper print, officially decreed illegally animal abuse, much of this exhibit had strong anti-animal-exploitation themes. Banksy not only said that this was a conscious flip, but that much of the money from the elephant exhibit went into funding this one.

A woman outside was handing out Go Veg For Thanksgiving pamphlets but I rejected them because I’m already vegan, I already have good Thanksgiving recipes, and our Thanksgiving had already passed anyway. I don’t think she was officially associated with the exhibit, just using the opportunity.

I was killing time and wanted to see if this Google trick to find open surveillance cameras worked on Flash-less Safari on the iPhone, and it did.

The feed refreshed at a faster rate than that, this was just the screenshots I could manually snag.

As of right now, the camera is still up (larger version). It’s weird that I don’t even know the country but I was able to watch someone feeding birds live over the internet.

Take that, 20th century!

Click through to these Google searches and try a few results.
Some may be offline.

control/userimage.html
inurl:indexframe.shtml
inurl:”MultiCameraFrame?Mode=”
inurl:”view/index.shtml”
inurl:”view/indexFrame.shtml”
inurl:view/view.shtml
inurl:/view/view.shtml?videos=
inurl:ViewerFrame?Mode=
inurl:ViewerFrame?Mode=Motion
inurl:ViewerFrame?Mode=Refresh
liveapplet

Jus’ somethin’ to keep in mind next time you notice a camera nearby.

Since hearing the details of environmental philanthropist Glen Davis’ murder, the idea had been flitting around my mind that it might have been an anti-environmentalist assassination. It seems sort of far-fetched, yet also at the same time doesn’t at all, when you think about how the anti-enviro people are actually quite happy consciously killing everyone and everything on the planet to fill their bank accounts.

Still, I’m not enough of a conspiracy theorist to follow that sort of thought train without a lot of evidence in that direction… but when the idea was brought up by a friend, and the murder scene address was contextualized as being a building containing the World Wildlife Fund’s offices, it certainly left me wondering…

Take a look at the surveillance footage of the suspect released by police.

The suspect “was hanging around the scene for at least half an hour before the crime, used a ramp to get into the garage that few would walk on and seemed generally ‘out of place’,” according to police. This guy doesn’t seem like a panicked thug screwing up a carjacking, he walks in and out quite casually - this really does reek of hired and planned assassination.

Don’t expect mass murderers to play fair, that’s all I can say…

Info at Analogik.

Well, I’d mentioned it before but only the other day did I manage to get a taste of the new TTC surveillance cameras myself. These photos are from a Yonge night bus.

Four per bus! I wasn’t expecting that.

They’re pretty spooky, though I can understand the reasons behind them. Once I spotted these, though, I became hyperaware of the fact that these little surveillance domes were actually everywhere I went… in stores, in elevators, in apartment building lobbies and hallways. If the Dundas Square ones go back up, that’s pretty much got everything covered. Very little of what a person does downtown would go unrecorded, although it is important to point out the difference between a centralized totalitarian (1984ish) regime monitoring a billion little cameras, and a bunch of independent private closed-circuit ones. Still, I’m left feeling a tad claustrophobic, like we’re losing space.

On a happier note, I found a wonderful little TTC prize while on the subway. I’ve already pointed out the TTC happy face stickers, which I continue to see regularly while riding the subway. This time, though, in addition to the stickers someone had also placed this little doll’s head:

(I included the train car number in case any trainspotters feel like going headhunting.)

I hadn’t been around Dundas Square for a while, so I’d just noticed these signs alerting people that the general public was under surveillance in the area, something which is clearly distinct from the way closed-circuit camera systems are generally used for private security. I snapped this photo, and then went and did something illegal out of the sight of the cameras.

I’ve been told by people who have seen first-hand the screens from which these are monitored that the cameras watching Dundas Square can cleanly zoom in from encompassing the whole of the Square to reading the name on someone’s necklace.

Later on, in fact on January 8th, I discovered via news reports that the cameras were going to be coming down. Mayor David Miller says it isn’t clear that there has been any benefit garnered from them, and it’s obviously a hot political potato to be holding. They did come down, however the Downtown Yonge Business Improvement Area (Why do these business-owner gangs always describe themselves as “improvement areas”? Using the phrase to directly describe a group of people really confuses me.) says their association will present a proposal to the city on February 1st to reinstall six cameras in the same area when new street lighting goes up later this year.

You may want to know that the TTC has just installed 100 high-resolution cameras on buses around the city. They aren’t monitored live, only used for footage in investigations. I have yet to see any, but according to that article, they ought to already be on the streets. I assume that buses with cameras will have to make it clear to riders that they are under surveillance, as taxis do.