Surveillance Prototypes: Rethinking transitory spaces to reveal truth telling information through surveillance gazes. Alexandria, Cairo – Egypt

The research focuses on manipulations and censorship of ‘truths’ around events in spaces that are caused by individuals or governments for their own interests. Particular focus is on HOW the ‘truths’ of these spaces, events and activities may be augmented or shunted by surveillance gazes, in turn reproducing untruthful representations of spaces. What are the methodologies that can be developed to unpack, map and expose the hidden phenomenon of these ‘truths’? How does surveillance of such spaces attribute to hyperreal versions of themselves? The project finds newly uncovered ways of truth seeing and truth building. This affords us the ability to understand contexts truthfully and enables us to act acting accordingly to those contexts.

Surveillance Prototypes is a new type of digital public space for 'holding truths' as an active participatory archive for Tahrir Square, Egypt. Information collected acts as a spectacle (making the invincible visible) in a climate of erasure and censoring. It is digital as a website and ‘real’ by drawing on multiple collected narratives of a physical public space.