Interception is a performance of pure ‘urban hacktivism’, held in Poland by Roch Forowicz, an artist from Warsaw very focused on the experimentations involving video technologies with respect to surveillance and violation of privacy. In this last project Forowicz pushes his boundaries by physically removing a camera used for video surveillance and reinstalling it in an underground station in order to project the output on a wall. In this way his idea is to publicly show to the trespassers their own pictures tracked by a movement tracking software . Surely an extreme concept, this one of Forowicz, of stealing a device and use it illegally and publicly, and provide online unfiltered documentation. Even if it could appear like a sort of sensationalism, those kind of actions can play an important part on people’s imagery. By getting directly involved into the ‘urban warfare’ the artist has the chance to modify the street furniture and change or invert its functionalities, even if for few hours, creating a strong communicative impact in the people who come across the event. This chance represents the very significant social part of Forowicz’s project, it is on this ground that the dichotomies within the rules of society become more evident. It is here where the ‘legality’ of the surveillance imposed by the establishment clashes with the ‘illegality’ of the creative citizens claiming back their private lives.
Tony Canonico