This Guy Peers Through People’s Open Webcams to Create Art

• AUTHOR: LAURA MALLONEE.LAURA MALLONEE
• 

SWISS PHOTOGRAPHER KURT CAVIEZEL has spent the past 16 years taking more than 4 million photographs on each of the world’s seven continents. He’s done this from the comfort of his home in Zurich, “traveling” the world through open webcams and IP cameras.

His series Wallpaper offers a curated glimpse through the 50,000 or so cameras he’s bookmarked over the years. These cameras, each of which Caviezel insists he accesses legally, provide a view into everything from public squares to private bedrooms. “The world wide web is my camera,” he says.

Creepy, yes, but oddly compelling in the themes and patterns it reveals. Wallpaper compiles hundreds of similar images into grids. “Users” is a composite of people making the same motion—sipping coffee, exhaling smoke, that sort of thing. “Red Car” features more than 600 traffic camera images of, duh, red cars. Others are more straightforward: a girl donning Halloween makeup in “Zombie” and a man tying one on in “Drunk.”

Caviezel’s fascination with webcams started in 2000. He’d just published Red Light, a collection of portraits of motorists stopped at the light outside his apartment. He wanted to replicate that project in another city, and someone suggested he do it using traffic cams. That didn’t pan out, but his research led him to webcams.

Peering through an open webcam, or anything else connected to the internet, is not terribly hard. Caviezel finds them through Google searches, public netcam collections like Skyline, and webcam communities like Camchat. When something piques his interest, he’ll categorize it, and save it. The way he sees it, his computer is the camera: the screen is a viewfinder, the mouse a shutter, the webcam a lens. “I’m not looking on the web, I’m looking through the web,” he says.

He started Wallpaper about a year ago. Each image begins with a compilation of as many as 1,000 shots, each formatted as a high-res printable file and laid out in a grid. It looks like an abstract tableau from afar, but closer inspection reveals intimate vignettes.

In “Couple,” a man and woman sit on a floral couch eating their meals. Kaviezel spent more than a year observing their relationship, concluding they were “very familiar … and well attuned” to each other’s needs. Yet Caviezel insists he is not a voyeur. He has no idea who any of the people in the series are, and doesn’t seek their permission. He says they’re all logged on to a webcam community and presumably know that means someone might be watching. In that way,Wallpaper is deeply unsettling yet utterly fascinating.

Some of Caviezel’s images appear in Public, Private, Secretat the International Center of Photography from June 23 through January 8.

http://www.wired.com/2016/05/kurt-caviezel-wallpaper/