Did you ever feel you were being watched?

With surveillance technology so quietly pervasive, Electroland looks to pull back the curtain in its public art.

By Hugh Hart
Special to The Times

August 6, 2006

RED carpets get unrolled nearly every night of the week in Los Angeles, but they don't usually inspire guests to hopscotch their way toward the cocktails and hors d'oeuvres. But that's exactly what transpired recently at an apartment building in downtown's South Park neighborhood. There partygoers stepped onto a digital carpet of entryway tiles embedded with sensors that sent red LED lights pulsing underfoot as they crossed to the event in the courtyard.

Across the street, carpet creators Cameron McNall and Damon Seeley watched a super-sized version of their "EnterActive" floor show flicker across an eight-story grid of LED panels melded onto the building's facade. When completed, a pole-mounted video camera facing the building will transmit images to a plasma screen in the lobby, so visitors inside can see the effect their footwork is having outside.

"The whole thing is like a big nervous system that's able to sense where people are, and that drives the experience for people on the carpet and in the surrounding urban environment," Seeley says.

McNall, who a few minutes earlier could be seen in front of the building jumping from square to square trying to locate the secret "Easter egg" tile programmed to trigger cascading waves of lights, adds, "We find that spectacle is fun, so we try to make work that's accessible to everybody."

McNally and Seeley, the buttoned-up, low-key principals in the two-person L.A. design firm Electroland, are local practitioners of the art of surveillance. Their project, at the Met Lofts apartment building at 11th and Flower streets, is but one of many examples of artists and designers using tracking technology to create whimsical, disturbing or otherwise aesthetically engaging experiences in public spaces.

Ellen Lupton, curator of the National Design Triennial, "Design Life Now," which opens at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York on Dec. 8, credits the New York architectural firm Diller & Scofidio, now Diller Scofidio + Renfro, with setting the pace for surveillance-themed media works in the early 1990s. "For probably 15 years, way before 9/11, they were doing a lot of work dealing with surveillance that used cameras and video and airport security X-ray machines," she says. "They were key in bringing this discourse to the design arena."

Lupton, who selected Electroland to contribute an interactive staircase installation for the triennial, says that by combining architecture, attention to environment and new technologies, Electroland is letting people know "that the building has eyes, so to speak."

McNall and Seeley were hired by the developers of Met Lofts four years ago to transform the narrow slice of space in front of the building into an interactive playground. The $380,000 installation was created under the Community Redevelopment Agency's "percent for art" program, which requires projects that receive certain aid from the agency (tax breaks, land or other financial assistance) to set aside 1% of construction costs for art.

The Flower Street installation is just Electroland's latest experiment in interactive mind games.

Before co-founding Electroland in 2002, McNall, who has a master's degree in architecture from Harvard University Graduate School of Design, had worked on navigable 3-D space for a CD-ROM company. In 1991, he became an adjunct professor in UCLA's department of design and media arts, where he met Seeley, who was working on his bachelor's degree in design. Pre-Electroland, Seeley worked with UCLA professor and media artist Rebecca Allen's "Emergence Virtual World" and "Coexistence" projects, which explored boundaries between physical and virtual realities.

For their first collaboration, in 2001, McNall and Seeley devised "RGB," a temporary installation at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) that enabled cellphone users to call a designated number and, using the keypad, activate red, green and blue lights stretched along the exterior windows of a campus building.

By subverting utilitarian technologies for aesthetic ends, "RGB" exemplified what has become an Electroland theme. "We're all so affected by this pervasive invisible electronic network — e-mail, Blackberries and so on," says McNall. "In our work we explore fun ways to make these things visible and look at how this pervasiveness can change people's relationships to buildings and spaces, or to each other."

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Keeping an eye on things

ANOTHER project, a recently completed breezeway atop Rockefeller Center in New York, electronically "tags" visitors and individually tracks them via LED panels in the ceiling. More surveillance-themed projects are in the pipeline. In about 18 months, an electronic vitrine on the facade of JH Snyder Co.'s NoHo Commons, a residential-retail complex being built in North Hollywood, will display "wipes" of alpha-numeric messages in response to passing cars. And an Indianapolis airport pedway, scheduled for completion in 2008, is designed to literally connect the dots between travelers, who are "assigned" overhead discs of light as they travel to and from the parking lot.

Julie Silliman, director of civic art for the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, says a small subset of artists within public art are using interactive electronics. Among the notables are face-recognition video artist Steve Appleton and UCLA-based Christian Moeller, known for his ambitious commissions in Frankfurt, Berlin, London and Tokyo as well as Los Angeles. Electroland's work, she says, "allows people to invade the technology, as opposed to technology invading them."

With the Flower Street project, she says, "they are trying to find this zone within a building structure that interacts with the greater public without infringing on the private realm."

It was that approach to animating the intersection of public and private space that intrigued architect Scott Johnson of Johnson Fain Partners, who designed Met Lofts for developer Forest City Residential West. "Their work is conceptual and bothersome in a very positive way, raising questions about human activity in this large environment we live in," he says. "What Cameron and Damon have done is connect the individual who's just walking into a building — how mundane can it be? — with a whole set of playful possibilities."

And what if residents aren't in a playful mood? It's one thing to enjoy the building-as-beacon from the 110 Freeway (where the lights can be seen), quite another to be an apartment dweller who doesn't want the distraction of flashing lights.

Johnny Wu, 35, is a product design consultant who moved into the building a few months before the exterior LED rig was finished. "I was a little worried because I didn't want my residence to be like a nightclub with a neon sign or something," he says. "They assured me it wouldn't affect the residence, and that's turned out to be true. I have one of the flashing blocks basically in front of my unit, on my balcony, but I don't find it distracting at all…. Once you're inside you don't really notice it."

Kevin Ratner, a senior vice president for development for Forest City Residential West, says the installation is "a big draw for the building," which has a target demographic of "young professionals who maybe have their first job out of college, single, or maybe couples who are young and hip and looking for a building that's going to reflect their sensibilities."

From Electroland's vantage point, the wires and hardware and mind-bending software toiling behind the scenes and beneath pavement are effective only insofar as they produce a beguiling experience for the person on the street.

"We're interested in creating this chaotic, dynamic situation where the participants themselves are the driving force," Seeley says, "whether it's a display on the floor or the ceiling or the side of the building. The people and their interactions are the content."

The designers are well equipped to monitor at least some of their projects. From their studio, Seeley clicks a mouse to check a real-time video feed relayed by a wall-mounted camera that tracks Manhattan tourists as they stroll through Rockefeller Center. They appear alternately befuddled, bemused or oblivious to the light patterns tracing their every move.

"The challenge in most of our work," McNall says, "is that there's no sign there that says, 'You are now entering the art zone. Do this or do that.' We're just trying to create these gentle overlays of experiences and give them some depth."