The F.A.T. Manual
132
People Staring at Computers by Kyle McDonald July 2011 http://fffff.at/people-staring-at-computers/
People Staring at Computers is a photographic intervention in public spaces. Kyle McDonald wrote a simple application that took one picture every minute, and installed it in a couple of Apple stores in Lower Manhattan over three days. If the application found a face, it uploaded the photo to the artist’s server. Having collected more than a thousand photos, Kyle decided to exhibit them in the same places they were originally captured. So he wrote another app that could be remotely triggered after being installed on all the computers in one location. When the app starts up, it takes a picture and slowly fades in that photo. A moment later, it starts cycling through older photos. Most people instinctively quit the app less than 10 seconds after recognizing their own face, so the exhibition was relegated to the unused machines. Apple’s reaction came two days after the publication of the project on the F.A.T. website, on July 7, 2011. According to the New York Times [1], “he was awoken by Secret Service agents at his home in Brooklyn. They had a warrant to search for evidence that he violated the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and they left with his laptop. Then lawyers for Apple contacted Web sites that hosted video made by Mr. McDonald, including Vimeo and Tumblr, and told them the material might violate the law, that a criminal investigation was going