From a very young age, I intuitively knew that I was living in a cinematic world. The sensation of constant observation has guided me throughout my career as an experimental filmmaker. After first exploring the thin boundaries between fiction and documentary, I turned to archival materials and found footage. Since 2001, I have been observing and recording webcam streams.

This book is the result of my artistic research project wherein I use webcam-generated footage as the sole source material for making experimental films and installations. My study is an analysis of the possibility of a new mode of filmmaking, one that is broadly accessible and networked, and that creates archives for future categorization of the audiovisual materials that document city life. Central to the dissemination and pervasiveness of this new cinematic medium is affect. Affect is present in the relations between individuals and the cameras and affect also influences processes of subjectification. My art project has its roots in 1999. This was the year that I became aware of the growing number of cameras that streamed in real time over the Internet, in an unregulated manner and for no apparent reason. I had realized by then that cameras normally used for surveillance were being sold as webcams to any household that could afford them. I wondered what made ordinary people stream imagery of the public space of their street to Internet viewers from cameras they positioned in their windows. It was around that time that I got in touch with a group of activists who were designing city maps to identify the routes where surveillance cameras could not capture images of individuals. When occupying an empty house to fight real-estate speculation, for example, squatters could avoid being filmed if they followed the cartographic indications. Squatters could also prevent recognition by wearing a cap or a hooded jacket if the cameras were too pervasive in the area. Fascinated by both the increasing purchase of webcams by ordinary households and how the awareness of the cameras’ existence had such high influence on the activists’ street routines, I started to observe publicly accessible webcam streams regularly.