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Dries Depoorter turns everyday surveillance infrastructure into visual art. He combines open or poorly protected camera feeds, social-media images, application programming interfaces (APIs) and machine-learning models, then places the resulting systems in galleries as screens, loudspeakers, clocks or prints. The works let viewers watch, report, buy influence or become the classified subject, making privacy a physical experience rather than an abstract policy debate.
What makes Depoorter’s work surveillance art?
Depoorter’s method is straightforward but consequential: locate a stream or database that people treat as ordinary, automate a comparison or classification, and expose the result in public. A police camera, a politician’s livestream, an Instagram post or a bird crossing a border becomes source material. The artwork is the whole chain—collection, software judgment, display and the viewer’s role in it.
That chain also reverses the usual direction of surveillance. In most systems, institutions watch the public. Depoorter’s projects sometimes let the public watch institutions, as in The Flemish Scrollers, or watch the watchers, as in his camera-based installations. The reversal is temporary and theatrical, but it makes the imbalance of scale visible.
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Projects at a glance
| Work and year | Data source | Automation | Viewer role | Power direction | Material form |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seattle Crime Cams (2017) | Live police radio and nearby live cameras | Feed pairing and real-time selection | Observer | Public safety system watches the city; audience watches the system | Networked screens |
| Jaywalking (2016) | Live intersection cameras, including some protected only by default passwords | Pedestrian and traffic-rule detection | Potential reporter | Camera turns bystanders into enforcers | Screen and large decision button |
| Surveillance Speaker (2018) | Camera view of the installation’s surroundings | Visual classification and natural-language description | Observed subject and listener | Machine describes people to their faces | Camera and loudspeaker |
| Surveillance Paparazzi (2020) | Open Hollywood camera feeds | Microsoft’s paid face-recognition API | Observer of machine judgments | Commercial recognition aimed at public figures | Computer display |
| The Follower (2022) | Open cameras and Instagram location-tagged photographs | Image recognition and location matching | Observer of a reconstructed photographic moment | Public camera data meets personal publishing | Video installation |
| The Flemish Scrollers (2022) | Livestreamed government meetings | Python/Keras phone detection | Public audience judging officials | Citizens monitor elected representatives | Tagged video clips and online posts |
| Quick Fix (2019–2023) | Instagram accounts and engagement markets | Automated account activity | Buyer of likes and followers | User attempts to manipulate platform metrics | Interactive service installation |
| Short Life (2020–2023) | Buyer’s birthday, origin and WHO life-expectancy data | Percentage-of-life calculation | Subject and purchaser | Demographic statistics personalize mortality | Custom clock |
| Border Birds (2022–2023) | Open cameras observing birds at borders | Machine-learning capture and selection | Viewer and print buyer | Border infrastructure is repurposed for nonhuman movement | Printed photographs |
How the best-known works operate
The Follower: reconstructing an Instagram photograph
For The Follower (2022), Depoorter recorded open-camera footage for weeks, scraped Instagram images tagged with the same locations and used image recognition to look for the moment when a social-media photograph was taken. The result turns a polished, voluntary image into evidence of the invisible camera network around it. Depoorter later removed the video after copyright claims, an outcome that became part of the work’s lesson: public visibility does not eliminate ownership or consent.
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Jaywalking: when the audience can press “report”
Jaywalking (2016) detects people crossing illegally in live intersection feeds and offers gallery visitors a large-button choice to email a photograph to police. Some feeds were public; others were reachable only because they still used default passwords. The installation does not merely show automated enforcement. It tests whether a visitor will accept the role the interface offers—informant, accomplice or abstainer.
Surveillance Speaker: classification made intimate
In Surveillance Speaker (2018), a camera and loudspeaker convert visual recognition into a natural-sounding spoken description. Depoorter recalls the system saying, “I see a girl taking a selfie in a mirror.” Hearing a machine narrate an ordinary gesture makes categorisation feel personal and immediate; the subject is no longer an anonymous data point on a dashboard.
The Flemish Scrollers: watching officials watch their phones
The Flemish Scrollers (2022) applies Python and Keras detection to livestreamed government meetings, identifying politicians using phones and posting tagged clips with the message, “Dear distracted, pls stay focused!” The work redirects scrutiny toward people who exercise public authority, while also asking whether automated exposure is an appropriate form of civic accountability.
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Seattle Crime Cams (2017) pairs live police radio with nearby live cameras, turning emergency infrastructure into a real-time tableau of incident and response. In Surveillance Paparazzi (2020), computers scan open Hollywood cameras for celebrities through Microsoft’s paid recognition API. Depoorter says the results were all false positives—a pointed demonstration that an expensive recognition service can produce confident-looking nonsense.
Other works that widen the argument
Quick Fix
Quick Fix (2019–2023) lets visitors buy Instagram likes and followers. Depoorter says, “I currently have 50,000 fake accounts on Instagram.” That is an artist-reported figure from his 2024 Make: interview, not an independently audited count. The installation treats platform popularity as a purchasable performance and makes the audience responsible for deciding whether manufactured attention feels different from organic attention.
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Short Life
Short Life (2020–2023) displays the percentage of a person’s expected life that has already elapsed, using WHO life-expectancy data for the buyer’s country. The buyer enters a birthday and origin; the clock is prototyped with Arduino and rebuilt with custom printed circuit boards. Depoorter calls it an “edition of 1 million,” but no independent sales or edition statistic is established.
Border Birds
Made with his sister Bieke Depoorter, Border Birds (2022–2023) uses machine learning on open cameras to capture birds crossing borders. Selected images become prints that can be sold. The project shifts surveillance away from human identity and toward migration itself, exposing how a border camera can be aesthetically repurposed without becoming politically neutral.
The technology behind the installations
Depoorter identifies Shodan as his main discovery tool: “I mainly use Shodan, a search engine for internet connected devices.” Shodan indexes exposed devices; the artwork’s ethical tension comes from what happens after a feed is found, not from the search engine alone. Readers should not treat his projects as instructions to enter cameras or bypass access controls.
His hardware scales with the workload:
- Raspberry Pi single-board computer: the platform he says he uses in most installations.
- Nvidia Jetson Nano: used when on-site processing needs more power.
- AWS: used when the Jetson is still insufficient.
- Keras: his stated choice for face-recognition work.
- YOLO: his stated choice for object detection.
The stack matters artistically. A small, inexpensive computer can make a gallery piece perform a task associated with state or corporate surveillance. Depoorter puts the scale problem bluntly: “If only one guy achieved that with simple open source software, imagine what a government can do with access to way more cameras, way more computer power, and way more resources.”
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What the works say about AI and privacy
Detection is not understanding
Object detection can identify a person crossing a line or holding a phone; face recognition can propose an identity; an API can return a match. None of those outputs guarantees that the classification is correct or ethically justified. The false positives reported for Surveillance Paparazzi make that distinction visible, while Surveillance Speaker shows how a fluent sentence can make a weak inference sound authoritative.
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Consent disappears in the data pipeline
Open availability is not the same as informed consent. Camera subjects may not know a feed is indexed, that frames are being stored, or that an image will be paired with a social-media post. Depoorter’s projects deliberately expose that gap. The removal of The Follower after copyright claims also shows that privacy, copyright and platform terms are separate constraints that can collide.
Interfaces recruit behavior
The large reporting button in Jaywalking, the purchase flow in Quick Fix and the public tagging in The Flemish Scrollers turn viewers into participants. Each interface makes a political choice feel like a simple click, allowing the gallery to reveal how easily surveillance becomes routine when responsibility is distributed across software and users.
Exhibition context
New Media Gallery’s 2022 Eyewitness exhibition in New Westminster presented three of Depoorter’s surveillance installations. Reviewer Gillian McIver described the work as connecting publicly available Seattle emergency police calls with the city-wide CCTV system and displaying incidents and responses as they happened. In that setting, the gallery was not a neutral container: it became a viewing station for civic infrastructure.
What is—and is not—measured about the projects?
The documented record establishes project years, methods and the artist’s statements, including the 50,000-account claim. It does not establish independent audience totals, sales figures, installation counts or measured social impact. Those absences matter because surveillance art often invites claims about changing public behavior; here, the strongest evidence is what the installations make perceptible, not a quantified outcome.
Why painters and visual artists should care
Depoorter’s work is materially visual even when its subject is code. A screen composes a city from simultaneous feeds; a loudspeaker gives an image a voice; a clock turns demographic probability into portraiture; a print freezes a machine-selected encounter. For painters, the lesson is not to imitate the hardware but to examine the systems that decide what becomes visible, who gets framed and whether the viewer is looking, being looked at or making the judgment.
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