Surveillance Scape is a meditation on how surveillance, power, and consent are mediated by architectural objects. It is told in two acts: first a map, and second a participatory installation consisting of a surveillance camera, two projectors, and forty-nine interlocking plywood modules.

A heat map tracks the spatial footprints of CCTV view sheds in a Shenzhen Civic Center, the prominent city center at the core of Futian District and a bastion of generic mega-city aesthetics. Surveillance Scape asks: by what means can architecture challenge, engage, and reconfigure the organization of this map, and the data-rich digital landscape it represents?

Surveillance Scape culminated in an exhibition, for which forty-nine triangular, interlocking objects were CNC-milled from plywood. During private fifteen-minute appointments,visitors assembled and disassembled their own projects in front of a centrally-located surveillance camera, whose view was projected live onto the walls of the gallery. Two worlds were created: a spatial and material real, inhabited with our bodies, and a digital representation, recorded and then projected live onto the gallery walls. The physical and digital engage in a continuous cycle of spatial reconfiguration, in which the human actor mediates. The transformation of the image from physical to digital and then back creates a “wall of mirrors” environment in which each appointment is a collaboration between the visitor and their digital avatar, reflected back.