The Catalogue (2004)
Directed by Chris Oakley
The Magic Lantern Cinema series program “Masses and Swarms” contains eleven short, crowd-themed film and video works. Oakley’s video piece is set in a shopping mall where surveillance systems scan and classify visitors according to color-coded consumer profiles. “I wanted the piece to operate as a mild science fiction, a screen recording of an as-yet-unrealized system,” Oakley writes by e-mail. “I’d been interested in surveillance for more than a decade before RFID (radio-frequency identification) tagging became a reality. I initially hoped to use real CCTV images from malls, but after finding them impossible to obtain I decided to shoot my own at the Bull Ring development in Birmingham, which was then Britain’s newest and largest urban shopping center. The screen overlays, suggesting a system in which tracking of individuals has converged with a database, were created and composited over a subsequent three-month period. I had always seen the relationship between retailers and customers as essentially hunter/prey, and at that time felt it had gained an even more sinister edge. Interest in The Catalogue never seems to have waned, even as our relationship with privacy has changed immensely.” Aaron Cutler (June 19, 7:30pm at UnionDocs as part of the program “Magic Lantern Presents: Masses and Swarms”)