I’m gonna spare you the obvious ‘eyes in the back of your head’ joke, except for this sentence, where I make reference to the joke I didn’t just make. But I swear, that’s it.
The ‘guy’ to which the headline is referring is Mr. Wafaa Bilal, an assistant profressor of photography at NYU, and the ‘art’ in question is the installation “The 3rd I” at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar. Bilal will have a camera implanted in the back of his head for an entire year, in order to beam images to Qatar. For real.
Frankly, I don’t see why he couldn’t have just rigged some sort of stylish accoutrement to wear – cheap, stylish, and with the notable bonus of not requiring a camera’s installation into your f**king head. But I’m not here to judge. I’m always down with cyborgs. And besides, this isn’t even the first time he’s done something this level of crazy. In 2007, Bilal confined himself to a gallery space in Chicago with a remote-operated paintball gun for a month, inviting web users to log on from home and fire on him.
For a month.
All is not necessarily well, though – NYU staff have major privacy concerns, and have yet to work out all the kinks in what to and to not allow Bilal to film while walking around with a camera in his head. So far, the plan is not to allow filming on NYU property. That… sort of cuts out 9 or 10 hours of Bilal’s day, though. Kinda counterproductive.
Anyway, I’m sure we’ll hear more about this project as 2011 drags on. Stay tuned!
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