public infrastructure as a medium

It all started with when I encountered a twitter bot and its underlying open source code.

The account, named the color of berlin, posted regular sky updates with a single color image, the name and hexadecimal value of the color of the sky. The account linked to a github repository that fetched the latest image from a public camera livefeed.

This bot fetches the latest image of the sky in Berlin, crops and places it on an HTML5 Canvas, picks the color and matches it against a color list, fills a new Canvas with the color that was matched, then tweets the color name, image, and HEX value.

In the spirit of open source development, I quickly forked the repository and started building with my local infrastructure.

The city of Montreal was publishing images from their hundreds of traffic cameras every 5 to 6 minutes. I collected the URLs of cameras that offered good perspectives on the sky. I translated the list of colours to french. Shortly after, I had my own twitter bot tweeting La couleur du ciel de Montréal.

The Montréal cameras were operable and an operator at the city could change its orientation. This meant that their point of view was ever-changing. The level of sky visible in the images varied over time. The bot's requirement for good sky views created a need for monitoring. I decided to create my own dashboard to get a new perspective of the full set of cameras.

I had been experimenting with NFTs and wanted to bring these colours on the blockchain. I created two collections of colored tokens.

couleur de montréal v1 - 12 tokens
couleur de montréal v2 - 484 tokens

These tokens' metadata contained the location, timestamp, colour name and hexadecimal value for each of these tokenized moments. The archive was no longer only on my local machine and on twitter, it was now encoded on a decentralized network.

At times, the images stopped being updated. I decided to set up my own live feed to provide my followers with constant sky updates. From that moment on, I experimented with two webcam infrastructure running in paralels, the city's and my own. This created a constant flux of colours.

At this stage, I described this project as a self-directed residency at the city's surveillance infrastructure. I was approached to show this project at Place Ville-Marie for Art Souterrain and decided to create a website that livestreams this surveillance data.

A week before the exhibition began, the city stopped updating its images. The images remained online, frozen in time. My residency had come to an end. Only my own infrastructure remained accessible.