Follow, the application for make control themselves in real time

Follow, the application for make control themselves in real time

Discharge from App Store and affords of having a person who observes your displacements for an entire day, accompanying you for every day.

“Unnoticed: Follower is a service that affords you of having a person who follows you, for an entire day, in your daily life. An invisible and discreet company, than does not take part effectively with your matters daily. Someone, in short, than is limited to look to us and to accompany to us, a kind of virtual body guard.

It is not teaser of the next episode of Black Mirror, but a true one app created from the artist and Lauren McCarthy programmer. Enough to go up the site of Follower and to answer to two questions: because it is wanted to be followed and because she would have itself to be. If it has been selected, the application from App Store can be unloaded and a imprecisata morning a notification will announce for the moment to the person selected that day will have been followed, only from the artist, “for safety reasons”. The test of the experiment arrives in evening, with a photo that McCarthy has released during the day.

The test of the surveillance

To half between a experiment and an artistic performance, Follower App has been active to January slid to San Francisco, is already releasable from all the inhabitants of New York that wish to make themselves to monitor and in future could arrive also in other Countries.

 “We live an ambivalence: on one side the surveillance is pervasiva and outside control, from the other has an intense desire of being seen, continuations, sharing aspects and intimate details also of our lives. It is full of sites that for ten dollars fill up your accounts of follower to payment, but enough this in order to feel itself satisfied? ”, McCarthy has wondered before to give form to the plan. “With the gig economy it seems sometimes of being disposed to try any app or service that promises to something of original or profit. With Uber or TaskRabbit, for example, a button is pressed and a person sees itself to move towards your position in the map. I have intentional to invert this process: the people do not see my position on the apt. are alone I to follow they. What they gain to us is not a point on a map, but the knowledge that is someone around they that it observes them with attention and concentration”.  To think us it is a somewhat alarming idea well. nevertheless there are people whom they have accepted of being followed in road, under the rain, than they have been made to look while they were working inside of their office, playing tennis or eating with the friends, looking a film or making the expense, exiting and to re-enter to house. Nobody that, at least up to now, has staged details pantomimes therefore, only daily life. “Sometimes me it has seemed that they made some things solo for me, or that they had noticed me, but cannot never be sure. At the end of the day I leave them, perceiving a strong sense of informality nevertheless without to have never really interacted with they. I send they a photo who I have released during the day and this is the last contact”.

The preliminary questions — that is to ask if it would be wanted to be followed or to follow and because — are part integrating of the experiment: “Some have written that they wanted to participate for pure curiosity, others in order to receive support or because they wished to really feel connected with someone, others because they wanted to show a history me”. McCarthy tells that the experience is intense exciting and: “I follow them all the day beginning to imagine what is about to make, what says and thinks. It is strangely intimate. At the end of the day I feel to know them, I feel to have shared a experience”.