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Whose bike is this?
I wanted to take this shop from Al-Ismaelia [for Real Estate Investments]
to create art installations inside it
I wanted to create something
that wasn't exactly street art or graffiti
The artwork is set up inside a closed space
But the people on the street are interacting with it
without needing to physically enter the space
I think the idea first came up in October
We were at Ganzeer's home back in October
There was news that the government would install cameras in downtown Cairo
Surveillance cameras to document *** harassment incidents
They wanted to identify harassers and arrest them
So we thought: What if we got to know the people watching us?
And what do they see and closely follow?
This made us think about how our society monitors what everyone is doing
We're used to people watching us as we walk on the street
Sometimes this doesn't really bother us
At other times we worry about who that person might be
It depends on who's watching us
Then we thought what if the character kept changing
Would we be uncomfortable if it's a Salafi?
Would we like it if it were a beautiful woman?
What would it feel like it's an old man? And so on
We also included some historic or iconic characters
There's a different character everyday
We're using Open Source technologies in everything
We're using open frameworks and kinetics
The infrared kinect sensor works in daylight and night time
Because we're working from 10am until midnight
The kinect sensor detects the motion of people's legs
And the eyes move accordingly
The eyes can follow several passers by at the same time
They don't just focus on one person
I made an open call on twitter and Facebook
for people who wanted to be featured in the project
So I took photos of people, then I would draw their faces
Then I give Yasmine the face drawn on several layers
The eyes and face on different layers
So she can start working on them
On the first day of the show, there was this man
I don't know if you saw him, but
He was a street cleaner
He noticed what was happening
So he left what he was doing
and he came to play around with the installation
He was trying to figure out how it was following him
So he kept interacting with the installation
There was also a guy who asked one of my friends, Adham
He asked him: Who's this and why's he staring at me like this?
We're getting different reactions. And that's the whole point of the work