Helium Tracing a short film produced for the course Drift Cinema with five other colleagues documents the act of handing out five hundred balloons in Times Square on an April afternoon.
Intended as a exploration of surveillance culture in America, the film incorporates video shot on several hand-held cameras, as well footage from freely available webcams located throughout Times Square, and security camera footage from an adjacent building. The innocuous act of handing out a balloon acts as a device to initiate chance encounters with strangers and other unpredictable social interactions. Once the performance was over, social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter were scoured until an individual was located who described receiving a balloon in a “tweet”. Searches through Google uncovered an uncomfortable amount of information related to the individual, including the city she lived in, the number of children she had, favorite restaurants, bands, and numerous photos of her and her family.
Helium Tracing examines the seemingly harmless acts of real world and virtual social interaction, and the unforeseen consequences involved.
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