Moving through the city streets with a video scanner reveals a hidden layer of personal fragments and stories which are broadcasted by the private owners of surveillance cameras. The accumulation of these autonomous yet synchronous acts contributes to an invisible ad-hoc network of media permeating the socially codified spaces of our urban environments: the café, the apartment building, the store, the parking lot, and the street.

Life: A User’s Manual is a shared experience in visualizing the invisible and it is an act of subverting existing surveillance tactics. During publicstreet performances, the audience is guided by an urban, nomadic persona who acts as a physical interface to the unseen. The female character embodies the qualities of a wireless signal by being herself nomadic, transient and placeless. A scanner and home-made 2.4 GHz antenna is used to look for and capture unencrypted wireless video transmissions within the city, which are visualized in real time on a battery-powered television monitor. The audience, led on this nomadic journey, is drawn into a borderline action of entering into an alternate view of public and private space, not usually seen.