When it debuted this summer, the Traffic Cam Photobooth (TCP) website offered a new twist on the surveillance state by enabling smartphone users to take selfies with traffic cams in New York, Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, and Ireland.
TCP was recently featured in an exhibit at Miami Art Week. But the future of the interactive site is uncertain, at least in New York City, where the Department of Transportation has 900-plus traffic cams accessible through the website. Its Office of Legal Affairs recently sent a cease-and-desist letter to Morry Kolman, the artist behind the project, charging that the TCP “encourages pedestrians to violate NYC traffic rules and engage in dangerous behavior.”
TCP captures shots of the cease-and-desist and a mirror selfie. (Credit: Morry Kolman)
“You are hereby directed to immediately remove and disable all portions of TCP’s website that relates to NYC traffic cameras and/or encourages members of the public to engage in dangerous and unauthorized behavior,” the letter demands.
Kolman, the 28-year-old Brooklyn software engineer who launched TCP, is not exactly quaking in his boots. Kolman attached the cease-and-desist letter to a telescoping 25-foot window washing pole and proceeded to shoot photos of the letter with traffic cams in Manhattan and Brooklyn. He also attached a mirror to the pole and had the traffic cam take a photograph of itself.
Kolman shows the traffic cams his cease-and-desist in Brooklyn and Times Square. (Credit: Morry Kolman)
Kolman declined to comment on the legal issues raised by the city, but the cease-and-desist letter and photos of Kolman holding it up to traffic cams were included in the Miami exhibition Sweet Streams (Are Made of This), an effort by the MUD Foundation to highlight the work of artists dealing with different types of data streams, or the datasphere as the foundation refers to it.
“Making surveillance tech interactive is a really good way of bringing attention to it,” Kolman tells us. “It’s one thing to understand that cameras are everywhere but… I want to show how to live under these systems and how to resist them.”
Kolman at Miami Art Week (Credit: Morry Kolman)
Kolman came up with the idea for Traffic Cam Photobooth after getting an assignment for a course he was taking at the experimental School for Poetic Computation, which describes itself as dedicated to “the study of art, code, hardware, and critical theory through lenses of decolonization and transformative justice.” His assignment was to make a picture without taking a photo.
Since its launch in August, TCP has had more than 400,000 visitors, according to Kolman. Because of privacy safeguards built into the project, he said he can’t see where the selfies are taken, but he does keep count of how many snapshots have been made so far: around 780,000. Some users have acknowledged him or the website when they post their traffic cam selfies on Instagram or TikTok.
To use it, navigate to trafficcamphotobooth.com on your smartphone. Tap the “nearest camera” link for the site to pull up a nearby traffic cam (you may need to turn on location services for your mobile browser) or browse the map manually. When you’re at the location, tap the “I’m ready!” button, strike a pose, and tap “Take My Photo!” from your phone.
(Credit: TCP/PCMag)
Kolman’s previous internet shenanigans include a “low-carbon NFT” parody, “smuggling” a 70-minute feature film onto TikTok by manipulating the video’s metadata and creating a website based on the AmITheAsshole subreddit, a popular crowdsourced advice forum. That website is powered by three AI models and seeks to demonstrate that bad data creates bias.
Kolman isn’t the first to play with traffic cams. Back in 2015, a Belgian artist known as Dries Depoorter created a gallery installation titled Seattle Crime Cams, pairing traffic cameras with real-time 911 call information made public by Seattle police.
In 2020, “an immortal programming goddess” known as boringcactus (real name Melody Horn) made a website called pig.observer to help Black Lives Matter protestors evade the police. Horn, who has a day job as a software engineer with the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, liked that the Traffic Cam Photobooth is “fun and shareable.”
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Kolman is currently a freelance full-stack developer. His career as a multimedia artist began after college when he worked for a digital marketing firm. After that he became a meme-maker at TaskForce, a Los Angeles-based company that produces content for nonprofits.
Yosi Sergant, the founder of TaskForce, said use of memes was second nature to Kolman. “The people who excel at that work have an ability to tap into current trends and the collective psyche,” he said. “They throw all of that into a grinder and push out something that is uniquely suited for the bowels of the Internet. Morry’s dang funny and dang good at what he does.”
(Photo by Robert Daemmrich Photography Inc/Corbis via Getty Images)
Sergant knows a thing or two tapping into the zeitgeist. He commissioned Shepard Fairey to create the Obama Hope poster for the 2008 presidential campaign, which went viral and was praised by New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl as “the most efficacious American political illustration since ‘Uncle Sam Wants You.’”
Kolman comes from a media-obsessed family. His kid brother Izzy moonlights as a crew member for ESPN at NFL games. His filmmaker father is currently using AI to create videos for a documentary about a Chicago homicide. And Kolman’s mother is a former newspaper writer who was dubbed “The World’s Worst Mom” after she let Izzy ride a New York City subway alone at the age of nine. She parlayed the infamy into a reality TV series of the same name, wrote a book about over-parenting titled Free Range Kids and now travels around the world lecturing on the topic.
Kolman credits his parents for developing his ability to engage an audience. One lesson he has learned is that fashion is not only a way of expressing your personality but a means for sparking conversation, which might explain why Kolman is often seen wearing a shirt with a floral pattern and a pair of striped pants. He wears a down jacket with a rainbow of pastel colors and can sometimes be seen with a 5th generation iPod nano dangling from his left ear, which “play[s] video in a way that works well as an earring,” he notes.
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About Jon Kalish
Contributing Writer
