Lifeblogging Becomes Surveillance Art

This is a screenshot from Professor Hasan Elahi's lifeblogging site trackingtransience.net. What you're seeing is a Google Map showing Elahi's live location and a rotating webcam showing the location. Read below to find out why Professor Elahi has gone to these extraorinary lengths to track his movements. Scary stuff. Wired Campus: Pre-Empting Investigation, San Jose State U. Professor Records the Details of His Life

The San Jose Mercury News ran a story this weekend about Hasan Elahi, an artist and assistant professor at San Jose State University who is “lifelogging” his whereabouts and activities to demonstrate that he is not involved in terrorism. The whole project came out of a life-changing event in 2002 — when, Mr. Elahi says, he was detained for nine hours at a U.S. airport and accused of stockpiling explosives during a trip to Africa.

“Elahi reasoned that if he was fated to live under a perpetual cloud of suspicion anyway, he would turn his Kafkaesque existence — every waking, quaking moment of it — into ‘surveillance art,’”