The Watcher Within

For the exhibition 'The Watcher Within' (2023) I took on an alter-ego called Spider; an isolated persona with an existential desire to look without being seen. Spider uses openly accessible webcams to explore hidden narratives that unfold in ordinary and mundane. To reside in the human and not so human spheres as a ghostly presence. Out of this three works came: The Watcher Within (film), 3 men, 2 dogs, 1 car (publication), and Geest & Machine (Ghost & Machine) (research paper). The pdf of my research paper Geest & Machine can be read here.

The Watcher Within (film)
film & photography: Jeroen Zwaap
editor: Jeroen Zwaap
soundscape design: Pi (website)

duration: 34m28s

What did you set up in The Watcher Within?

I collected fragments from live CCTV streams and edited them into a video. Then I placed that video in a cinema setting. So images that originally belonged to surveillance, control, and observation were moved into a space of attention, duration, and cinematic looking.

That shift was the intervention. I did not film these scenes myself. I worked with existing camera feeds and changed the conditions under which they were encountered. The same images that might normally be glanced at as functional surveillance became something to sit with, watch, and interpret.
What happened when these images entered a cinema context?

People began to watch CCTV footage as if they were watching cinema. That immediately changed their position. They became spectators of images that were never really meant for them as a film audience.The cinema setting creates an expectation that something will happen. You wait for an event, a gesture, a narrative turn. But often, almost nothing happens. People pass by, stand still, wait, dis-

appear from the frame. A car leaves. Someone crosses a square. An insect moves in front of the lens. Dirt, low resolution, bad lighting, and obstruction become part of the image.

So the work creates a tension between surveillance and cinematic desire. You are watching real people in real places, but the images resist becoming a story.
You use the term cinematic ecologies of attention. What do you mean by that?

I am interested in how these networked cameras produce a strange kind of visual environment. They are spread across the world, pointed at streets, shops, offices, roads, entrances, backyards, public squares. Together they form an ecology of watching.

But when you look at them outside their usual function, they become ambiguous. They are not only instruments of control. They also produce accidental images: poetic, boring, abstract, uncomfortable, sometimes beautiful.

For me, the work is about entering that ecology and slowing it down. It asks what happens when surveillance images are no longer read only as evidence, but as images that shape attention, expectation, and relation.

"A car leaves. Someone crosses a square. An insect moves in front of the lens. Dirt, low resolution, bad lighting, and obstruction become part of the image."

What kind of world did these cameras show you?

What struck me was how uneventful the images often were. CCTV has a visual language that suggests danger, evidence, crime, suspicion, or something about to happen. But most of what I saw was waiting, passing, standing, cleaning, smoking, walking, almost-nothing.

That almost-nothing became very important. It made the camera network feel less like a system of dramatic revelation and more like a pond of human presence. You could look for hours and see very little, but slowly you begin to notice rhythms: how people enter a frame, how they leave it, how a space holds time, how a camera keeps waiting even when nothing happens.The strange thing is that this ordinariness became charged precisely because it was watched. A person standing still for too long becomes suspicious. A badly lit corner becomes atmospheric. Dirt on the lens becomes painterly. An insect in front of the camera becomes an event.

What did you begin to notice about the places these cameras were pointed at?

That became one of the most interesting parts of the work. The cameras were not simply looking at “the world”. They were pointed at very specific kinds of spaces.

Some cameras looked at social spaces: streets, squares, shops, workplaces, places where people pass, gather, wait, or move through each other’s presence. Others looked at tourist spaces, places already shaped by being seen: beaches, monuments, viewpoints, city centres.

But many cameras, especially private ones, were pointed at thresholds. Doors, windows, gardens, garages, gates, driveways, fences. Places where one space turns into another. Where inside meets outside. Where private life touches public space. Where something or someone might enter, leave, cross, appear, or disappear.

That made me realise that these cameras do not only record activity. They divide the world into zones of attention. They mark certain spaces as watchable, vulnerable, valuable, suspicious, scenic, or worth waiting over.
So the camera network becomes a kind of map?

Yes, but not a normal map. It is not organised by geography alone. It is organised by attention, access, anxiety, tourism, ownership, curiosity, and control.

When you move from one camera to another, you begin to see a fragmented world made of thresholds, waiting areas, passages, entrances, views, corners, and exposed surfaces. It is a world seen through points of concern. A garage door. A garden path. A shop entrance. A square. A beach. A corridor. A street crossing.

Together, these fragments form a strange atlas of places where people expect something to happen, or fear that something might happen, or simply want to keep looking.

Was the work also about voyeurism?
Yes, very much. The viewer becomes implicated. You are looking at real people who may not know they are being watched in this way. That creates uncomfortable form of spectatorship.

At the same time, the images are often extremely ordinary. They do not offer the drama that surveillance aesthetics seem to promise. CCTV often carries associations of danger, crime, proof, suspicion. But here you mostly encounter waiting, passing, standing, almost-nothing.

That contrast is important. The work confronts the viewer with their own desire for meaning, tension, or narrative. You begin to notice how quickly you start looking for something to happen.

At what point did the CCTV footage stop being surveillance and start becoming cinema?

I am not sure it ever fully stopped being surveillance. That is part of the tension. The images keep carrying their original function with them. They are still images made by cameras that were installed to monitor, observe, secure, or control a space.

But when I brought them into a cinema setting, something shifted. The viewer no longer looks at them as functional images, but as images that might contain a scene, a possible story. A person waiting in a doorway becomes a character. A street corner becomes a set. A delay becomes suspense. Nothing has changed in the footage itself, but the way of looking has changed.

That is where the work became interesting for me. The images did not need dramatic events. Their ordinariness was enough. The footage began to show how easily daily life can become cinematic when it is framed, watched, and held for long enough.
Did you feel like you were watching, editing, or trespassing?

All three, I think. I was watching footage that was already public in the sense that it was accessible online, but that does not mean it felt neutral. These were real people, in real places, caught by cameras that were not filming for me. So there was always an uncomfortable feeling of looking at something I had not been invited into.

Editing made that even more complicated. The moment you select, cut, slow down, place one fragment after another, you start producing attention. You create expectation. You suggest that something matters. That is a cinematic act, but in this case it is also a voyeuristic one.

I did not want to remove that discomfort. The work depends on it. The viewer should feel the attraction of the images, but also become aware of the position from which they are watching.

So the work is also about the viewer’s desire?

Yes. The camera is watching, but the viewer is also watching. And the viewer wants something. A story, a clue, a disruption, a reason to keep looking.

That desire is uncomfortable. It reveals how quickly we turn other people’s ordinary lives into possible narratives. In the cinema setting, that desire becomes even stronger, because cinema trains us to expect meaning. We wait for the image to justify our attention.

But the CCTV fragments often refuse that. They give you duration without drama. Presence without explanation. The work holds the viewer in that space between boredom, curiosity, suspicion, and fascination.

What kept you watching, if almost nothing happened?

I think it connects to something much older in me. As a child, I built a pond in the garden, and I could watch it for hours. Not because something spectacular happened, but because life kept appearing in small ways. Insects moved across the surface. Plants shifted. Small organisms appeared and disappeared. The whole thing was alive, but not in a narrative way.

Watching these camera feeds reminded me of that: looking into a small world from the outside and slowly beginning to notice how much is happening, even when nothing seems to happen. At first, a frame can look empty or uneventful. But if you stay long enough, almost-nothing becomes full of small events.

Of course, the conditions are completely different. With the pond, the looking was intimate and wondrous. With the camera feeds, the looking is technologically mediated and ethically uneasy. But the attention has a similar structure: you are watching a world that does not perform for you, and yet it keeps unfolding.

"The camera is watching, but the viewer is also watching. And the viewer wants something. A story, a clue, a disruption, a reason to keep looking."

Schermafbeelding 2023-07-07 om 23.56.17.png

"But moving between those fragments produced a strange sense of connectedness...A broken, distributed, technological version of looking at life from a distance."

You mentioned it was like watching a small world unfold. That makes me think of the Overview-Effect (the shift that astronauts describe when they see Earth from space)...

That is an interesting association. To astronauts their position towards Earth suddenly makes the planet appear as one fragile, interconnected whole. They experience a shift in relating towards our home satellite.

Of course, this work does almost the opposite. It does not offer one total image. It offers fragments: fixed views, low-resolution feeds, partial glimpses, thresholds, corners, entrances, views, places cut out of the world by cameras.

But moving between those fragments produced a strange sense of connectedness. Not the unity of the Earth seen from space, but a dispersed sense of a world happening everywhere at once. People waiting, entering, leaving, cleaning, passing, guarding, looking, disappearing. A human world seen from many small, fixed points.

So perhaps it is not an Overview Effect, but a fragmented overview. A broken, distributed, technological version of looking at life from a distance.

What did the cinema setting add to that?The cinema setting changed the contract of looking. When you sit down in front of a screen, you expect the image to hold your attention. You expect composition, duration, tension, maybe even a story.

Earlier you compared it to watching a pond as a child. How does that memory enter the work?

As a child, I built a pond in the garden, and I could watch it for hours. Not because something spectacular happened, but because life kept appearing in small ways. Insects moved across the surface. Plants shifted. Small organisms appeared and disappeared. The whole thing was alive, but not in a narrative way.

Looking through these camera feeds reminded me of that kind of attention. At first, many of the images seem uneventful. A doorway. A driveway. A square. A street corner. But if you stay with them, almost-nothing becomes full of small events. Someone enters the frame. A curtain moves. A car leaves. A shadow changes. A person waits too long. An insect crosses the lens.

The difference, of course, is that the pond was a place of wonder. These camera feeds are not innocent. They are connected to ownership, protection, visibility, distance, and sometimes control. But the act of looking — of watching a small world unfold without needing it to become a story — felt strangely familiar.

Does that change the role of CCTV in the work?

Yes. I want to move away from saying that the work is “about surveillance”. Surveillance is the entry point, but it is not the whole subject.

The work is more about what these cameras make visible when they are approached as a distributed visual ecology. They show how people, buildings, thresholds, infrastructures, weather, light, dirt, insects, and technical limitations all participate in the image.

A camera installed to watch a door also records the changing light on the pavement. A camera aimed at a garage also catches rain, dust, passing animals, shadows, reflections. A tourist camera shows not only a view, but also the expectation of a view. A private camera shows not only protection, but a boundary between inside and outside.

That is where the work becomes more complex for me. The cameras are functional, but the images exceed their function.

But these images often do not give you that. They remain ordinary.

They keep waiting. They show spaces before or after anything happens. So after a while, you become aware of your own looking. You notice your impatience, your curiosity, your suspicion, your desire for an event.
What stayed with you after spending so much time looking through these cameras?

What stayed with me was the feeling of being present without being there. I could enter all these places visually, but never materially. I could watch a street, a garden, a doorway, a garage, a beach, a square, but I could not affect anything. I could not be seen back. I could only move on to the next 'portal'.

That created a strange kind of distance. I was close enough to notice small events — someone waiting, a curtain moving, light changing on a wall, an insect crossing the lens — but far enough to remain completely outside the situation. It made me feel like a ghost passing through other people’s surroundings.

Maybe that is what the work leaves me with most strongly: the sense that networked cameras do not only show us the world. They produce a particular kind of viewer. A viewer who is present but disembodied, attentive but passive, curious but unable to respond.

So the question is not only what these cameras are pointed at. It is also what kind of watcher they allow us to become.

The Falling Man Projects

About Jeroen Zwaap

About Jeroen Zwaap

The Watcher Within