street scanner

2023

Interactive installation, Tokyo Designart Festival

Hala Amer, Saga Elkabbash, Levi Hammett, Giovanni Innella, Martin Basalan Juras

With electronic jewelry by Hind Al Saad

Street Scanner is an interactive public installation that explores the aesthetics and implications of machine vision in everyday urban life. Positioned prominently on the storefront of Januka, a contemporary jewelry brand in central Tokyo, the work invites passersby to engage directly with a machine-driven gaze—one that increasingly mediates how we perceive and navigate the world.

Using off-the-shelf hardware and open-source software, Street Scanner captures live street activity and reinterprets it through algorithmic processes. The resulting visuals—fragmented, glitched, and strangely beautiful—reflect the subjective interpretations of machine vision systems. In doing so, the installation draws attention to the invisible networks of cameras, sensors, and computational logic that now weave themselves into our environments, often unnoticed and unquestioned.

Part of the prestigious Tokyo Designart Festival, Street Scanner merges public art with critical technology studies. It transforms a retail facade into a platform for speculative reflection—where digital perception is made visible, and viewers are invited to confront the systems that increasingly define their lived experience.

Complementing the installation, a collection of electronic jewelry by VCUarts Qatar alumna Hind Al Saad is also featured. These pieces reinterpret the modular logic of printed circuit boards into contemporary Islamic geometric patterns—offering a poetic link between computation, ornamentation, and cultural identity.

“Street Scanner brings the unseen gaze of machines into the public sphere—making visible the systems that already see us.”