On some level it's not surprising to anyone, or anyone that's lived in a city, it's normal. Even from the outside, it's not like i was in disbelief, that said, i couldn't shake this weird feeling they gave me. This knowledge of being constantly perceived. So i started researching and diving into this curiosity more.
one of the first significant things that i realized was that Chicago was one of the first major cities to implement a citywide cctv network. This was then expanded through legislation to require the inclusion of private surveillance cameras which face the public street in areas like downtown.
Walking the same block of downtown Chicago over and over and over and over, with a big Canon5D MkIV and 70-200 2.8, trying to be as obvious as possible with the biggest gear I could get from the school, capturing as many peoples faces as i could. From there the images where brought into bridge where I went through the about 7k images rating each one on a scale of 0-3, based on the amount of info, 0 being almost nothing, 1 being referential details like signs or clothing, 2 being a looser category of partial faces, actions, occupations, etc., and 3 being a distinct sense of confidence in whatever details are there. The images where then run through a number of computer vision api's to generate content tags, including object identification, emotional estimates, scene detection, and some general exif like date and time. this info was overlaid and the images where then ordered chronologically and presented here in 3 varying densities of display.