The main aim of this book was to conceptualize webcams as emerging cinematic media. To this end, I have highlighted the ways in which the presence of these cameras influences the lives of the people they film, but also those of the people that watch their streams. Throughout this research, I have demonstrated that video surveillance, as a networked mass medium, transforms urban space by creating a cinematic mode of existence. To study this phenomenon adequately, I have chosen to follow simultaneously the parallel paths of a theory-based analysis and an artistic practice. The present book is the result of an experiment in artistic research in which I explore the relations between philosophy, film studies, media theory, filmmaking, and autonomous art. By combining theory and practice, I have studied and compared surveillance, modes of existence, and capitalist modes of production, as well as notions of the cinematic so as to help delineate and conceptualize webcams as cinematic media.

This research analyses the evidence that video surveillance affects society beyond the scope of crime prevention when it involves the seemingly random collection of data that are subsequently stored in archival facilities. The fact that webcams are considered a less invasive form of recording than CCTV devices allows for the pervasiveness of these media. However, even if considered trivial, the continuous production of audiovisual material by these cameras will influence the future interpretation of present activity in the public space. As I described in chapter five, Derrida writes that the future will give meaning to the present, which implies that deciding what will be recorded, and under which terms, involves great responsibility. However, privacy laws are deeply flawed by decision-making authorities who become increasingly evanescent and hard to identify in contemporary society. This lays the ground for a metamorphosis of the world into a closed circuit composed of networked webcams that are constantly filming human and nonhuman activity and feeding these streams back to the viewers. As a result, a new mode of existence has emerged in contemporary society that is, in essence, cinematic, in which most people are aware of potentially constant observation and recording.