Real-time Guard Simulator

Real-time Guard Simulator is a browser-based surveillance work in which almost nothing happens. The visitor becomes a security guard watching a live sequence of surveillance cameras. Approximately once per day, a crime appears somewhere on the monitors for only 15 seconds, preceded by a 5-second alarm window. If the visitor notices it in time, they can press ALARM. If not, the event disappears and the waiting begins again. Cinema has trained us to imagine surveillance rooms as places of constant action: suspicious figures, sudden movement, dramatic discoveries. Real surveillance is mostly the opposite. It is prolonged attention directed at almost nothing. The work turns this boredom into its central mechanism. At first, the visitor watches carefully. After several minutes, attention begins to drift. Eventually a strange reversal can occur: instead of hoping that nothing bad happens, the guard begins to want something to happen — simply to justify the act of watching. A crime becomes a reward. The project uses the mechanics of a game while deliberately refusing the normal logic of games. There is no continuous stream of challenges, no escalating difficulty and almost no stimulation. The rare event is valuable precisely because of the enormous amount of empty time surrounding it. Real-time Guard Simulator explores surveillance, attention, boredom and the way interactive systems can transform undesirable events into desirable content. The user is supposedly protecting the monitored space, yet the system quietly encourages them to hope for the very event they are there to prevent. The work runs in real time. The visitor cannot skip the waiting or request a crime on demand. Whether anything happens during a visit is largely a matter of chance — and patience. Medium: browser-based interactive artwork / real-time simulation Platform: web Artist: Jānis Kauss / Absurd.website