Through a modular network of screens, the watchtower embeds the living rooms, bedrooms and workplaces of hundreds of crowd- workers into its structure. The installation’s surveilling (and surveilled) agents are members of mTurk (or Mechanical Turk). This on-demand scalable workforce, or crowdsourcing Internet ‘marketplace’, enables individuals and businesses to employ workers remotely to do tasks that computers are currently unable to. Coupe has commissioned crowd-workers to complete unusual tasks that require them to reflect, document, dream, plan, and consume all forms of observation - illustrating a very human approach to what we normally consider a machinic, computer-led, process.

Through the crowdsourcing of these tasks to an ‘unseen’ workforce, surveillance today is revealed as something bidirectional and dispersed. By bringing the normally outdoor watchtower structure into a gallery context, the work creates a strange kind of monument to observation and in an act of subversion, grants us a rare opportunity to consider who is watching whom.